A Key To Me Ash Can

From time to time Key To Me Comics will be departing from our usual episodic content about the books that are key to us. We consider these our Ash Can editions; small stories that would otherwise be unpublished. Today we will look at an artifact from both Dave’s and my past.

This past weekend I was tackling a reorganization of my bookshelves. With all my recently acquired comics, I needed to rearrange my system. Luckily? I stumbled across an ancient folder from my Junior High era. Inside the folder were some things best left unremembered. Sheets of song lyrics I’d meticulously written out after countless listenings, a Wayne’s World fanzine attempt we had done, and other juvenile attempts are being, to be kind— creative. But one thing bore more scrutiny; a booklet produced as part of our English homework.

Now I’m not even sure if this was an 8th grade or 9th grade assignment*.

* It was 8th you jackass. -Editor

I do know that by this time Dave and I were regulars at the Comic Book Connection. The assignment must have been to either review a restaurant (the Gifted kids) or write about a food you didn’t like (the otherwise advanced, but just not gifted kids)*.

* Not that I’m bitter, but I still remember the artificial divide of gifted and the rest of us and this is an iniquitous example of this on an actual assignment. I understand it was de rigueur back then, but way to make some of us feel less than Pennsylvania Dept. of Education! So yeah, never mind. I am bitter! -Geoff

* Dave here, I want the record to show that being in the Gifted Program was super weird. And while, at the time, it did provide some false and unearned confidence, I cringe at the idea that this was a thing I was a part of. Let me take this time to thank Geoff for bringing back some adolescent educational trauma I have done my best to erase from my memory.

Please don’t judge the nascent adolescent minds that wrote the following entries. We did what was asked of us and, if nothing else, hopefully learned something. I think my writing still carries a certain flourish that was present even back then. So Mrs. P, don’t take my bitterness of the system as resentment towards you. Rather, I want to thank you for what you taught me. You encouraged my hyperbolic and embellished vocabulary, but ignored my stunning inability to hear how my writing actually sounded! Many teachers before you didn’t show the least amount of enthusiasm for what I was going for when I wrote.

So this is what the two now “grown-up” 14 years olds wrote like when they were first collecting comics. Hopefully our prose are, if nothing else, more elegantly recorded and hopefully, more thoughtfully constructed in our dotage.

Exhibit A.