On Attending the Conference Panel Regarding Teaching Creative Thinking and Critical Thinking

And so we all gathered in the bowels
of the great Hyatt Regency! Under the
humming florescent lights all geeked
and ramped up to talk about creativity
and deep critical thought, sharp,
intelligent mindfulness, all of us
scholars and professors, pedagogues,
eggheads, academics, intellectual
willy-willies, silver-haired, thick-tongued
cockeyed bobs, all knotted up in
cravats and scarves and blazers,
it's a Roundtable Discussion! We're
sharing ideas in this breakout
session of linen tables and ice water
and photocopied paradigms and
nomenclatures and the one thing
we're not doing is sharing ideas,
we're too busy sharing rigamarole!
Marvelous circumlocutions! Superfluous
verbosities, loquations, lofty philosophical
cogitations, gaseous construction, ideological
caterwauling, rationalistic intercourse,
mentalistic stuff! The almighty social scientists,
the holy trinity of presenters,
the sagacious brainy thinkamobbers
sit with their goblets of ice,
their flip charts and their grids
for categorizing the world and its
slippery phenomena--oh they are
geniuses! They answer every question!
They are clairvoyants, oracles, epistemologists,
lexicographers, mathematicians, logicians
of the soul, they close off every mind
like a guillotine! Snap! There are
no messes! There are no formative
concepts, no fricatives or sibilants
floating in the air! Just these ghoulish
faces staring out at us from their
black eyes and their pens scratching out
dead words on paper, and we've all got
our marching orders: we need to teach
our students to think creatively! To think critically!
They are failing! They are lugheads! Thick-headed,
vacuous, dumb beasts! We need to teach them
how to think! We run for the door,
gasping for breath, zombies all rhombus-
noggined, desperate for some life,
something real, a cup of coffee, a conk
on the noodle, a smack in the kisser,
fresh air, a poem, a punch in the belly,
a spin in the hotel's revolving door,
anything to penetrate this scrim
of vacuous ratiocinative parlance swimming
in your brain. Meanwhile, there are
cardinals bragging in Millennium Park!,
Snow Stars!, hyacinth spreading their
syrupy headstrong nectar across the wind!,
fields of daffodils, like sunflowers, like windmills,
like men kissing and slobbering each other
on the serpentine stainless steel bridge!,
girls parading by with their "Hug Me!" signs
and giggling and boys copulating everything!,
everyone with a camera flattening the world
into digital pixels, transubstantiation!, there's
your fucking miracle, professors!, there's your
fucking rubric for creativity! You can't
separate the world into Manichean
dualities, it's all one ectoplasmic
slime, one big ass swamp cabbage,
a horse lattitude jibber jabber!,
the most dishwater lurid carnival
of your life! Put that in your post-modern
metaphysics!, your General Education
academic schematic!, your post-Marxist
templates for fostering unique and
monolithic exhortations that scream
please, please, think differently, just like
we want you to.