When – was 17 – stopped being a walking surreal artwork in school and started dressing like a pirate instead. I actually felt like some sort of pirate, probably influenced by the pogues, and I had this pirate hat I used to wear all the time which some teachers objected to. It wasn’t posturing in any sense – I felt rebellious and the pirate seemed like an archetype perfectly fitting to that feeling. At school I was behaving like a saboteur, a terrorist. That’s because the lessons bored me to death so I was always looking for funny ways to stir up trouble. We had this one physics teacher who was like a complete automaton, the perfect example of what happens to you if you think the world was invented by Newton. At one point I had, in a spirited flash, somehow managed to get the whole classroom sing in protest to the mere dullness of school existence. The whole class was singing one particular song and clapping their hand and stamping their feet and the teacher just stood there, baffled by this inexplicable phenomenon. We must have sung for at least half an hour, it was a very spirited moment, a moment of great liberation. At some point the rector of the school came in because we were so noisy everyone heard it but even the entrance of the rector couldn’t stop us.

Another automaton was a religious teacher, new to the school, straight from the thelogical university. One of the most ridiculous creatures I have ever seen. I organized a protest where the whole class, apparantly without reason, would stare at his crotch the entire hour. The guy was literally going insane. The first few minutes he tried frantically to figure out what was wrong with his crotch, checking 5 different times if his flyer was open or something. As he could not figure out what was wrong the guy almost fainted of embarassement: he must have felt like he was having the ultimate nightmare.

I had a wide range of such tactics which prevented I died of boredom in that Godforsaken place. I was also probably the most detained and punished individual in the history of that school. I used to have hourlong ideological discussions with the principles about how I felt they didn’t have the right to punish me. I was really good at that sort of thing: I always cornered him until he had to use the ‘I am just doing my job’ excuse. I remember once overhearing a particular teacher giving a flamey speech to the principle about that I in her view was a terrorist that had to be expelled from school. Needless to say that woman didn’t last very long: I constructed a campaign where everyone in class would give a quick stamp to the floor which, as this was chemistry class, would always cause all glass tubes to rattle. As she couldn’t figure out who was actually stamping the floor she slowly turned into a nervous wreck. At one point she seemed on the edge of breakdown and I took one of those brushes they use to clean those chemical vials and when she looked at me I started brushing my teeth with it. That did the trick. She started foaming at the mouth like a lunatic. She was incapable of even uttering a coherent word and was just shouting like a wild animal to the savages in front of her.

I also found out that if one simply stalked the principle and stole the papers from his desk he wouldn’t know anymore who needs to be punished so that was my salvation: even if it worked only for a short time and it was sort of dangerous to do.

The last year in high school I got a woman as a years principle. As I would attend lessons as I felt like she used to call me every day at start for punishment. I decided that I would write her a letter. I wrote a long and detailed letter explaining exactly why I felt that school system is wrong and why I felt I have the right to attend lessons as I feel like. After that she never called me for punishment anymore. She was a nice woman.

I was sort of radicalizing at some point: I remember going to school wearing pants without any bottom. I was practically walking around in my underwear. It felt great and liberating but some english teacher went berzerk over it, probably from sexual frustration since that same woman later that year was expelled for kissing a student on a school trip.