When I was a kid I always wanted to eat school lunch. You just weren’t cool if you ate anything out of a paper bag. Plus one can only eat so many sandwiches before even a glimpse of a brown bag makes you vomit uncontrollably.  Tuna fish, ham and cheese, turkey and cheese, PB&J, peanut butter and honey, egg salad, toasted cheese, jelly bean and Nutella… enough sandwiches to last a guy a lifetime and a few for the road after.  Well my sweet old mum managed to get me school lunch more as I got older which propelled me to previously unknown social ranks.

There were a couple highlights in school lunch. The first and foremost was pizza.  We had pizza once a week in elementary and on this day, when the lunch bell would ring kids would stampede to the cafeteria foaming at the mouths to get a mouthful of greasy bliss. Once you got into junior high and high school they served pizza every day. Kids shit their pants at this revelation until a few weeks worth of eating it made them do so literally.

At my school, once you were in 4th grade kids could get a turn to serve lunch. I don’t remember why everyone was so ecstatic to participate in child labor. I do know part of it was probably the totally awesome hats you got to wear. They were these disposable sailor cap looking things. I guess since they were made entirely out of toilet paper the idea was you could cover your head with them first and your ass later after too much pizza. Well, for some reason no one got more excited about serving, than when you got to hand out pizza slices. Getting to serve that was like winning the Powerball. I know because I always felt stiffed that I never got to do so.

Another lunch menu highlight was chocolate milk. They could only serve it on short Wednesdays because it made kids too ADD to do so any other day.  I don’t know why they were worried about that more than the Tampico.  Tampico was this less than 1% (!) juice, high fructose drink. If you got chocolate milk that was a few days old you had to throw it out. On the other hand if you got a Tampico that was a few months old you hit the jackpot. I went out of my way to scrounge up expired Tampico. Instead of going bad, the juice tonic would just ferment and everyone who had any would go back to class arm in arm singing slurred renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody.

In junior high and high school, lunch was the best part of the day. In elementary however it was torture. First of all there was the military style seating. They had these 1,000-foot long tables you had to sit in classroom order on. There was generally a faculty member prowling the aisles with a whiffle bat to ensure you ate your food in misery and silence. The few times they weren’t there lunch would break down into pure pandemonium. There was one time it got into a full-fledged food fight utilizing the catapult like abilities of sporks. Somebody shot an orange slice directly at my face that I ducked. Right at that precise moment the principle walked in taking a squishy orange load right on his forehead.

There was also a stumpy, disgruntled looking lunch lady standing by the garbage cans blocking the portal to recess freedom to all those who hadn’t eaten all their food. There was generally something on the menu we didn’t like, be it butter bathed brussel sprouts or rubbery roast beef. I’m not really sure why anybody gave a damn if I ate my brussel sprouts.  To get around this, we’d take turns being the sacrificial lamb. Everyone would give whoever’s turn it was all the vomitous stuff they didn’t want and that person would continue on in misery and silence until saved by the bell.

Junior high and high school lunch had a lot more options. Every day you had the choice of pizza, salad and potato, hot lunch, or just living off the vending machines with an intravenous supply of quarters. This is what most of the emos did and why it was an endless source of entertainment to glue quarters to the tiles around the machines and watch all the greasy, black haired skeletons try to claw them off. Hot lunch was really good my early years but eventually the district started cracking down and only serving food that was precooked at secret government facilities.  I guess there were a few too many instances of playing magician with a hair in your esophagus or discovering a horsefly hive in your cake for anyone to feel safe eating a fresh, cooked from scratch lunch. After that the lunch foods started really going down hill.

Often times at the high school they would have day old pizza. This meant without paying any extra you could either have your single slice of fresh pizza or two slices of day old pizza. It would be insanity not to take the two-for-one until you realized it was Monday and contemplated what day old pizza truly meant. I think this is where the trend of dipping pizza in ranch came from in schools because then people couldn’t really tell how revolting their pizza was. Sort of like how sailors would eat hard-tack in the dark. Ignorance is bliss.

After awhile though I came to the conclusion that lunch pizza was where schools make all their money. I’m sure if you looked at the books you’d find some massive embezzlement scheme where some of the higher up lunch ladies and administration have secret Italian villas and enormous offshore bank accounts.  It’s simple math. You have a $5 Little Ceaser’s Pizza. This pizza generally has around 10 slices in it, often more. A school pizza lunch costs you $1.25. Now if all you get is an alcoholic month old Tampico, a few lettuce leaves, maybe a cookie, and one piece of pizza? Multiply this by hundreds of kids a day. Pure genius.

I suppose if there’s a life lesson to be learned about school lunch it’s that "Ignorance is bliss".

A long, long time ago I went to elementary school. At mine we had some pretty awesome teachers. Most kids looked forward to getting them the same way a cop looks forward to getting their next donut. Well, after about a few months of pure awesome with one of the best teachers in the whole school, she up and left on a hunting expedition to the Himalayas to track some rare white snow leopards.

There are lots of bad teachers, mostly those old bags that make it apparent they wish that after school they could slowly skin every child behind one of the portables and use their hides as a Snuggle. Well this teacher was worse. Enter Mr. England.

Despite the sophistication this name might imply, Mr. England was everything a bad teacher could be and more. He was boring, he wasn’t funny (despite billions of painful attempts), he was incredibly strict, completely incompetent and just plain evil.

Having passed his prime, Mr. England was one of those guys that half-heartedly tries to act a lot younger than they really are. He expressed this with cycling. He’d spend hours talking about his bike gear, his rides, his races, things elementary kids don’t give a damn about. We thought a $10 Tamagochi or X-Brain was the secret to life happiness so to us someone must have severe encephalopathy to spend thousands on a cutting edge carbon bike frame. We all knew in reality his riding accumulated to probably more like a few hours a week. This didn’t stop Mr. England though from disillusioning himself he was some Lance Armstrong type though.

Mr. England had a lot of really odd and even more annoying mannerisms. Some people crack their knuckles, pop their gum, or bite their nails. The habits Mr. England had made these seem like resume worthy character attributes.  One of these was like every annoying hand twitch people could make rolled into one. It was sort of a finger snap, leg smack, index gun pointer all mixed together. He’d often even accessorize this by twirling his keys with his weak hand because he apparently wasn't being aggravating enough already.  The worst of all these mannerisms however was far more terrible and still haunts my memories to this day. 

Most people emphasize what they’re saying by a louder voice, more descriptive words or a simple exclamation mark. Mr. England however felt this just didn’t cut it. Instead, whenever he needed to make a point he would thrust his arms to the heavens as if holding two enormous light sticks and waving them, yell “AIRPORT LANDING LIGHTS!” Ultimately it tended to have that same derogatory sound as “HELLO MCFLY!”

I am not aware of a single student who enjoyed Mr. England’s sparkling personality.  In fact, I’m fairly positive everyone (including the faculty) hated him more than a trip to the boys’ bathrooms. Since Mr. England attempted to rule his class with an iron fist and constantly threatened disciplinary action, we had to resist his authority in more subtle ways.  A teacher like Mr. England needed more than mere spitballs and pencils lodged in ceiling tiles.

There was one student in particular, who excelled at these disruptive actions. Due to Mr. England’s sure irritation with him I’ll call him Thorn. The Thorn pulled a number of grade-A pranks on Mr. England that we respected more than any class letter grade.  Sometimes these pranks were old classics yet Mr. England’s reactions were so ludicrous that they bear mentioning.

On one occasion Thorn attached a paper that said “Careful: Historical Site” to Mr. England’s back unbeknownst to him.  Somehow the man managed to go a half-day of back crinkling before realizing there was entire 8.5x11 there. After taking it off and obviously seeing it for the first time Mr. England decided somehow that the best reaction would be to play along.  He reattached the paper and for the remainder of the day did his iconic hand twitch at everyone while making a scoffing sound almost like Elvis’s laugh, jerking his thumbs at his back and saying, “I’m a historical site” as if he knew it was there the whole time.   Obviously he missed the point that the joke would always be at his expense.

We finally graduated elementary but this did not diminish our burning hatred of Mr. England. We continued to try to make his life as much of a living hell as he made ours. Since the junior high got out earlier than the elementary where I lived and was right next to it we’d pay regular visits to the quack on our way home. Mr. England would constantly leave his portable for God knows what strange reasons so we would go sit in the classroom in some empty desks. His current students, who liked him as much as we did, were happy for the distraction. Mr. England would come back and often continue to lecture on about the chemical composition of bike spokes for a good 15 minutes. When we’d had as much as we could handle we’d raise our hand to ask a question and that’s when he’d actually realize we were there. He’d lose it and start a high speed chase out and around the portable till he realized an old guy running after a couple kids probably sent the wrong impression.

Later on, I got older and went to High School. I never saw Mr. England again and I don’t know what happened to him.  I heard he quit to avoid a firing probably for gross incompetence or some unlawful behavior. Try as I might though I have never forgotten him. I suppose if a lesson can be learned from Mr. England it would be "Some people are just bad eggs".

So back when I lived with my parents we resided in one of those split level homes. You know, the ones that have 5 mini-floors so I'd think I was the shit with my five billion floors even though the square footage was probably less then my buddies' 2 story houses. This meant that we had a lot of staircases.

I had this one gifted friend who liked to jump down these short stairwells inevitably resulting in numerous cases of blunt trauma. In retrospect the first impact to his cranium was probably the reason he kept on doing it later. This definitely didn't help his situation.

Well my sweet old mum was the type that was always looking for new incredible ways to utilize every square inch of a home. Apparently some cosmic forces focused and some disturbed mind out there must have fallen off the john and hit their head too, coming up with an incredible idea. A way to utilize a space previously unconsidered throughout recorded human history. And thus the Stair Basket was born.

Unlike many actually useful, improbable inventions like the Shamwow, Clapper and others, the Stair Basket would go down as a blight on humanity. This seemingly harmless wicker invention is single handedly responsible for more pain and human suffering then every major plague in history combined.

Anyways my mother managed to find one of these and it was promptly given a home on our main staircase. Of the total width of that stairwell this wicker deathtrap probably took up about 1/3 to 1/2 of that width. This meant that any time you went down the staircase now you had to evade this basket, hugging the wall for dear life much like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when they escape the mines. This was just during the day.

Imagine if you will, waking up at some ungodly hour just like any other night with the intense need to take a whiz. Well, now this mundane task was turned into a life risking venture. After many mishaps and miraculous survivals came the fateful day.

Tensions were high already at the time. I was watching TV nearby (surely nursing some recent basket wound) when down the stairs came my stepfather forgetting that all important rule of hugging the wall and he stepped right smack into the bowels of the stair basket.

Down the stairs went a flurry of man, wicker and curses. Slowly, he stood up with an obvious gimp and this was about when all hell broke loose. My memory is a little foggy after that but I remember lots of expletives yelled well over the safety of 140 dB and watching that wicker basket crash into multiple walls at light speed.

To this day I'm not really sure what the ultimate fate of that wicker basket, or any others for that matter, was. I have never seen one anywhere since. I'm making a safe bet that ours wasn't exactly an isolated incident. I suppose if a lesson could be learned from stair baskets it's that "Some spaces are best left unused".