Gawd help us, he's gone wild

Having made a speech some called funny, others called truthful, and still others called incendiary, I've had plenty of time to think things over and find myself coming to no conclusion. For some odd reason I was picked to be valedictorian of the graduating class. Call it the blundering genius of democracy, an infamy of inequity but they, perhaps because I slept in the law school, and looked like I needed wealth, recognition, or a decent haircut, and stumbled and fell face-front through my courses, and still smiled,- yes you are wondering when this sentence is going to end, soon I hope, well, they, this was where we started earlier on, remember?- they picked me to speak to them at this august occasion.

I agonised over it for a week. I thought and poked at people in their conversational moments. I tried to stitch it all in, the laughter, the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-vision, the gasping relief, the tiresome tedium, the stretching out to touch people before they disappear, and everything else I could stab at, within five minutes of energetic thundering.

I was right to do it- i.e. keep it within five minutes. People had to turn away from their food to get a glance at the weirdest valedictorian that did. It would have been ridiculously unfair to have kept them in that state for more than five minutes. Perhaps my crowing and crying at the gods stunned them so much they didn't notice and perhaps I could have burned and burned longer than I did.

But it ended thank goodness- or at least that must have been what the assembled faculty must have thought.

What a night! strong applause, some dissenters, but all round something to keep the occasion memorable. It was a bit of a cat among the pigeons, a grenade into the cake shop, but no real harm done. If they ignore me and keep doing whatever they have been doing for years, maybe we'll live, and still a little wiser.

I can't help remembering what the girl to my left said when, faced with the pomp, I faltered. She said, "It's not you up there, it's us."

That was a charge.