Pass the salt

My fourth grade teacher was named Mr. Bland, and while he lived up to that moniker on an hourly basis, there was a quality he posessed that was informed, vibrant; very un-bland. To this day the first thing I think of when I think of Mr. Bland, besides the obsessive computer jokes and musings about how the world was going to crumble before our eyes if we didn't back up every library book on a simple personal computer, or how he took great pride in the newspaper hats he made us assemble like cheap Americanized oragami on Paper Day (because reading the paper would be too easy, too...bland) ...

Okay, so the third thing I think of when I think of Mr. Steve Bland was a stupid joke he told us about a headless man. Like the myriad folds of the Peter Pan-like newspaper hat, I can't remember the steps leading up to the final product. But what I do remember is the punchline: "You better quit while you're a head."

We'd laugh, mostly to comply with his threats of a doomed natural existence on account of the un-archived books. But we'd also laugh because he was just too simple to be taken seriously. "Quit while you're a head." Pause. "Get it?"

Oh man.