Oh, The Suphering

As a note to yesterday's post about students submitting some disturbing and violent creative writing, I feel the need to recount my own history of such behavior. A couple of years ago, while rummaging through old Childhood Stuff at my folks' place, Mary and I unearthed a treasure: a collection of stories written and illustrated with care by my kindergarten-aged self. Many of these stories were about the X-Men or Power Rangers. All of them involved characters fighting. Now, they were hardly troubling; my inability to spell or color within the lines made them hilarious, actually. Still, one story was about "Rock Man" who killed people with rocks, making them "supher" (what can I say, I was a young poet).

So I drew pictures of people dying, scribbling all over the page with a red crayon, and described mass amounts of suphering. Does that mean I needed counseling at that age? Absolutely not. To this day, I have never been in an actual fight. I just liked comic books and Star Wars. I had an imagination. Had an adult told me that what I was doing was wrong or inappropriate in any way, I would not have taken it well. It would be like telling me that I couldn't eat pizza or watch Saturday Morning Cartoons. Children can have twisted imaginations, but I am living proof that such a thing does not necessarily mean the child will grow up deranged.

PS I also touched on the depressing nature of high school literature yesterday. One such universally read bleak and gloomy classic is Great Gatsby. If you've read it, you may find THIS funny.