Thoughts prompted by the beginning of another school year.

I didn’t like school. Ever. Thought it was overrated, and the older I got, the more I didn’t like it. Truth is I’m going on 57-1/2. That’s a lot of not liking school.

School gave me the heebie jeebies as a student and makes me somewhat discombobulated as an adult.

As a red blooded American, I don’t like paying taxes. Hate it. I particularly think I shouldn’t have to pay taxes for other people’s kids to go to school. Granted, other people paid taxes for me to go to school, but I didn’t write the rules.

Besides, if you look at your tax bill, the biggest chunk torn out of your rump every year is for schools.

Some people think senior citizens should get exemptions from school taxes, and they do in Bryan County. I tend to agree, but then again, if you exempt me somebody else has to pick up the slack. I just wish they would hurry up.

Yet it’s not just the taxes. It’s the traffic headaches school causes to those of us not in school. Driving anywhere around here is already bad enough during the day because you can’t turn around twice without some builder installing another subdivision somewhere.

Now, school buses are all over the place, stopping every 500 feet to pick up or drop off the apples of somebody’s eye and so what if you’re late for an important meeting. You should’ve left an hour earlier or gone by way of Atlanta. And that’s the easy part.

Despite the fact public school systems spend millions of dollars a year to provide buses and drivers, these days you probably got as many if not more kids being picked up and dropped off by parents than ride buses.

There were no car pickup lines when I was a kid. I started riding a bus when I was 5 in Germany and so small I could barely climb up the stairs to my seat, and didn’t stop until I got my own car as a senior.

Once, me and some high school buddies jumped a train to ride it to school, just to see if we could get there like hobos. We wound up about five miles away, sore and trying to explain to the local constabulary why we were hanging on the side of boxcars as they sped through the middle of town. Don’t try that at home.

Oh, there were and there are some good people involved in schools, and they can talk you into believing just about anything, but all in all it’s what a former colleague of mine called a “crock of hooey.” The smart kids will learn and become brain surgeons or Realtors, the dumb ones will end up like me, getting older and crankier and dumber by the week.

Remember Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out?”

One of my all time favorites.

“School’s out for summer,” Alice sang. “School’s out forever.” It sounded like revolution.

If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, look it up on the internet.

When I was a kid adults thought Alice Cooper was the devil. He wore scary makeup and ate bats - actually, that was Ozzy Osbourne - and scared parents silly.

Besides, if you played his records backward, you’d turn into a newt, or a drug addict, or maybe Marilyn Manson.

These days, ol’ Alice looks pretty tame compared to some of the stuff kids are exposed too.

And he is just a normal guy nowadays, from what I understand. Plays a lot of golf.

That said, my advice to you youngsters is to get all the education you can and stay off social media, and avoid the kind of people who use social media to judge others.

They’re unhappy, twisted, tired souls who have nothing better to do. Stooping to their level is like wrestling hogs, as the old adage goes. You end up just as dirty and they’ll enjoy it. .

All that aside, I admit to sometimes admiring those who make education their life’s calling, though I’m somewhat amused by those with “educator” license plates who never learned what a blinker is for.

I’m also fairly bemused by those who prefer the term “educator” to “teacher,” but then what do I know. I’m a hack.

Finally, lest you think I’m a mean spirited hack, I was inspired during a visit to Bryan County Elementary School as school let out on that first day.

I watched as teachers got students to their assigned buses and learned it’s probably not as easy as it looks, and it looked like herding about 500 cats with higher IQs than your average feline.

As one teacher pointed kid after kid to the right bus, she said something that stayed with me the rest of the day.

“Love you,” she told them.

I needed that.