Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Speech to middle school assembly about the dangers of appearing at speaking engagements completely unprepared

I remember when I was your age. I thought I had it all figured out.  I thought, "hey, listen.  I've got good grades, I've got a good head of hair.  Whatever else."  I thought I'd figured it out.  But I was wrong.  Dead wrong.

Uhh.  Hmm.  Let me see.

I know you, because I was you.  I sat where you sat and said, "I'm not going to end up like that -- old guy.  Whatever he's doing, or whatever."  I don't remember what I said exactly.  But it was something like that.  Something like what you're saying.  But someday, you're going to get a call from someone who says, "want to swing by the school, give them an inspirational speech?  Something they'll remember?"  And you'll say, yeah, sure, I can whip something up real fast.  And then a couple days will go by, and you'll finally open up a Word document --

I don't know.

You need to prepare for every speaking engagement you receive.  This is important.  If you only take one thing away from this speech, make it that.  You don't want to stand up here like an idiot and not -- you know -- YOU HAVE TO PREPARE.

You there, talking in the front row.  Shut up.  Shut the fuck up, kid.

There was this one kid in my class.  He had spots on his dick.  I remember when he changed in gym class we would all make fun of him for his spotted dick.  We used to beat the shit out of him.  Anyway he ran for class president against this other kid -- this real ugly kid.  They had some assembly, and the ugly kid just rambled for a while, and the kid with the spots on his dick prepared this big stupid speech, and he won.  Because -- look, who here has spots on his dick?  All right, forget it, I don't want to know.  I don't remember why I was telling this story -- well, he won the president because he prepared his speech.  Class president.  Even though his dick had spots like a snow leopard's pelt.  Or I think he won, I don't actually remember.  Nobody cared about that shit anyway.  Who's class president here?  No one?  Do you have class presidents in middle school?

I am sweating a lot.  I'm not wearing anything under this sweater, so I am sweating and it is very itchy wool.

How much time do I have left.  Fifty-eight minutes?  All right, sure.

Look, I'm going to wrap this up.  Prepare your speeches.  I wish I'd brought a newspaper so I could ad-lib something.  There was a story the other day about this sidewalk -- it was a special sidewalk or something.  The point is escaping me.  But I could have talked about that for a while, or at least read a few paragraphs.  And you -- well I don't know.  Ok.

2 comments:

David Iscoe said...

I'm normally a fan of Chris Sartinsky's writing but this story hit too close to home and my ability to enjoy it was lessened.

chris said...

I've never seen a David Iscoe speaking engagement that wasn't extremely well-received.