Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have just received an imperious missive from Soror Neferusobek, who asserts—in essence—that the Woke ideology, political correctness, and the prevailing neo-puritanism now render ALL my writings recounting the joyful escapades of my dear youth liable to prosecution.
By the Holy Stèle! I am appalled!
I mean to say: in these texts, one finds nothing but the most juvenile antics…
Consider: I am of Generation X, i.e., born during the Era of the Glimpsed Paradise (1966–1976): Make Love Not War was the first vibe in which I was immersed in this world.
It is true that, in matters of Love and War, eroticism and martial arts have crossed paths in opposite directions since the neoconservative revolution…
When I was thirteen, the only allure of school was that, on the way there, one could detour to the newsstand to buy Playboy or Penthouse and a pack of Rothmans Blues.
And this posed no issue beyond the tobacconist’s wry smile.
On the other hand, when it came to sports involving face-to-face physical confrontation (though, of course, reading Playboy at thirteen and facing the tobacconist’s wry smile are highly athletic face-to-face physical confrontations), combat sports, I say, were strictly limited.
Even full-contact was banned.
Thai boxing had a reputation for unbearable ultraviolence but was seen as a typical specialty, like the Reclining Buddha Temple, sticky mango rice, and gay pedophilia.
The maximum allowed was French boxing.
Conversely, nowadays, even the “coolest” female comedians let out shrieks of outraged piety and fire off scandalized tweets if their children happen to glimpse, at a newsstand, the cover of Hot Video where a pornstar shows no more than any woman at the beach—while, in terms of violent sports, MMA has just been fully legalized in France.
Mind you! I am a huge fan of women’s MMA, a groupie of Gina Carano, revering her facial asymmetry and Picasso-signed nose—but it is undeniable that the average MMA fighter, at the canonical age of thirty-eight, can no longer spell their own name, remember where they live, or find a single centimeter of their body free from chronic pain.
That said, the same is true of the pornstar…
In fact, Soror Neferusobek is specifically referring to a text of mine—modestly titled “School Days”—published long ago on the occasion of the 2009 school reopening, narrating, with an admirable pen, the essence of my own schooling.
The Sister declares the thing “atrocious and very likely illegal in May 2025,” and I would like to know if she speaks true.
Thus, I provide below a faithful, full English translation of that old post—please tell me what you make of it.
School Days
To Saint Carolus Magnus, to Blaise Pascal and to Janson de Sailly.
“Happy, thrice happy days of ardent youth!” — Captain Edward Sellon
It was—how could one forget?—the start of the school year a few days ago…
Happy young people who have just returned to the classroom and for whom school is still a daily reality!
Enjoy it to stock up on memories! Life is long…
Last week, I was frolicking around my dear old Blaise Pascal School and the venerable Janson. (I frolic often. I love to frolic. As soon as I have a bit of free time, I frolic. In fact, this habit got me discharged from military service.)
At the sight of my middle school and high school filling with students, something like a wave of nostalgia swelled my thirty-seven-year-old heart…
How far away it all seems! And what glum expressions our present-day students wear!
It seems that the youth of 2009 view schooling either as a sort of pre-kolkhoz or as the waiting room for the intelligent world… and they may not be entirely wrong…
In my day, as some ancient provincials still say, things were very different…
You must understand that, emerging from a primary education dispensed by a parade of greenish tutors, my entry into sixth grade felt like the relief one gets at the end of a dentist’s appointment. I had to wait for my first night at the Bains to experience a comparable rush of endorphins—and my schooling became perfectly enjoyable as soon as I banished its most tedious formalities, namely homework and rules…
By the Holy Stèle! Though I’ve since attended Sciences Po, I’m still occasionally surprised that it’s Wednesday and I don’t have to go to detention…
Middle school taught me, in any case, a few things:
1. Work methodically.
With the care of an illuminator, I would make my cafeteria tray revolting to annoy the staff—I always started by crafting the traditional bomb: (Fill your glass to the brim, cover it with your emptied tray, then flip the whole thing—if done correctly, the glass appears to have been flipped empty, and the absence of air will drag the tray along when the humble employee pulls on it—the tray will soon crash down, the water in the glass exploding and dousing the unfortunate worker in a most jubilant manner); then I’d smear the tray’s edges with Kiri cheese, so it couldn’t be grabbed without displeasure; and I’d finish by adorning it with a personal, somewhat trashy homage to Arcimboldo…
2. Reject ease.
One day, I decided to plant cafeteria knives in perfect quincunx patterns across the entire lawn, buried just enough to be undetectable at first glance but protruding enough to wreck a lawnmower blade… I used a friend’s rock’n’roll Doc Martens for the task, whose perfect compliance that day I cannot praise enough… We soon witnessed the delightful spectacle of our tiny groundskeeper mowing for five seconds… uttering a brief curse when his blade broke… painstakingly repairing his machine… mowing for five seconds… cursing again when his blade broke, etc. Not to mention the forty-eight hours of grueling work it took the poor man, once my scheme was uncovered, to uproot my knives…
3. Aspire to excellence.
In winter, I’d make a single snowball between noon and two, starting right after lunch and spending the entire break compacting it—by five minutes to two, it had naturally acquired the consistency of a standard pétanque ball: I’d then ask my classmates to seize the class’s official punching bag, whom they held at the back of the courtyard, while I executed a point-blank strike on his person—such was the custom—Alas, fate decreed that one day I’d slip, and my masterpiece, launched with extreme violence, flew fast and high, shattering the windows of Mr. P., our censor… The next moment, we were contemplating the flushed face of the worthy magistrate, slowly emerging like a distant tomato through his broken window, scanning the courtyard for his profaner… A marvelous scene, pictorially speaking…
4. Stay active.
We had a physics teacher officially affiliated with the Communist Party—in my young mind, a communist was a circus freak, like Siamese twins or bearded ladies (indeed, all communists today admit to belonging to one or the other category)—This one did nothing to reverse the trend: Mr. B was short, hideous, dirty, and began every sentence with “basically.” One day, arriving late to his class (and I don’t recall ever arriving on time), I pointed at him from the doorway, saying in a teacherly tone to my classmates: “Here, the last communist… the ultimate fossil, the survivor of a fetid race soon as extinct as smallpox…” Enraged, he lunged at me, like Woody Allen trying to thrash Dolph Lundgren… I fled, running, and led him, puffing furiously behind me, toward a bed of small firs, through which I made him slalom, trace curves, figures, and loops, to the immense glee of all my classmates gathered at the windows—until our stern censor, who had watched the scene from his office, intervened, asking Mr. B (sweating profusely) to stop making a spectacle of himself, and me (in tears from laughter) to stop laughing…
5. Equip yourself properly.
I once showed up to a massive geography test equipped with a cassette on which I’d recorded my entire course. I placed it in a tape recorder hidden in my locker, connected to an earpiece I slipped under my shirt and through my sleeve to my left ear—in the so-called Dying Buddha position (head nonchalantly resting on my hand), I planned to write under dictation. Alas! I’d poorly inserted the plug, and in the sepulchral silence of the class working on the test, my voice suddenly blared: “Chapter I, the Relief…”
6. Prioritize the essential.
But, of course, all these pranks are the sidelines, the diversions of a schoolboy’s life, whose essential activity remains, after all, masturbation—Such is human folly that all my antics went almost unnoticed among my peers compared to what truly earned me popularity: the equine dimensions of my virile attributes and my propensity to display them incessantly to satisfy their insatiable lust—Personally, I don’t recall any consistent activity from entering middle school to the BEPC other than onanism—but it wasn’t without trials—One day, during a French class, so engrossed was I in trying to quell my raging ardors behind my desk that I forgot the existence of our teacher (a petrifying brunette with a bun, glasses, and a pointed nose), I suddenly saw her standing before me, like the Commendatore’s statue—she shot me a withering glare, saying in a dry tone (and these words made her the school’s superstar): « Go on… Put it away… »—Another time, during English class, I’d revealed my turgid nature, at a terrifying stage of priapism, hoping to show it off to the girl in front of me—the fire alarm went off just as I was about to tap her shoulder—It was only a drill, but I was young, panic seized me, and, convinced the flames were real, I tried to bolt for the exit—Unfortunately, I’d made the classic mistake of pulling my virility straight through the zipper without unbuttoning the top—so, standing, hopping, shouting: “The fire alarm, damn it! It’s the fire alarm! We’re all going to die!” I couldn’t tuck it back into my pants—The English teacher, impeccably zen, watched me imitate a marsupilami with my frantic leaps and the disproportionate, persistently turgid caudal appendage, and it was as an ithyphallic satyr dancing the tarantella and swearing that I found myself in the courtyard…
Then came high school.
I tried a bit of boarding school.
Not unpleasant, except that the corridor to the girls’ dorms passed by the headmaster’s and deputy’s staff quarters.
It took countless hours of study to map out every creaking floorboard in what we called the Death Corridor—but I eventually obtained the exact plan for the ideal crossing, each “mine” marked with a red cross.
We only needed to proceed slowly, following my arrows lit by our watches—I still remember the line I delivered upon first crossing the forbidden door, addressing a cute, slightly stunned second-year girl: “Who’s stronger? A frail child who doesn’t eat enough, or a six-foot-five Dracula lookalike with cocaine in his system?”
By year’s end, we’d gained enough skill to reach the delights of the gynaeceum in under twenty minutes, and our nocturnal escapades went not only suspected by the authorities…
Back in Paris to prepare for my bac, I developed a violent aversion to one of my classmates, a shriveled, whiny, bespectacled boy we nicknamed, for reasons I no longer recall, El Gringo.
It’s not an exaggeration to title my final year The Passion of El Gringo…
I began with the usual bullying and took particular care with the chapter “scorching humiliations in front of girls at the pool”…
Then, truly elaborate persecutions began to sprout in my mind…
It was necessary…
The sight of El Gringo, who physically resembled a testicle or a kidney and pretended to mimic a rap attitude, was unbearable to me…
I was becoming cruel…
Truly cruel…
I could’ve made a dehydrated Beninese child cry…
But El Gringo avoided me, and I was reduced to expedients…
One day, when he’d thought it wise to come to school in sweatpants, I caught him just in time at the top of a staircase and yanked down his pants as he stepped onto the landing—in my haste, I took his underwear with them, and it was fully exposed that El Gringo appeared before the Spanish teacher and a monitor, who were chatting in front of the classrooms and observed, without much fuss, the whitish, vermicular appendage he took a second too long (the time to realize what had happened) to conceal…
The nickname Oyster Dick was coined alongside Gringo, but curiously, we continued to use the latter almost exclusively…
Note that a wrestling dive I performed on my unfortunate classmate during PE, as he attempted a delicate gymnastics pose, which left him breathless for nearly two minutes and turned him blue, also earned him the name Smurf, without, once again, displacing El Gringo…
I finally managed to send him to the hospital by firing, with a giant blowpipe made of five connected pens, a pen ball into his right ear.
“This,” I thought, “is the swan song—what will I do when Gringo returns? How to top this?”
Gringo returned.
Still his punchable face and screechy voice, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore.
Until my dear Corinne H. (who, if she reads this, should know that, though now a proper officer’s wife and mother, she was in high school the most irrepressibly arousing girl I’ve ever known) suggested I check out the vehicle El Gringo used…
What was my astonishment to discover our friend rode to school on an unforgivable orange moped!
I immediately sanctioned the offense by stealing the machine and placing it, running, in the girls’ bathroom…
It was a great joy to see Gringo complain that someone had “nicked” his “ride” to all the students, who didn’t care, too busy wondering what that awful noise and black smoke coming from the girls’ bathroom was…
El Gringo got a lock… a vain precaution… I quickly confiscated his keys and organized a Fort Boyard-style treasure hunt to let him retrieve them…
Fifteen coded messages, scattered across the school, each carrying a riddle to find the next… El Gringo gave up at the seventh… Continuing would’ve been pointless anyway: the code on the fifteenth and final message had no particular meaning…
He had to buy bolt cutters, and I didn’t fail to call the police to report a suspicious-looking guy trying to steal an orange moped in front of our school by cutting its lock with bolt cutters… The police, alas, didn’t intervene before Gringo fled—but no matter! This isn’t the place to denounce our executive’s ineptitude!
My masterpiece was, with the help of my dear friend Taz, now a brilliant CEO and still an excellent partier, getting construction workers on a nearby site to hoist Gringo’s moped onto the school roof with a crane…
We had to generously tip the entire crew, from the foreman to the recent apprentice, but we’d voted a no-limit budget for the operation and certainly didn’t regret it!!!
We’d only planned to have the Gringomobile throne atop the building… Our accomplices, diligent workers, exceeded our wildest hopes and lifted it so high and so far forward that only a vague orange dot was visible against the rooftops…
When, at five o’clock, Gringo came whining in my ear: “Come on, guys, where’d you put my ride?…” I replied with composure: “I don’t know, Gringo… Last I saw it, it was on the roof…”
It was very complicated, very long, and very painful for our victim to retrieve his property… But I don’t recall ever laughing so hard…
Verily, and Amen! Happy are the schoolboys if they knew their happiness! I got my bac with highest honors and the jury’s congratulations—I went to Sciences Po—and I sometimes regret not having failed every class since CM2, as it would mean I’d still be entering my final year this year… which is all the stupider since I never went to CM2…
You only laugh freely in high school or at the sight of an old lady slipping on ice and sprawling in the street with all her packages… in both cases, enjoy it while it lasts!...
— Sir Shumule, September 6, 2009 e.v.
You’ll say: You must feel a bit outdated, Sir, reminiscing—after a life as a complete sybarite, a red-heeled dandy, and an orgiastic guru—on such carefree adolescent memories…
Don’t be mistaken—aging doesn’t worry me much—I’ve got time to see it coming—They taught us at school, during “prevention campaigns,” that the brain stops developing the moment you take cocaine: I’m thus currently about fifteen years old.
Meditating on this, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, which we call GOD.
Warm kisses from the Bahamas.
Love is the law, love under will.
— ☉︎ in 1° ♊︎ : ☽︎ in 19° ♓︎ : ☿︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.
