Young Grendel in primary school. (click for full size)
Ah the glory! The slow-growing, unseen development of the brain. One day: the incomprehensible, mystic procession of arcane symbols, the next: the stolid stream of recognisable words. I turned the pages, eager to be rid of the childish nonsense. Unrealistic and stupid repetition of one syllable words. "Oh look: See John run!" Baby talk!
I powered through the picture books at home and began to consume the library. "Are you my mother?" Spoon-fed a high-nutrient diet of imaginative prose I turned around and found myself chomping on the final pages of an adult classic. Like a ravenous dog I wolfed down the wisdom and traditions of the ages: The labours of Hercules, Frey and his ship, the study of sharks, the golden apples of sun... I ate and ate, school work became irrelevant.
Maths seemed a remote goal in baby school. We fought on piggy-backs while the girls made houses in the dirt. Demarking their rooms and ascribing function to their subjects to come. "Every mother is a queen don't you know?" And then I found myself in the finals of classroom mental arithmetic knockouts. Effortlessly defeating those whom I admired. How did I know that stuff? What are 7 sixes?
Twice two is four, two fours are eight.
Take from the left and carry the one.
Addition is associative, subtraction is not.
Divide and conquer in one digit bites,
Keep the remainder and do it again,
Whittle down the dividend til only a nub remains.
The power of iterative process.
And so it went... but at the time I loved art. My scrapbooks filled with random sketches. Not great, but I was better than most. A monster of clear potential: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" All grown ups ask the same boring questions... I had no idea. Fruit cake and tea, formal chairs and clean carpet. How quickly they forget what they were...
Up in the high school the shit began to get real. It turns out that teachers are dumb: "You can't take the log of a log". Pffft, just watch me! It turns out that teachers are humourless: From Macbeth: "Was that a head with arms?" Like the Kool-Aid jug or Pac-Man. Turns out that teachers are petty. Suspended for a week. Turns out that teachers are cruel. But not only teachers... Just a taste of what was to come. A harbinger of doom. If I had but the wisdom and depth then to hear the toll. But it was too soon. I was but a spratling...
Then music came and alcohol and drugs. I led the rebellion. At first it was comedy, walking into class backwards, with my clothes on backwards, sitting down backwards... Taking over a foreign maths class disguised behind a paper mask. Writing equations on the board then vanishing like Zorro! The new teacher confused and powerless. Later he became the principal...
The headmistress takes on Grendel in front of the school. (click for full size)
Arguing the point! Always arguing. Do they not see how stupid they are? I demolished the headmistress in front of the senior school. She was a fool to tackle me! What did she expect? She was defenceless in the face of my withering sarcasm. As if her self-ascribed prestige meant a single iota to me? I rejoiced in her rage. I cared not that I had made another enemy. "Fuck the lot of them!"
I shared a pack of peanuts in the maths class and found myself suspended and then expelled. An absurd charade with my parents summoned to the principal's office. I felt neither fear nor concern. They gave no reason. There was no justification. They dismissed their scholarship student.
The bell tolled again: "Behold your fate!", "The theme of your life!" I had not the ears to hear it... Had I but known, would I have taken a different path?
"Fuck them all!"
I left them behind and took the road for the stars.