August 09, 2002

les Doodles Dangereuse

Was rooting around in an old box of papers recently and came across a bunch of papers and such mostly dating from my high school years.

One of the things in the batch of papers was a weird doodle I'd done one day. It's quite the morbid little piece. I emailed it to Kallisti, as I knew she'd find it amusing and it was actually something to show her that went along with discussions we've had it the past about our respective high school experiences.

Months ago, there were those stories that hit the paper about students getting suspended or expelled for violent content in doodles they'd done. Kallisti and I both were swapping stories of the odd stuff we'd sometimes cough up in high school that would surely be unwise to do these days. I told her, for instance, I used to regularly doodle various scenes of people being executed and such.

I went to high school in the late '70s in a big high school (2000 students). No one ever batted an eye back then at any of my odd doodles, writings, or even the sometimes offbeat topics I'd pick for essays.

I mused that had I gone to high school at another time (or perhaps just another place), this kind of stuff probably would have caused some sort of concern about me, and I would have likely either been hauled off to a shrink, or in more alarmist times, probably seen as dangerous and expelled.

Anyway, here's one of my vintage morbid doodlings.

I would almost be tempted to add (for sake of argument) "hey, and I turned out all right." But I suspect those most given to alarm over such types of "expression" might not necessarily agree with me on that. C'est la vie.

Still. I can attest I did indeed draw this doodle mess (and others like it) as an adolescent and I wasn't then nor have been since particularly homicidally-inclined.

For what that's worth .....