Better Places To Hide

No. 10 of 30 -- Guidance Counselor series

Is the world big enough for you? Or do you agree with me that we need better places to hide from guidance counselors? And if the world were bigger, that’s exactly what we would have. If you agree wholeheartedly with me, please sit in absolute silence and tell yourself it’s so. I will sense your agreement. Because if we say it out loud, we'd certainly encourage guidance counselors to buckle down and torment their kids more. And knowing guidance counselors as I do, the last thing they need is more incentive than what they have inappropriately appropriated to themselves already.

Am I serious about guidance counselors or is this some kind of joke? Are heart attacks serious? Diphtheria, cancer, dog breath, Italian breath, rickets, psoriasis, hangovers? Are these dread conditions serious? Yes, they’re DAMNED serious, forgive the profanity. And I’m D——— serious too. My life, saints be praised, wasn’t completely ruined as it turned out, but if my guidance counselor had fulfilled his complete will, I would’ve been mush a long time ago, consigned to the garbage heap, tossed out like so many dirty diapers.

One thing I did when I didn’t have to be with him was scrupulously avoid him. It couldn’t be done all the time, of course, because the school wasn’t enormous, but if I knew he was going to be someplace, I avoided that place. Just like you would avoid toxins to the extent that you could. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison anything.

If I would’ve had full range and not been a minor and not had parents, I would’ve been long gone. As it was, once I graduated, I immediately moved to a different town. More because I got a job there, then went to college and had other jobs over the years, with only the positive additional benefit of being away from him. After high school, my prayers were answered, and I never saw the guidance counselor again. I went my way, and though I had been unfortunate enough to have crossed his path in high school, the rest of my life was lived in greater happiness and peace.

It actually turned out that if the world had been even smaller I likely would’ve avoided him too. But all that is with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I didn’t know. I could’ve gone to the ends of the earth and he would’ve been there. I didn’t know. I actually was in a small town hitchhiking once, well over 100 miles from where I lived, and someone pulled up and asked me if I was such-and-such, my name. And I didn’t know them. So I’ve never been sure if that person was a living tentacle from him.

Speaking of the earth, it’s interesting how we got the continents we have. I saw this on a science show recently. The continents once upon a time were one land mass! So you can look at the contours of the different continents and see how they fit together like a puzzle. Pretty cool that I learned that, huh?

But why did the Good Lord cause the continents to separate over eons, millions of years? Scientists don’t know the full answer, but research is starting more and more to point to one clear inescapable conclusion: to give kids more places to avoid guidance counselors if push comes to shove.