This week in Hutchinson.

On Sunday, like every spring Sunday, the over-middle-aged men of Hutchinson get out their 50s and 60s topless classic cars and drive down Main Street, their receding hairlines and long, gray mullets whipping in the breeze. Gas-stinking black clouds of exhaust blow out of their mufflers like a french inhale.

Yesterday after school, a couple of days before prom, one of my juniors came running into my classroom. Do you have a mirror? I need a mirror! Zit! I hate this zit! And she proceeded to yank my cabinet open and pinch at her chin in my mirror. Ew. I said. You better not get your zit juice on my mirror. She was so into her squeezing, she didn't hear me, and telling this story makes me want to throw up.

We went outside with chalk today, to do grammar on the sidewalk; in a warning to the students, I said you may only write your sentences on the sidewalk. I don't want to see your names, I don't want to see any genitalia out there...and a student in the front row looked at me quite seriously, perplexed, and said who's genitalia?

Today the man across the street crouched in his yard, and with a flathead screw driver dug each dandelion out of the ground the way one digs a splinter out of his skin.