Mike Macartney's Blog - Posts Tagged "boot-camp"
PE
A dreadful nostalgia played in the 1980s about the 1950s. How the children of the 60s gritted their teeth over Ronny Raygun and pissed and moaned about remembering those people’s good old days of obedient wives and quiet children. This happened long before retro-tv came a-calling. That looping of endless repeats of The Cartwrights weeping for young guest actresses dying while Hop Sing scurried jabbering.
Ponderosa: No Women Allowed!
"Pa, she's dead!"
"But Hoss, you knew it would end that way when she showed up in a red shirt."
There too, Barbara Stanwick flowing down staircases to medieval Stockton, California with her snotty ass children sneering at the bottom.
Today, those 60s kiddies are thrilled by the whirlpool watching the memories go round and round with a sucking sound. Ads quietly drone to them likes flies in a summer kitchen about catheters delivered directly and Alex Trebeck peddling burial insurance. Does your Hurry Cane have batteries charged for its dual headlights? “Help! I have fallen off the stairlift and can’t get up!”
If you lived it you remember one of the joys of that carefree childhood, PE: PE. Physical Education, the thing Kennedy wanted every boy and every girl to have. Joy preached by Arnold on the road to the Governator of Call-e-fornia. Who does not want strong and healthy bodies to go with the bright and eager minds in schools across the land. Ronnie won the Cold War handily with bright young minds and strong healthy bodies from those six years of PE in junior high and high school.
In 7th grade you got the list of things to buy: white gym shorts, white gym socks, white tee shirt, tennis shoes without black soles (so as to not desecrate the holy gymnasium floors), and a jock strap. You brought your own towel to roll everything up in on Monday and take home on Friday. A Master combination lock held your wire basket in the wall of baskets that kept your uniform during the week. God forbid you did not take it home on Friday, or forget it on Monday. Later in high school came gray steel portals in stacks and rows.
The local sporting goods stores filled with children every September looking for jock straps in little colored cardboard bricks with arcane sizing printed on them. They lay scattered in large baskets in the isles next to the baskets of baseball mitts. If you are a woman, a jock strap is like a thong with two elastic bands instead of the center cord in back to connect to the elastic waistband at an angle to clear the butt cheeks. There are two reasons that a 12 year old boy might be forced to wear one: His large penis flops around in his shorts if he only wore regular underwear, or he is being groomed for a career as a stripper. Today it would be called a “Sundusky.”
Odd, when my sons took PE that they not only did not have to buy a Sandusky, and did not even have to take showers in large, gray concrete holding pens with drains in the floor and spigots in the walls.
PE in school resembled a Serbian Marine boot camp in every way. The first 15-minutes were calisthenics with jumping jacks first. They were a sucker's illusion to get past the nausea most felt waiting for the commencement of the death march. Then came mountain climbers, sit-ups, squat thrusts, running in place, push-ups, leg raises, bent torso push-throughs. Don’t forget deep knee-bends with hands on the hips. Sometimes duck-walks with hands on the head, and crab-walks with hands and feet behind you. Think WWII Japanese prison camp on the Bataan peninsula. Just warming-up.
Running came after calisthenics. Laps around the track or laps around the school on the sidewalk in the case of junior high. As a fat kid who was slow and very passive aggressive my internal motto was, “Yes sir! Right away Sir! Fuck You sir!” So sad they had to wait for me and a few others to walk in.
Track in the spring, baseball, soccer, and slaughter ball other times. Slaughter ball had two teams, shirts and skins, and a huge canvas ball to encourage commission of generalized mayhem by forcing the ball over the other’s goal line. When I was a senior they got some weights. One spring we actually did something I liked outside with them. No, we were not instructed to beat each other with them.
Many times Friday was a special treat: wind sprints up and down the gym for the entire period in rotating relay groups until kids threw up. Forwards, backwards, duck walk, crab walk, skipping, sideways, any way the sadistic bastards who “coached” the PE class thought up. Mondays are so bad? Really?
Oh yes, the colored trunk system. High school had white, red, green, blue, and gold trunks to be earned in week-long testing a few times a year. Requirements for red included, 32 push-ups with somebody holding a fist under your chest and thighs to touch gong down, 60 sit-ups in two minutes with somebody holding down your feet and your legs straight, 10 pull-ups with palms facing away from you, run 1/2 mile in 3 minutes, a series of 10 back and forth 50-yard sprints, and climb a rope to the 30-foot ceiling of the gym. Once you passed those a fireman’s carry of someone your own weight for 1/2 a mile made you red, red trunks that is, like the fire truck. Green added climbing rope without feet, and more of the rest without the firehouse test. Blue went further like climbing peg boards up the side of the gym with your hands and other impossible things. Gold included actual flying around the permitter of the gymnasium 10 times. Only two students in the entire 60 year history of the school had made gold. One year a 5’4” blond boy built like an olympic gymnast tried for gold. He already had blue. The coach worked with him during the testing weeks and he came very close, I think he missed the 4 minute mile or something.
I never made color, and even though I was a senior could not stand at the front of the lines doing calisthenics. Only colored trunks could. At this point there was one coach, Mr. Flynn, who liked me and was sad to have to tell me no.
Yep, PE, Hell’s Boot-Camp with “coaches” enjoying torturing herds of young boys and teenagers with pitchforks, poking between the jock strap bands on the way to the showers.
Even after several decades of karate and aikido training, weight training, and amateur bicycle racing I refuse to run for anyone. “Yes sir! Fuck you sir!”
Ponderosa: No Women Allowed!
"Pa, she's dead!"
"But Hoss, you knew it would end that way when she showed up in a red shirt."
There too, Barbara Stanwick flowing down staircases to medieval Stockton, California with her snotty ass children sneering at the bottom.
Today, those 60s kiddies are thrilled by the whirlpool watching the memories go round and round with a sucking sound. Ads quietly drone to them likes flies in a summer kitchen about catheters delivered directly and Alex Trebeck peddling burial insurance. Does your Hurry Cane have batteries charged for its dual headlights? “Help! I have fallen off the stairlift and can’t get up!”
If you lived it you remember one of the joys of that carefree childhood, PE: PE. Physical Education, the thing Kennedy wanted every boy and every girl to have. Joy preached by Arnold on the road to the Governator of Call-e-fornia. Who does not want strong and healthy bodies to go with the bright and eager minds in schools across the land. Ronnie won the Cold War handily with bright young minds and strong healthy bodies from those six years of PE in junior high and high school.
In 7th grade you got the list of things to buy: white gym shorts, white gym socks, white tee shirt, tennis shoes without black soles (so as to not desecrate the holy gymnasium floors), and a jock strap. You brought your own towel to roll everything up in on Monday and take home on Friday. A Master combination lock held your wire basket in the wall of baskets that kept your uniform during the week. God forbid you did not take it home on Friday, or forget it on Monday. Later in high school came gray steel portals in stacks and rows.
The local sporting goods stores filled with children every September looking for jock straps in little colored cardboard bricks with arcane sizing printed on them. They lay scattered in large baskets in the isles next to the baskets of baseball mitts. If you are a woman, a jock strap is like a thong with two elastic bands instead of the center cord in back to connect to the elastic waistband at an angle to clear the butt cheeks. There are two reasons that a 12 year old boy might be forced to wear one: His large penis flops around in his shorts if he only wore regular underwear, or he is being groomed for a career as a stripper. Today it would be called a “Sundusky.”
Odd, when my sons took PE that they not only did not have to buy a Sandusky, and did not even have to take showers in large, gray concrete holding pens with drains in the floor and spigots in the walls.
PE in school resembled a Serbian Marine boot camp in every way. The first 15-minutes were calisthenics with jumping jacks first. They were a sucker's illusion to get past the nausea most felt waiting for the commencement of the death march. Then came mountain climbers, sit-ups, squat thrusts, running in place, push-ups, leg raises, bent torso push-throughs. Don’t forget deep knee-bends with hands on the hips. Sometimes duck-walks with hands on the head, and crab-walks with hands and feet behind you. Think WWII Japanese prison camp on the Bataan peninsula. Just warming-up.
Running came after calisthenics. Laps around the track or laps around the school on the sidewalk in the case of junior high. As a fat kid who was slow and very passive aggressive my internal motto was, “Yes sir! Right away Sir! Fuck You sir!” So sad they had to wait for me and a few others to walk in.
Track in the spring, baseball, soccer, and slaughter ball other times. Slaughter ball had two teams, shirts and skins, and a huge canvas ball to encourage commission of generalized mayhem by forcing the ball over the other’s goal line. When I was a senior they got some weights. One spring we actually did something I liked outside with them. No, we were not instructed to beat each other with them.
Many times Friday was a special treat: wind sprints up and down the gym for the entire period in rotating relay groups until kids threw up. Forwards, backwards, duck walk, crab walk, skipping, sideways, any way the sadistic bastards who “coached” the PE class thought up. Mondays are so bad? Really?
Oh yes, the colored trunk system. High school had white, red, green, blue, and gold trunks to be earned in week-long testing a few times a year. Requirements for red included, 32 push-ups with somebody holding a fist under your chest and thighs to touch gong down, 60 sit-ups in two minutes with somebody holding down your feet and your legs straight, 10 pull-ups with palms facing away from you, run 1/2 mile in 3 minutes, a series of 10 back and forth 50-yard sprints, and climb a rope to the 30-foot ceiling of the gym. Once you passed those a fireman’s carry of someone your own weight for 1/2 a mile made you red, red trunks that is, like the fire truck. Green added climbing rope without feet, and more of the rest without the firehouse test. Blue went further like climbing peg boards up the side of the gym with your hands and other impossible things. Gold included actual flying around the permitter of the gymnasium 10 times. Only two students in the entire 60 year history of the school had made gold. One year a 5’4” blond boy built like an olympic gymnast tried for gold. He already had blue. The coach worked with him during the testing weeks and he came very close, I think he missed the 4 minute mile or something.
I never made color, and even though I was a senior could not stand at the front of the lines doing calisthenics. Only colored trunks could. At this point there was one coach, Mr. Flynn, who liked me and was sad to have to tell me no.
Yep, PE, Hell’s Boot-Camp with “coaches” enjoying torturing herds of young boys and teenagers with pitchforks, poking between the jock strap bands on the way to the showers.
Even after several decades of karate and aikido training, weight training, and amateur bicycle racing I refuse to run for anyone. “Yes sir! Fuck you sir!”
