BY CHARLIE C. The pale and gaunt horseman that is the embodiment of September is riding in to town and the concept of summer is slipping beneath our fingertips like sand in an hourglass. With that comes another wave of post-millennial complaints and whines about the forthcoming school year. I personally have no problem with the back to school deals and sales that litter the days of July and August in every commercial retailer known to man. I find it reassuring that other children specifically hate this one time of year where their ‘freedom’ is washed away and I love it. Maybe it’s because I’m a regimented human. I need to have a schedule to go by or I crash and burn, and with an entire summer of completely unstructured time I don’t know how to contain myself. Which by some means explain how I’ve managed to binge watch 11 seasons of Supernatural within the past two months. But, enough about me.
Since I am entering the 7th grade and starting my tenure at middle school (only 10 more years of schooling left….yay?), today we went to the local Walmart (the most evil corporation that has ever existed) to go shopping for school supplies. I grabbed the list and already I saw what was going to go terribly wrong. For school, it said I needed three 3-inch binders, which are absolutely massive. For something absolutely colossal comes great price, which totals around $30 for all three. I chose to ignore this and leave it for my mom to worry about.
But I need you to understand what this experience really was like. There was a countless array of aisles filled with screaming and crying crib lizards clinging to overworked moms who chose to look past their whining little ones to get a deal on binders. I cannot stress enough how terrible this was. Despite all of this, I went to grab the pencils, hoping that would make out to be an actual win in all of this. But there was something wrong. The aisle was flooded with crap brands like Dixon and Paper Mate instead of the lovely Ticonderoga. I kid you not, I nearly had a full-fledged panic attack while tearing through these joke pencils in anguish. Before all light seeped out beneath me, I saw yet another crying ankle-biter clinging to his mother (which shouldn’t have raised any red flags due to the fact that this is Walmart’s main demographic), but he was holding a pack of Ticonderoga pencils.
I walked opposite of the direction they were headed to hopefully find where the source of these were. Here, there was a smaller aisle where the partition between rows was so low you could see the person on the other side. It was filled with irritatingly blue cardboard boxes filled with Crayola colored pencils and more of those cheap things I mentioned earlier. I walked among this aisle slowly and reproachfully, cautious of what I might find. And then, next to the little boy smoking a crayon, there it was. A massive collective filled to the brim with packs of Ticonderoga pencils. I grabbed what I needed and traversed back to the mothership. Seeing as everyone had an equally terrible experience garnering supplies, we paid and got out of that horrible place.
There still are more terrible things to be said about the month preluding school that I haven’t even begun to describe. The sense of impending doom placed on parents rushing from store to store to gather all the supplies necessary for the beginning. The stress placed on younger ones who haven’t even thought to begin a five page essay that was due by the end of the summer. I could delve in to this one subject for hours and waste paragraphs of your time resuscitating days worth of information you already knew. But I’ll spare you, the reader, of it this one time. Farewell~Charlie
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Like any normal 11 year old kid from Haddon Heights, he goes to school, loves his dog, likes Minecraft and leaves a mess wherever he goes. He also writes better than most adults with a perspective that borders on the paranormal. If this kid can keep his head on straight, he is going places. You can check out his blog THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO CHARLIE.