Walkabout

I’d like to congratulate a portion of the school body that recently went walkabout. The students of whom I’m speaking were all suspended during final exams, but showed up to school anyhow to cause as much disruption as possible. When scooped into a police van and taken to a bus stop several miles from the school, given bus passes and the instructions to go home, they took only a couple of hours to return to school. Walkabout was a success.

Ceremony of induction by fire happened later that week, in the first floor bathroom of the freshman building, where they cleverly substituted burning toilet paper for a bonfire. Word of their geste has been uploaded to worldstarhiphop, among other traditional methods of record-keeping. Attempts to chant their prayers in classes have been circumvented by the priestly order of the teachers, who persecute these neophytes by demanding that their melodic performances take place elsewhere. The practice of subduing the senses into a higher state and achieving a nirvana of the soul is equally oppressed, and in fact downright policed by a hegemonic leadership that outlaws any substance on campus that has not been produced in the sweatshops of the school cafeteria.

Declaration of successful transformation into adulthood is being debated by school officials, who are considering the process of removing these new adults from the school arena, in which, having completed coming-of-age rituals, it is inappropriate that they remain. Their still immature friends who linger in the hopes of a diploma most probably are considering with longing the idea of going walkabout themselves and thus becoming full members of the adult community.

We are still awaiting the vows of celibacy, nonviolence, and fasting that we know will accompany the other rituals we have witnessed.