Read Online A Bad Idea I'm About to Do by Chris Gethard - Free Book Online Page A

night, I stayed up late and examined my genitals for signs of hair. On occasion, I still quietly talked to them. And eventually, those hairs appeared. Within months, I would be blessed with a bright-red fire crotch that became its own source of embarrassment.
    Over time I realized that while my lack of pubes had been a problem, it had never really been the problem.
    The real issue was my awkward, clunky behavior. It was my nervousness, my uncomfortable shifting and sweating. It was my remarkable inability to deal with the situation in a straightforward way.

    I had completely betrayed the attitude that had enticed Samantha in the first place. I had played it cool when I almost threw up on Samantha’s head. But I couldn’t play it cool when faced with the prospect of her seeing my hairless pubic mound. If I had figured out how to summon that same level-headedness, and managed to convert the impending disaster into another victory, we might have had a relationship that went somewhere.
    I may at least have gotten a tug job out of it.
    As an adult I’ve learned that even if there are moments when I feel I am mere seconds from vomiting on my life, I can still pull it together to regain control, and that good things can still come from it. On my best days, this helps. When it doesn’t I can feel my same old insecurities set in—my awkwardness, my over-thought reactions to things, my inability to act when any action at all will turn a situation from tense to fine. It is a pattern that has reoccurred often, and it is in these instances that I feel like a frightened fifteen-year-old again, scared to take his eyes off the television screen, managing only to awkwardly jam his unwelcomed boner firmly into the temple of life.

Scared Straight
    â€œI ’m sorry, class,” Henry Knutsen said as he stood at the front of the room. “Things are getting a little too serious in here.” I shifted in my seat, giddy with anticipation. “Would anyone like to see me do my impression of bacon?”
    We cheered. None of us anticipated this much fucking around when we signed up for a class on Law. Knutsen pinned his arms against his sides and jumped around as if he was a slice of pork frying in a pan. “I’m burning!” he shouted. “I’m burning!”
    We clapped. Then he went back to teaching us about the Supreme Court.
    Henry Knutsen had taught in West Orange for over forty years. At the beginning of my senior year, he announced that he would finally be retiring. For those of us who had already registered for his classes, this was a godsend. As far as we were concerned, Knutsen had effectively announced that he no longer gave a fuck about our education, and we couldn’t have been happier.
    When he wasn’t impersonating breakfast meats, Knutsen figured out other ways to waste time, his favorite being The
Shawshank Redemption . That movie’s long, and high school classes are short. We spent a good week watching a movie all of us had seen on TBS at least half a dozen times already. After the scene where Andy Dufresne escapes, Knutsen rewound the movie and had us rewatch the jailbreak ten times in a row. He never told us why. He just sighed each time with a far-off look in his eye.
    Looking back, I realize that Knutsen must have seen a lot of himself in that moment. Andy Dufresne escaped Shawshank by using a rock to smash a hole in a pipe. He then climbed through a river of human shit and was finally free. I’m pretty sure that Knutsen saw his experience teaching at West Orange High as his own private prison. His retirement was his escape, and his final year with us was his slow crawl through a shit pipe.
    And for this we loved him. But we also got the feeling that the school officials weren’t quite as pleased. Many of us believed that they had in fact decided to make an example out of him; rather than allow him the opportunity to coast through his final year, one final