Me and My Middle Bully. Kind of Like The Song “Me and My Shadow”. Kind of.
I hate running. If you’ve been here for a while then you already know this based on this post…or this post. Running for me is like being a cat and having someone draw me a bubble bath. At first, I thought it was because I can taste blood when ever I run. It’s like I’m bleeding from my lungs. Then I considered the fact that I used to smoke as the reason why running for me is like the plague. However, as we all know most things that shape our adult life can be traced back to early child hood trauma or as I call it Seventh Grade.
Seventh Grade and my middle bully.
J. Quacking Bush the First.
As if this time in life isn’t rife with so many tortuous obstacles but the world has to give you a J. Quacking Bush the First of your very own for all of seventh grade.
You try so hard to fit in at this time of life and every time you make a step forward into the “inner circle of cool” something makes you take about five giant steps backwards. It could be something as simple as what you bring for lunch. Or what you bring your lunch in. Why on earth would the kind of lunch bag matter for a child trying to fit in at lunch time?
Again, I ask why on earth would it matter? A brown bag is a brown bag right?
Of course a GIANT brown lunch bag would be better than the cute tiny lunch sized bags that all the other kids parents bought specifically for their cool kids to bring lunch to school in. A GIANT brown lunch bag couldn’t cause any added anxiety to trying to blend into the cafeteria at lunch time unnoticed, could it?
It certainly wouldn’t cause a life long aversion to paper grocery sized bags that lingers on well into adult hood.
Why would it?
It’s just a GIANT. BROWN. BAG.
WE WERE ALREADY RECYCLING… IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES.
For crying out loud, my parents were just really progressive.
Lunch itself would be enough to send me spiraling off to the nurse where I would feverishly suck on the thermometer and then rub it in my hands to get the mercury to rise because trying to find a nice empty table to eat my lunch out of my GIANT paper bag was not the worst of the situation. Every lunch was accompanied by J. Quacking Bush the First staring me down and taking her wing and making a slicing motion just under her waddle. A gesture meant to get my adrenaline going, I am sure for recess, directly after lunch.
If I managed to eat my lunch I would scarf it down as quickly as possible then dispose of the evidence, evidence being the brown bag that was large enough to fit J. Quacking Bush the First in, a thought that I wish had occurred to me back in the Seventh Grade.
*sigh* Hind sight is 20/20.
Invariably I would end up finding my way out side to the playground hearing what I thought was my heart pounding inside my head in preparation for play time. Much to my dismay it was the slow pounding of the gigantic flippers of J. Quacking Bush the First bearing down on me. And with a quick look behind me, I was off for the better part of an hour running my fucking ass off until the bell rang.
Down hills.
Up hills.
By teachers.
Through dodge ball games.
I probably could have set myself on fire and no one would have noticed the game I was playing with J. Quacking Bush the First. The game I like to call “Run, Run For Your Little Life Because When J. Quacking Bush the First Catches You It’s All OVER”.
It all makes perfect sense to me now.
Running feels like dying a slow fiery death by bully.
