Largo High School – A Slice Of Big Pauly

We’ve Already Lost America

I read an article this morning where the courts just ruled that the immigrants who have been coming into the country illegally as of late have the right to own firearms.

Remember when Laken Riley was murdered a few weeks ago? One of my Largo High School buddies was Jeffrey Clark – who is the spokesperson for the University of Georgia’s police unit. A small world, indeed.

That decision floored me, to be honest. I had been hopeful that former President Trump would get back into office later this year, although he has to run a legal gauntlet no candidate has ever had to run in this country before.

But I think this just seals not only his fate but ours.

I have been thinking of just simply not posting anymore when Trump eventually loses, or if there is a scenario where the elections are canceled. I would keep this blog going, but everything else – I have no use for it once we get to a dystopian state of affairs.

As they say in poker, it’s time to recognize that the Deep State has “the nuts,” meaning the best possible hand. If things get out of hand, I think the DS would simply bring China in. Why else would they want “the smoke” of a civil war?

Because they have the upper hand.

It’s almost to the point where I don’t want to watch the news anymore – especially when Mr. Trump was (and this is a continuing story) at a rally over the weekend in Ohio – and he spoke about a “bloodbath” coming to the automotive industry if he isn’t elected.

The media chose to ignore the reference – and instead used the “bloodbath” quote out of context meaning that there would be a “bloodbath” if he fails to win in November.

In life, the bad guys do win every once in a while – and it’s starting to look like this is one of those times.

I’ll stay around – probably to talk about other things. But the America we know is already gone.

Only Father Time Survives Everything

I was saddened to hear yesterday about another one of my middle and high school classmates passing away. It was someone I remembered – perhaps more of an acquaintance than an actual friend, but one of those people who was part of the tableau of my years of wonder.

It was a reminder that all of us have our struggles. If you think your struggles are overwhelming – you’re probably too self absorbed to note what others go through in their lives, and that we all live under the same roof called a sky.

To my classmate, safe travels over the rainbow bridge, and we’ll see you again – sooner or later.

Hillary Goes To High School

I look at some of the stories I’ve told about my life on this blog – and there are times I think I tell a good “beginning” and a good “ending” of stories, but I don’t tell you all the “middle” of a story for one reason or another.

So let me get back to “Hillary” who I recently discovered had passed away somewhere around 2000 or the early 2000’s. I’m unsure of how she passed exactly.

August 26, 1985 was the day my graduating class began high school – with Hillary and I both in the same Phys Ed/Health class. On the surface, that seemed to be good news – we were already good friends though we generally weren’t social past going to school, and I’d probably get to talk to her more.

As often happens as a young person gets older, the total makeup of who is a friend to you and who isn’t changes with time. Some stay with you, but others drift apart, one way or another. For some reason as 9th grade starts up, Hillary starts goofing on me and treats me like I’m some sort of joke to her. A few weeks later, she asks why I never asked her out.

Hillary was notorious in school for – ummm – short-term relationships with some boys by that point, even though she’s 14 (and could pass for 18 easy). That got me thinking I had a chance with her throughout most of late ’85 and early ’86 – and that was exactly what she wanted me to think. I even gave her flowers one day – oddly enough the day was January 28, 1986.

Kind of like how a certain structure went up in flames that day, so did my relationship with her in the time that followed. Her boyfriends were basically cover for the “side action” she was getting by cheating on them with other boys (by today’s terms, she was probably a sex addict of some sort), and by the end of that year, I wanted nothing to do with her. At best, I would have been a pawn in her game of life, as Alex Karras said as Mongo in Blazing Saddles.

Fast forward to August 25, 1986 – the start of my sophomore year. I’m begging “the school schedule gods” not to stick me in a class with her. Five classes come and go, no Hillary – so I have my hopes up like watching a pitcher throwing a no-hitter that this can be done. The bell for the sixth period Science class to start sounds, no Hillary. A few moments later, the door opens, there she is – a line drive up the middle for a base hit. No-hitter gone. She’s waving at me – I totally ignore her, probably wishing I had gone to Seminole High, which was actually closer to home than Largo was.

Our friendship deteriorates further – but you knew that already. One day, I’m on the bus heading home – and she’s on the back of a truck with about six other high school guys that I guess you could say were part of our “redneck” clique of the school. They’re more or less surrounding her in the back of the truck – and I don’t know where they are taking her. Somehow, I don’t think hog prices or Hank Williams Jr. are going to be discussed knowing Hillary’s penchant for short-term relationships – but I never ask her or them about what I suspect might have been some sort of gang-bang. It’s none of my business, and I’m trying to keep her in my rear-view mirror, if you get me.

The last time I see her in school was late 1988 – I’m a senior by now, and she would wind up dropping out of school around that time, possibly as part of a narcotics bust that hit our high school in early ’89. Oddly enough, it’s another situation that could have been sexual or might not have been – she’s in the back seat of a car with another woman, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Godspeed, Hillary. You were a character and a half.

How Things Change As Times Change

Tomorrow, the senior class of my alma mater of Largo High School has its graduation ceremonies. Just for fun, I thought I’d share the differences between the Class of 1989 and the Class of 2019. For the purposes of this blog entry, I’ll be talking about the event itself.

In 1989, we went to the Largo High football stadium for our graduation. It was held the night after the last day of school on Thursday, June 8th of that year.

In 2019, the graduation ceremony is being held at Tropicana Field, the home of MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays – which was still a little more than a year away from opening for the first time in 1989 as the Florida Suncoast Dome. According to Google Maps, it’s about 17 miles from Largo High to “the Trop”, and the quickest way down there would include taking roads that didn’t exist in 1989, such as County Road 296 that now connects to Interstate 275.

The graduation ceremony takes place tomorrow as I type this, which is May 24th. Somehow, the last day of the school year is the following Wednesday, May 29th. I have no clue how you would get the kids to attend the last days of school if they had no intent on going to college – and once they have their diplomas, isn’t possession nine-tenths of the law?

Call me an old fart if you want, and you probably will – but I’ll take our graduation over a ceremony 30 years in the future nearly 20 miles away.

Mount Hillary Revisited

It’s always the most unlikely things that mentally kick you in the shins.

About five years ago, I wrote a story about a young lady I went to school with who I named “Hillary” for wanting not to give out her real name. Much like the political Hillary we all know about in the here and now, this Hillary always got into trouble, or found ways to get out of such trouble.

You’d think someone like the Hillary I knew would be on social media these days with a Twitter account, more likely one of a legion of people with Facebook accounts. In doing some elementary searching, I found out that Hillary is no longer with us – passing away sometime around 2000.

If that were the story in whole, I wouldn’t be mentioning it here. But one day after I returned to Florida from North Carolina in the summer 2000, I’m on a PSTA (the local bus transit company here in Pinellas County) bus for some reason. As fate would have it, Hillary got on – and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s her. For some reason, I’m too shy to go and say hello – I bury my head in the St. Pete Times newspaper, figuring acknowledging her and vice versa would be too awkward,

And that would up being the last time I saw her. The moral of the story: make every second count – tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Journalism: It’s Been Dead A While

Julian Assange (right) and his cat (on the left) when he lived at the Ecuador embassy in London.

With the capture of Julian Assange by the British government, soon to be extradited over here to the United States – there was a hue and cry about how Assange’s arrest is the death of journalism. This coming from the same people who for the past two years and change who have been saying President Trump was colluding with the Russians – when in fact it was the Democrats who were spying on him, according to the recent testimony of Attorney General William Barr.

Yes, journalism is dead – but it died a long time ago, and those accusing Trump of being party and parcel to it are wrong.

When I was a freshman in high school, I took a journalism class for a full year. Hated every minute of it – and I don’t think the ample-chested teacher I had liked me all too much, but she wound up getting replaced by the end of the year. Back then, they teached you that every story should answer six basic questions – who, when, where, what, why, and how.

A few years after my radio days had ended, it was President Clinton who okayed an FCC edict that allowed a handful of companies to on the lion’s share of radio stations across the country in the late ’90s. Look at IHeartRadio. Look at any major market in this country, and they own at least half of the stations in that market. With so few owning so much, journalism isn’t going to be defined – but more than likely, it will continue to decay.

As for Assange, we are all assuming he’s coming to the US to pay for the “crimes” he committed. I submit to you all that we are not bringing him here just for that reason. One of the things Wikileaks did was tap into all the unsecure E-mail Hillary Clinton had on unsecure servers, and Assange has been on record saying his source were NOT the Russians. So, if anyone can clear up that matter, and what the Democrats did – it’s this guy.

Mr. Trump isn’t killing journalism – he’s trying to save what’s left of it. Anyone who says otherwise is distorting the truth intentionally.

Random Sightings Of Shrubbery

I will warn you up front, this is a bit of a PG13-ish post. Do with that what thou wilt.

I’ve spoken in previous blog entries about Gary (no, not his real name) who was a neighbor of mine. Gary had an older brother, who I will call “Earl” here. Earl was three years older than our little peer group, and unlike Gary – was a decent dude. He was the trainer “apprentice” for the Largo High athletic clubs, especially those using the football stadium – which would include soccer, track, and so on.

We had a mutual friend who even as a freshman was one of the best players on the girls soccer team, and Earl knew I made a habit of going to the contests when I was an underclassman – so he gave me a lift back home one night, but some of the girls on the team had nagging injuries that needed care. Thus, he commissioned me to assist him.

One of the girls (who was older than I was) had an ankle or knee injury, something like that, so Earl asked me to hold her leg in place while he got something to treat the malady. (And by the way, the locker room showers in the locker rooms didn’t work at LHS when I went there- nor did the girls get changed there, so this wasn’t like some act of perversion was going on for me to be there.)

I’m holding up this girls leg – I don’t think I was acquainted with her, but I probably made some small talk, what have you. The blue shorts are a bit high up on her, where the fabric is only covering up the top of her thighs, but something is peeking out a bit. It takes me a few seconds to figure out I’ve accidentally seen some of her pubic hair – and this is the late 1980’s when “woman-scaping” wasn’t that much of a thing, so it’s dark in color, and somewhat abundant.

It’s one of those instants where time to seems to slow down. Do I tell her what I’m seeing, out of courtesy? I didn’t really see the upside of that – that leg could wind up emphatically in my crotch. So I try not to stare at it and ignore it – and think about football players or something like that. Earl comes back with whatever it was he went to find, and life goes on.

I wasn’t much of a chatterbox in my high school days – so that incident has stayed with me, that is – until now.

The Pledge

howaboutno

We’re a week deep into the aftermath of another school shooting, and I’ve been seeing kids protesting all over the place in the media. I’m seeing these kids accuse one of our two major political parties of, essentially, murder.

We can argue whether or not whether or not that’s the case for eons. I’m just a bit concerned these kids are being exploited by our politicians to advance their talking points, to breathe air into arguments long since dismissed. Who exploits these kids is a secondary concern to me – that they are being exploited is the bigger concern.

Personally, I believe the second amendment is there for a reason – for the right of defending yourself. I don’t understand why it is easier to get an AR-15 rifle than it is to get a handgun. Never owning a gun, I’d think those laws are ass-backward – that it should be easier to get a handgun, tougher to get an automatic rifle. But I admit to you all I haven’t spent a lot of time on the matter, as I don’t really like guns all that much.

(I would also look into how mental health in society has changed over the years, as school shootings in this country go back to 1764, with scores more occurring in the 19th century.)

How do I know that this sort of exploitation goes on? Let me tell you a little story of my high school days in the 1980’s.

There was a big push one day by a group called SADD – Students Against Drunk Driving. The one day they were at our school, we were all gathered together to sign a pledge against drunk driving. That struck me odd, as I didn’t know there were kids who believed driving drunk was a good idea. Being a student against drunk driving was like being a Christian against Christ – it didn’t make any sense, so why build consensus for something so obvious?

If anything, I thought it was giving kids the idea of getting wasted and driving. “Hey! That’s an idea! Let’s drink some Jack and Cokes and go driving!”

The campaign was made: all the kids were going to sign this ridiculous, non-binding pledge, and they used an unspoken peer pressure to get all the kids to sign. Not signing was not an opinion. God forbid you were THAT kid who didn’t pledge against drunk driving – the horror of it all!

Seeing that I was looking at a few inches of garden hose without any lubricant, I signed. The moral of the story: if they exploit high school kids back in the 80’s, I shudder to think of what those kids in Broward County who are about to be seen up in Tallahassee go through in the wake of their school being shot up a week ago. They should not be used as political pawns, but be allowed to figure things out for themselves.

Geometry, Geography, And Prep Football

lhs

I was paying attention this past weekend to the Florida high school playoffs with a little bit more interest than I usually do. My alma mater of Largo High in Largo (where else?) has made the “lightning round” of the football season for the first time in a few years, winning its district and going 7-2 in a nine-game regular season. (A 10th game was scrapped due to Hurricane Irma in September.) On top of that, the FHSAA revamped its playoff format beginning this season, rewarding the non-district winning teams that play a tougher schedule first and foremost, regardless of what records the teams put up. Each region is made up of four districts, so it’s possible five teams could come out of a single district in its current format. Plus, you get bonus standings points for playing teams above your classification on top of that.

Schools from Pinellas County, whether they are private or public, have never won a state title in football, and Largo has never had a state championship team in a strictly team against team sport. They drew the #3 seed against Barron Collier High from Naples, the #6 seed, and Largo’s Packers came out on top, 27-24.

The outcome is somewhat significant, and I thought explaining why would make a good topic here. What happens to these local high school teams is that they are somewhat victims of their geography, and perhaps to a greater extent, geometry. Assuming the level of talent in the state is relative, what winds up happening is when a Pinellas school goes and plays a team from a smaller area, it usually winds up on the short end of the scoreboard.

Say you have two boxes of pizza, and you’re given the option of having one slice in twelve of a larger pizza or one slice in four of a slightly smaller pizza. Assuming you’re hungry, you’d eat that slice that’s 25% of the smaller pizza, right? These teams in slightly smaller markets like Sarasota and Fort Myers usually wind up with more talent and more depth if starters get hurt, and they usually wind up winning these games 80-90% of the time. Good coaching and luck play into this as well, mind you, plus these “gems” of players that wind up playing on Sundays a few years down the road.

Whats happened in the new century is that these smaller cities are beginning to get a rise in their population, so these school’s respective talent is dropping off. More high schools are needed because there are more children in these cities needing their education (much more important than football), so with time and with population booms in parts of the state, the playing field is being leveled. Twenty years ago, a Barron Collier type team would have an easy time with Largo, even though they went 5-5 and Largo went 7-2 and had home-field advantage. Now, the randomness works evenly for both areas.

I think it’s a safe bet a Pinellas team finally wins a state football title by 2030. Heck, it might even happen this season with a few teams still alive heading to the second round in a few days.

When It Hit The Fan

Yesterday, I was talking about how I would deliberately miss school in the first semester of the 1988-89 school year, when I was a senior at Largo High School. I can’t mention how lucky I was to have skipped school and NOT mention what happened when my luck ran out. And take it for me, when you think you’re getting away with something, don’t push your luck, as the universe always seems to find ways to balance things out beyond what you think you can fathom.

My parents weren’t really all too concerned about my school progress. They briefly separated when I was in middle school, then did so again for a few months in 1987 before coming back together. My mother left and got an apartment in nearby Indian Rocks Beach, living with her brother (and my uncle) at the time. In the spring of 1989, my Dad had a heart attack, forcing him into retirement from working as a butcher at a small store in Redington Beach, another nearby town. I’d work with him in the summer part-time.

They really didn’t pay attention to when report cards got released, and several days would go by from the time I’d get them to the time I’d ask for them, and I’d only give it to them when they requested. I somehow learned that bad news traveled fast, so you keep it to yourself until it’s asked for.

When the second semester began in early 1989, I was doing just well enough to pass classes. When my parents asked me for my latest report card and probably saw the eight absences I had without their knowledge, I could see what was coming, and it was trouble in River City. After the ensuing lecture, I was told that from now on, when I did homework or had to study, I had to do it in public view and not in my bedroom as I had been doing.

Whatever they said worked. I made the honor roll (making all A’s and B’s, with the allowance of making a C in one class) all three grading periods in that semester. If I missed a class that half of the year, it was for something that really happened, but it happened rarely if at all. I don’t think I did as well on the end of semester exams, but by that point, I had done so well that it didn’t mathematically matter. I was going to graduate.

The lecture gave me the “shot of adrenaline” I needed to finish my scholastic career strong. It would have been a total embarrassment had I failed enough classes in my final semester not to have graduated, but I always did just well enough to squeak by up to then.

Again, I was lucky when luck was all I had. If there’s a moral of the story, it’s not to depend on luck all of the time, because if that’s all you have, it can run out on you.

What Is The Reason For Your Truancy?

Over the weekend, Facebook reminded me of a scan I posted on there back in 2009 of my senior class, gathered in a patio outside of the school gym in the fall of 1988.

I’m not in the pic, because that was one of eight school days I chose to miss in the first half of the school year. That year, they had changed the rules over absences. In prior years, even if you took a single day away from school, you had to have a note from a parent explaining why you weren’t at school. In the 1988-89 school year, you just came back without explanations being necessary. You could elect to take 9 days off without penalty. The 10th such day off meant you failed all you classes for that semester.

And so, I wound up playing a lot of hooky that fall. I didn’t have any sisters or brothers, and my mother and father each went to work before I had to leave for school, and I always got back home when I went to school before they did. I wouldn’t make a lot of noise in the house, finding ways to entertain myself watching TV or listening to the radio quietly. I didn’t dare go out those days, lest anyone else catch me playing hooky and reporting that around, leading to a chain reaction of events where this gets back to my parents.

There was one Friday that I played hooky in the late fall, and then went to school to watch some sporting events at night. I may have had some PA announcing duties that day (back then, I did the PA for JV football, boys basketball, and girls soccer), but I don’t remember. I just got curious (and a little stir crazy, probably) to see if anyone would catch on. A few of my classmates knew I wasn’t at school that day, but no one in authority seemed to notice or care.

I was lucky. I should have gotten busted somewhere along the way, but it never happened. It seems I’ve always been smart enough to con people, but never smart enough not to.

That Plagiarism Thing

I was seeing my mother off on her way to Europe early yesterday morning, and saw my Tweet Deck abuzz over Melania Trump’s plagiarizing of Michelle Obama.

For the record, this is most certainly not the first time a politician (or, in Melania’s case, a speaker at a political convention) in recent memory has done this. Vice President Joe Biden got caught mimicking a speech in 1987, which ruined his Presidential aspirations for a couple of decades. Rand Paul has done it. Hell, President Obama got caught lifting part of Deval Patrick’s speech in 2008.

In the latter part of my senior year of high school at Largo High, I had to do a term paper in English class. (I chose college athletics as a theme, because even back then I saw how corrupt the NCAA could be.) My English teacher (who was no slouch, she wrote articles for the St. Petersburg Times on occasion) sat us down before we began our work and told us all about plagiarism. What it was, why it was bad, and how she was going to be on the lookout for it from all of us. If caught, the consequences would be severe, maybe even the difference in terms of whether or not we graduated on time or not.

It’s a big time fumble for the Trump camp, yes. But the Democrats can’t cry foul too hardly. As bad as it is, I merely think it’s a bump in a much bigger road of deciding who are new President will be.