When I was 14 or 15, I was involved in a rather spectacular bicycle crash. We were riding double on my little BMX and the dunderhead at the controls (you know who you are) somehow managed to not see a 4-foot ledge ahead of us. Down we went, two skinny kids flying over the handlebars, all bare flesh and unprotected skulls.

My buddy mostly got scraped up in the wreck. Me, I landed head-first and went blind for about an hour. My clearest recollection is of groping my way into a convenience store and going: “Hello? Can somebody help me? I can’t see and I think my friend is hurt. Also, are there doughnuts? I smell doughnuts.”

I had a tapeworm that summer.

We were patched up at the hospital and sent on our merry way to brag about our wounds. A few months later, we went into the eighth grade and, what do you know? All of a sudden, I was a terrible student.

You see what I’m doing here, right? I’m blaming a routine bicycle crash for the piss-poor attitude I carried all the way through high school. It took me 20 years to come up with this excuse and by God, I’m going to stick with it.

So today, for some, is the first day of school. Welcome back, kids. Your skin is still red from the summer sun and there’s beach sand in your shoes, but there you sit, confined to a chair like a doomed man imprisoned for the crime of being young.

For the next six hours, you’ll be listening to teachers going “mwah mwah, muh mwah mwah” and responding to the clang of bells like Pavlov’s pooch. Repeat five days a week for the next 10 months, which is practically eternity.

Tough times.

Or great times, depending on your attitude.

The way I remember it (and you must remember that I’ve suffered massive head trauma) it broke down 50/50, with half the student body gloomy and grousing on that first day, the other half absolutely thrilled to be back in school.

Me, I was the baggy-eyed kid, shuffling around in a hunched way like an old man looking for his eyeglasses, which happen to be on top of his head. I’d be exhausted and depressed and searching desperately for a way to escape this hell. One year I tried to fake demon possession. It didn’t work.

And every year, without fail, the first person I’d meet in those bleach-reeking halls upon first arriving was one of those Sunny Susans extolling the joys of a new school year.

“Isn’t it just WONDERFUL to be back? We get to see all our friends again and learn new things! Why, I’ve already joined nine after-school groups and covered all my books. See my butterfly stickers? Aren’t they just … Say, did your head just swivel all the way around on your neck? You ought to see the school nurse for that.”

There were kids who loved school, kids who hated school and kids who merely tolerated it, buckling down and getting good grades even though they’d rather be outside playing Hacky Sack (yes, that’s a real thing; look it up on your Internets).

Me, I never got back in the groove, not after seventh grade and the horrors of the bike wreck. From that point on, I was a terrible student. Terrible work habits, terrible attitude, terrible everything. I viewed school as a punishment, not an opportunity. Teachers were mean-spirited prison guards, books the implement of torture. I skipped school at least two days a week, slept through the rest of them and sought out rules to break in new and exciting ways.

It took me 4 1/2 years to get through high school, and then I graduated mostly because they were eager for me to be gone. Who could blame them? A mop could have occupied my chair and done a better job of it. The mop would have had cooler hair, too, and less acne.

So, for the next 20 years or so, I went around telling everybody that I wouldn’t change a thing. I did it my way. All’s well that ends well and blah, blah, blah. I’ve avoided schools entirely because who wants those weird memories back inside their head? Not me, that’s who.

Only the strangest thing has happened. On a torrid afternoon this summer, I crashed my dirt bike into a tree and thumped my head. Suddenly, I have a longing for education — a deep, unmitigated thirst for all things scholastic. I want to take high school English again. I want to go to pep rallies and join the Glee Club even if I don’t know what that is. I want to sit with my guidance councilor and have an earnest talk about my future, looking at colleges and planning for the SATs.

I exaggerate for effect. But the truth is this: inexplicably, without the aid of a concussion, I suddenly WOULD like to do it all over again. Just one more bite of the apple I so callously rejected as a reckless and ungrateful snot of a young person.

Since my time machine isn’t working (bad valve) the closest I can get is some diabolical blogging experiment devised by Lewiston Middle School teacher Susan Weber who, through some mysterious witchery, managed to hector me into participating.

So, yup. In a way, I’ll be going back to school this fall. It’s only blogging from the privacy of my home, but I feel the need to go shopping for new duds nonetheless. I’m thinking WBLM T-shirt, a chamois shirt to wear untucked and one of those belts with the metal buckle and slider. Those things are still cool, right? No?

Before you make fun of me on the playground, please bear in mind that I’ve suffered a terrible head injury.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer and a lifelong autodidact who is right now looking up that word on his Internets. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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