Now that I have lost all of the cushions that I was using to build my fort–Mom, my mother, found one of them in the backyard yesterday, and I have no idea how it got there–I have decided to turn my creative gifts to helping people, rather than to losing parts of their furniture. At the moment I am trying to teach my brother algebra. Learning algebra is not his number-one academic priority, and from what I have heard, telling people about algebra is not something his algebra teacher is especially interested in, either. "Mr. Bezdek? He was such an asshole," Nikki told me. When I get drunk I like to call up people I knew in high school and consult them about my brother’s academic concerns. "He just said really dumb shit all the time."

"I don’t remember what kind of shit, exactly," she added. "But, I mean, it was really dumb." My brother confirmed Nikki’s analysis. According to him, Mr. Bezdek’s favorite expression is, "Contrary to what Confucius say, J.L. Bezdek does know how to teach." He coaches the golf team in the morning, and he works for a roofing company after school, so if you did not get enough teaching in class, then you are left with a handful of "tough beans," according to Mr. Bezdek.

And so my brother has stopped submitting homework altogether. It is sobering, seeing your own piss-poor work habits reflected and magnified in someone who shares so much of the same genetic material, and my sporadic attempts at tutoring have met with little success.

ME: Okay, so you plug in your x, and that’s gonna leave you with two over two.

JOHN: Zero.

ME: What?

JOHN: It’s zero?

ME: It’s two divided by two.

JOHN: Ohhhh. (singing) Leaf, leaf, walkin’ down the street, divided by two, eat a piece of meat.

ME: Just pick up the pencil.

JOHN: Meat.

At the moment we are working on parabolas. I have tried explaining them slowly, and I have tried explaining them loudly, but he still does not understand them, not even when I put a paper towel tube up to his ear and shout the quadratic formula into it. Plus when he turned his head to tell me to shut up, the paper towel tube knocked me in the teeth.