Piece of Cake Training School

No. 24 of 30 -- Guidance Counselor series

Here's a good mock-up (?) of a pretend (?) wrestling coach place, combining two of my themes, the education of guidance counselors and the reformation of wrestling coaches. I'm assuming it's pretend, but on closer examination this might be how they actually do it!

I'm going with my gut, I think it’s in good fun. So coaches, please don’t wrestle me to the mat and have your way with me. And if you do have your way with me, please let me see what you have first just in case I have a hard time later discerning your presence. Which might qualify you for advancement to guidance counseling, although don't read that as a guarantee.

The theme, you have to admit, is curious, however pathetic it also is. That the guidelines for wrestling coaches and guidance counselors are so lax at that particular institution! And I need to be careful. If there really is a place called “Piece of Cake School of Guidance Counseling,” let's call this another place, a fictional place, whose low standards matches my other posts on these actual occupations. That’s always danger egging these guys on, you don’t want to get in trouble.

Knowing what I know, though, it's still hard to picture their standards so lax that a guy on the beach could brag about his misbehavior and failure to be in school and that he'll be advanced anyway toward a degree and career. I’ve had a few lenient professors in my career, but none of them was quite that lenient. And not so much because they didn’t want to be cool, but because the price of it would be their reputation and profession. So everyone was respectable.

Even my guidance counselor was genuinely educated, I’m assuming. I actually never saw his degrees or transcripts, but I have a hard time believing no one else did. Now that he’s gone, passed on, it’s probably a moot point. But for all the faults I found with him, having the required degrees wasn’t among them.

"Reforming Wrestling Coaches Since 1965." That’s a pretty good record, depending on when the ad was made. If it was 1966, then they were just at it. If it was last week, that’s a long time not just to endure wrestling coaches but to reform them! That much reformation, if it were really happening, would have revolutionized the industry by now! Because one thing none of us wants — except maybe them — are wrestling coaches running amok and unreformed.

And the Alert-o-Tron 5000, while it sounds like a great invention, is probably someone’s idea of a gag. The very idea that someone could strap on an Alert-o-Tron and manage to stay awake for 2 minutes and get a degree sounds like a stretch. Heck, I could stay awake for 2 minutes, depending on what time of day it is, without an Alert-o-Tron, and I wouldn’t be a good wrestling coach. I don’t know anything about the various techniques, except the very basics: If you're pinned and exhausted, give up and pound the mat yourself. And as far as the well-known perks of the trade, I don’t swing with such lenience. I’m particular as to partners and follow some pretty stringent guidelines. Flowers, wine, a call the next day...

Desperately Seeking Grunts

Part 8 of 30 -- Guidance Counselor series

What are the motives of guidance counselors? This is one of the unanswered mysteries that has never been definitely answered. The surface explanation, of course, has to do with supposed guidance and counseling. A student, let’s say, needs counseling about his or her path. What will I be? How do I get there? The guidance counselor is there, at least superficially informed about those issues and at his best faithfully tending to students’ needs.

I wondered what I would be too. I thought about the future. But in all the weeks I was with the guidance counselor, sitting in his office literally with him right there present with me, I can't remember him once asking me any such questions or wondering what I’d need to do to get there. Instead, he was more often sour, like he resented the fact that I was there, and acted like it was ridiculous for a kid should've been wrestling to be sitting in the office with him. Wish I hadn't been so innocent and nice, I could've jabbed him. "You served our country fighting the Koreans (and by extension Chinese and Russian Communists) and you can't handle the weekly visitation of one meek boy?"

Why was I there? In case you missed one of the other parts, I had a series of seizures, just a few, and my mother thought the semester of wrestling would equal the onset of more. And I can see that, if I were thrown about the room, and bearing the pressure of other boys on top of me, or holding my legs up in the air as they pinned me hard to the mat below. Why it had to be the guidance counselor to babysit me, that's something I can’t remember at all, school choice. He was probably the only guy with few actual duties. What’s a guidance counselor do all day? Not counseling kids much while they’re in school, because they’re already in classes. I guess the basic purpose of a guidance counselor is to have someone step in for the wrestling coach when and if the wrestling coach is ever disgraced by his lust for the ladies.

I really hate thinking of myself as a guy the guidance counselor resented. Spectacular little old me? But he made it clear enough in his funky little asides and look of disdain that it was so. With a little more maturity I really could’ve entertained him, or kept his spirits up. If I’d known about the internet in the future and blogs, I might’ve told him, “Sometime in the distant future I will be writing a series about you. This won’t be posted in the newspaper or on bathroom walls, but will be visible and available to the entire world. But I won't use your name, because your name should be forgotten.”

It’s one of my big regrets that I wasn’t able to flummox the guidance counselor a little bit more. To get on his nerves. To really take him on not so much personally but on a professional level. By asking the obvious questions (obvious now, not then), What are guidance counselors for?

I’m afraid the answer might not be as high flown as we’ve all come to expect. But instead is something like this, to sift out the undesirables from the desirables. The haves and the have-nots. Those destined to be the grunts of industry, dispensable in every way, and quick to be forgotten when they’re ground under foot. What if guidance counselors were becoming hugely wealthy by selling students into industry for 30 cents per kid? I can see it becoming so mainstream very few people would even notice. Look at the things we get used to in politics. These days if someone broke the Bill of Rights out of its hermetically sealed case and wiped their ass on it, we’re so jaded we’d be saying “Would you like a hot towel with that?” They’d say yes and we’d be heating up Betsy Ross’s dirty old antique flag.

Well, buster, I’m no grunt... I’m here from the future to put you under arrest, and to take you with me back to the future to stand trial for your crimes and the crimes of your profession. Who do you work for? What are their plans for the future. Skip that last question; I’ll look it up on the WWW when I get back. And when you and I get to the future, the first thing we’ll do is Google your death to make sure we get you back in time for it. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not crazy. That’s how we talk someday.

Please, Coach, Let's Make Love

Part 2 of 30 - Guidance Counselor series
(Fiction)

I wish I knew how the ladies ever got the idea that wrestling coaches are hot. That’s been one of the socio-psychological questions of my life, along with the question of cottage cheese being edible. When I heard it about wrestling coaches, I said in disgust, “Ewww, yuck.” But I later learned to love cottage cheese.

For about a week in the ‘70s, I lived in a town with two high schools and one university. As part of a research project I had volunteers (minimum stipend) following wrestling coaches. Note: It’s hard to do, because so often they’re behind doors where their activities are unseen. It is at these times most often, we surmised, that they’re having illicit affairs. Hence, there’s nothing to be seen except the partner arriving or departing, with nothing conclusively proving that they were there for bed sport.

I got only minimal credit until I found and used information from a wrestling almanac, briefly in print but quickly confiscated, with two pages of enlightening statistics on wrestling coaches, their affairs, how far their mates were willing to go on the mats, etc. Unfortunately, late one night a gang of wrestling coaches broke in where I worked and stole the almanac and the research. That was before we had hard drives or I would’ve had 100 copies in 100 different email accounts, at the very least.

So what we’re left with is what I can remember and hearsay. Both of which I consider admissible. In short, the wrestling coach has to have a big libido. I hesitate to give the full rationale for that. Except it has something to do with men grappling men and a certain split (awareness/denial) in the average wrestling coach's mind over that of what they're really doing. Libido action is required for admitting and excluding.

Beyond being merely interesting in wrestling terms, the study touched generally on how narrowly the mind can focus and fully function with awareness while not excluding but not fully recognizing simultaneous denial. Good stuff. As for me, I was happy I had the seizures, because I immediately saw the whole scene in its stark all together without studies.

Why the guidance counselor ever wanted to be a wrestling coach, I don’t know. I’m driven to the idea that he was looking for action, but maybe not. I'm sure there are wrestling coaches in it truly for the wrestling, not because they like to see boys in jockstraps and loose shorts roll around to pin each other, while jockeying for better vantage points. I'd hate to get the wrestling industry on me by making false insinuations, so I know there's good guys, with some bad. And with the bad, varying levels of hanky panky going on. And I’m not saying on whose part. How's that, a padded room, a den of iniquity.

In general, I was never alone with the guidance counselor beyond ordinary school offices, hallway, gym, etc. Much to my relief, and I can’t speak for him, but he was generally in a bad mood and not looking for action from me. No matter what you may think of the guidance counselor, and perhaps it was my own sense of industry, I managed to survive that semester without losing my virginity to a coach, counselor, or non-student.