Please stand for our national anthem.

Do you like the world around you?

Are you ready to behaaaavvvve?

(How could you do anything but, really?)

I love you Candy Orange Slice.

Now. The name of that song, just saying it, is the opposite of behavin’, right?

Let’s try one more.

she gets confused
flying over the dateline
her hands turn red
cause the days change at night
change in an instant the days
change at night, change in an instant

(You know very well it’s every fuckin’ word of it true.)

I love you John Exene. Pauline.

Buried in the X is the same misbehavin’ word, and that’s why I started down this road for truth.

I’m gonna use it too, in a phrase, with a certain licentious privilege and wrinkle your olfactory if you must.

The phrase means, per the Academy:

"some fact of considerable importance that is not disclosed–something suspicious, or wrong".
—Some guy in some book sourced via Wikipedia

You are saying by saying this phrase, you are so very afraid that something dark and dangerous is lurking out there, in a poorly frequented part of the yard, over there by the fence line where we chop and stack the firewood.

Let me say it. Another way.

Apparently there’s something invented by the Serious People called a SWOT analysis.

You’re supposed to analyze a given situation according to what you see as the existing Strengths and Weaknesses, the extant Opportunities, and … Threats.

Until a few weeks ago, I was just barely aware of this SWOT thing and I had to look up what it stood for–because they wanted me to help do one, in relation to a degree program I teach in.

I put it off forever (because of course, like any rational human being, I hate that shit), until at last one of my better colleagues came to me and interviewed my analysis out of me so she could finish writing it up.

I stated my view of the strengths, and the weaknesses, and the opportunities, and then she asked me about the Threats.

I thought about it a minute and then I said, in essence: that’s fookin’ ridiculous. Threats. This isn’t a war. This isn’t even a business. There’s no such thing as a threat, to a degree program.

And the better colleague said, okay, I think you’re right, but what are there instead of threats? We have to put something…

I said How About This? There are Potentialities for Collaboration. And let’s list a few … okay then. She wrote it all down and then wrote it all up and Whoosh. That’s done, for another damn year.

So this degree program is in trouble politically because too few people are graduating from it, and today I was one of the people who got called in to answer for it (I guess, unaccountable as it seems) and maybe figure out something better.

When I say called in, I mean by the guy I’ve been calling the General, even though he’s really only a Dean. Moreover, I’m going to call him Ron, even though his name is … oh hell, his name is Ron, and maybe it’s short for Ronald and maybe for Aaron, I don’t know. Ron the Dean.

So we’re sitting around the table to discuss the bloody fate of this degree program, and instead Ron wants to start by talking about SWOT. He doesn’t care what we said in the other seven pages. He doesn’t care about the strengths, weaknesses, or opportunities. He wants to focus like a pinhead laser on the treatment of the question of threats.

He reads off the stuff about potential and collaboration with a sneer in his voice.

And then he looks at me and he says, Was That You??

(Your phone’s off the hook but you’re not.)

And I said, well, Better Colleague wrote it, but yeah. She was directly quoting me … Ron.

He was so full of barely restrained fury.

He said well. I think this attitude means that the process isn’t being taken seriously here.

And with a considerable effort, I bit back a bitter laugh, and I said.

If you mean me. There. Ron.

I can assure you.

That I am taking these questions with deep. Abiding. Seriousness.

Plus a look on my face that matched exactly.

And it stole his thunder.

Not that he believed me. Any more than I believed myself.

But what could he say? "No you’re not"?

That would have pushed him all the way over the line into childish petulance, and he already had one foot over that line.

So he dropped it.

And then I told him all about why no one was enrolling in his degree and what he should do about it, at length, and all my similarly summoned colleagues around the table verbally slapped me on my back for my perspicacity, sagacity, my gorgeous insight, my lovely voice.

La.

You will not find it incomprehensible, but I hate meetings, almost as much as I hate wasting my time on stupid business analysis tricks–I’m a god damned academic, Ron, and not even a well-paid one, thanks, not even a tenured one, because you and your ilk don’t actually believe in liberty among worker drones. So when you ask me for my "honest opinion", you’re going to get it, and that will include my opinion about the nature of your questioning strategies.

Here’s the thing about Ron.

Like any good avowed ‘conservative Republican’ (direct quote), his whole life is about fear, and threats.

He sees only a small part of who I really am, and those seen parts make him unsettled and disquieted.

The larger chunk, that he can’t see at all–that pushes him over into frustration, and then outright anger, which burbled over vocally today. I anger him, and he doesn’t even really know why.

There’s an irony, in the fact that the stated cause of his anger was that I was allegedly not taking threats seriously.

He’s mad because he’s afraid and I am not afraid.

It’s as simple and as dumb as that.

If Ron was in the habit of being honest with his truest self, he would say:

"There’s a nigger in the woodpile."

There’s something important here, something suspect, some dangerous threat that is hidden.

Hidden, in this uncertain form of this rock and roll nigger probation prof, in this shaggy unserious tejón.

Someday soon, his fear and his threat model will lead him to let me go. There will be a long list of reasons justifying this action. The SWOT affair will be on the list. I’ll be called in again to the same cramped sad office, and he, filled with nameless dread, will enunciate his charges and, trembling, pronounce sentence on my mortal working soul.

On that day, I will not choke back the laugh, and it won’t even be bitter.

I think what I might do is hand him a printed copy of this post, timestamped November, URL stripped away so that he can’t follow me home.

I will leave him with a smile, and I will go still higher, back up into the mountains that heal, and leave him to wallow in his woodpile threats, because I won’t be the last of them to step out of the shadows and into the light.

I say it today, so I don’t have to bother then, that single word, little big man.

Goodbye.