A lot of you ask me, you look as like a role model, you say to yourselves, "How does sam get the hot girls and the cars and he's got a position in life that I'm envious of? What was this guy's deal in high school?" You're looking at me saying to yourselves, "This guy's a nerd. How can he possible be as cool as he is, he's obviously a nerd." The story that I relate to people is the story of how I survived high school, my formative years.

You know that old classic nightmare, the one everyone's had at least once? You know the drill by now; You wake up, and WOW, you're in class but somethings wrong. Holy cow! It's your pants! You're not wearing any! You're only in your underbriefs. Either that, or your most embarassing pair of spandex pants. Maybe even all the pretty girls you like are there with front row seats, laughing up a gigglestorm at your shorts. Everyone hates you. Why you? Why me? Why are they doing this? Why oh why did my mom forget to lay out my trousers this morning. Stupid mom. And then it stops. Then you wake up. Everything is a-okay, good, all clear, right on. You're in your nice warm bed, and your clothes, and yes, even your trousers are arranged nicely and warmed up by your dear loving mother. You smell a delicious breakfast banquet wafting into your room from the kitchen. You'll leave the house fully dressed no doubt, and make it through the day with all of your classmate friends, buds, and pals too. After class maybe you'll walk home with some friends of yours by the side of the river, and they'll all compliment your style of trousers and undergarments, and cool japanese gadget attachments all over your overcoat. As the sun starts to set and you all part ways, heading home and waving goodbye and looking forward to another formative day in high school, as you walk home there's no longer a trace of that bad dream you had earlier.

Well for me this is no silly dream. This was no "night terror" that I could simply have just "waited out" and woken up from into warm blanket and a morning greeting. This was no load of bologna community college-style self help "I'm going to wake up mid-dream and take hold of the situation" dream diary type thing. This was my real, everyday life. I was there in class being held upside down by my classmates, totally pantsed, lobster red, whipped into a real sweat from embarassment, as all my fellow classmates and my teacher pinched and prodded my feelings into a tizzy, and dunked my head in a bucket of the brown stuff, chocolate milk.

High school was more than a nightmare for me. I'm talking personally right now. It was something more like H-E-double hockey sticks. I was burned and seared by cool kids from the moment I stepped in the halls. Hot jocks sprayed extra-sour super blue razz Gogurt directly into my face as soon as that first bell tolled. Something was dreadfully wrong, but I was too busy getting stripped down to my skipperous pantaloons and dunked headfirst into every single toilet in a 5 mile radius to even stop and think. Welcome to my world, and boy is it a world of hurt.

Good old Hilltop High, where the ruling class jocks and "Sensi", which is short for sensually hot girls, lord over the social toilet. You got nerds, you got your no-life cybernauts, you got your ugly wimps, you got your crud-for-brains, you got supernerds, you got zyber-lamos, you got super-duper bad-at-sports weaklings, you got weak hearted-wimplings, you got bug collector kids, you got left-over paper bag sack lunch dweebs, you have stupid kids, you have oatmeal raisin losers, you got failed goths, you got super zany troll experts, facebook commentators ("Zuckernerds"), facebook likers, kids who talk about how they don't have TV at home, kids who talk about how they listen to NPR at home, raised by anime, Goku freaks, lunchroom wanderers, toilet swimmers, toilet divers, kids with rashes, tween bumblerboys, trash heap garbage kids, prom clowns, prom jesters, lunchroom floor dweebs, snot nosed idiots, scoundrel humble-beggars, pump-happy iron pounders, rump-slumping bumblebabies, badly-dressed geektards, gothic style proto Invader Zim trolls, classroom masturbators, classroom chameleons, California Raisins fans, raised-by-tumblr kids, pantsless fools, and the list goes on and on. And guess what? I literally fit into every category.

You can imagine what was going on, they were bonking me in the head pretty much from bell to bell. I got the bell to bell treatment. In the eyes of the social upper class at Hilltop High, I am the most undesirable and lame person to ever step foot in these halls. Even all the teachers, instructors, advisers, lunch ladies, janitors, disciplinary counselors, and coaches can't hide their outright hatred of me. That's how bad it was. There are numerous examples of this, but just to set the stage here one time, I was in homeroom and the teacher Mr. Jacket was announcing our grades for our classes, and when it came to be my turn, Mr. Jacket had me stand in the front of the classroom and proceeded to tell me he was shocked I had actually passed a class! He was actually proud of me for once, and maybe things were finally turning around for ol sam, academically speaking that is. A spark of joy appeared on my face, and that was his signal. He punched me directly in the solar plexus and shrieked at the top of his lungs that I had failed, obviously, and took my grade sheet, crumpled it up, and made me eat it. This is a true story. Oh brother! With all the wind knocked out of me and a big paper ball in my mouth, all I could do was loudly and pathetically groan in front of my dearest classmates, who, by the way, were all busy uploading photos of my embarassing public failure to every social media site possible and laughing mercilessly. Traumatic, right? I had no idea what I had done to make them all hate me so much, but they clearly did. I guess it's pretty clear from that story that I didn't have the best of grades either. I don't really want to talk about it, but I'd say it's a little bit more than that. I mean I didn't even know how to frickin read until I was 15! I was that stupid. The trauma associated with seeing words on pages or anything else created a mental block that made reading super hard. I only eventually learned the skill of reading from comparing the lyrics I had heard out loud in the songs to the words in the liner notes of all my Marilyn Manson albums, and from the word puzzles and fun games on the back of cereal boxes. And also my dad's yellow pages that he left all over the house. Gotta love dad and his yellow pages. Good thing ol dad collected those yellow pages. In school, though everyone noticed how weird and melodramatic and also incorrect my grammar was, I got pounded even more. I recall a particularly dark moment when I was in english 101 class, which I failed and had to redo, and the teacher Mrs. Tants said it was my turn to read aloud from the text book. It was really lame and boring basic english stuff that I didn't even understand anyway. You know, textbook stuff. So's I thought I might spice things up a little bit and that would be cool, and my classmates would think it was awesome and cool if I added my own "spin" to some of the writing. So I added words like "Gilgamesh" and "black steel rimmed helm" "Lucifer X" and "two-handed crimson broadsword". To my surprise, everyone burst out laughing at me! I got seriously pantsed that day by everyone in the classroom including the security guards. I have no idea what I did wrong. I thought, "maybe it was all their faults. They just didn't realize how cool the words were that I was using. Yeah that's it! Right over their heads!" But I was starting to realize that maybe I was missing something, other than my pants for once.