My face contorts, tics and quivers in an angry gymnastics of muscle twitches. The throbbing vein in my forehead, the little barometer of rage that assumes three dimensions when you’re truly furious, has bulged out in the shape of a mushroom cloud, hovering over the psychic Hiroshima incinerating my mind.

I stand across from a screaming, grabbing, pulsating larval mass of kids. They’re everywhere, climbing all over me. One child has so tightly grafted his limbs around my leg he looks like some ghastly, underdeveloped Siamese twin sprouting from my knee.

“Hey, Grant! Grant! Grantgrantgrantgrant!” screams a bouncing, chubby little one, bulging out of his overstretched Wal-Mart wear like a large salami stuffed in a tiny sock. He grips a crayon drawing in his Cheeto-filmed fingers. “Lookit what I’m sending into Highlights!”

Jagged crayon slashes intersect randomly. It’s either a crappy picture of a castle or a perfect representation of the Pictionary card “Delirium Tremens.”

“Well isn’t that just fantast—”

“Mister!” interjects my Siamese leg-twin, the cuteness of his little freckled face somewhat challenged by the alarmingly ripe farts wafting upward. “You sound like the leader on Power Rangers.”

“Oh, well thanks, I gues—”

“The BAD GUY leader,” he says solemnly, as I struggle to resist the urge to morph into a giant, rubber-suited robot and start karate chopping randomly.

I chose this mess, I tell myself. I chose it, and I’d choose it again. I’m here with these kids based on principle. We have a responsibility — we jaded, ironic college students — to instruct and warp the next generation into the sort of deformed creatures that are capable of thriving in our thoroughly effed civilization. It’s our duty to take the cult-ishly credulous young, those little sentient tampon pads who just absorb everything, and then feed them the blue liquid of Ultimate Truth.

If not us, then who? Our career teachers? Well, if you combined all of your elementary teachers, you might scrape up enough social and real world skills to run an unsuccessful fourth-meal shift at Taco Bell.

No. Me and you need to step up, to become a set of Big Brothers and Big Sisters who have actually had big brothers and big sisters.

Would a real big brother ever take you to the county fair or go “shoot hoops” with you? Sure, but only as the precursor to some sort of psychological torture. I still experience incontinence whenever I see a basketball, and my therapist says I’ll probably never be able to eat funnel cakes without seizing. But those psychological calluses have perfectly prepared me for a life of shitty jobs and sadistic girlfriends.

We need volunteers willing to engage in a little child disabuse. To disabuse children of those dreamy notions that will eventually leave them shaking and strung-out, sporting Obama T-shirts in one last self-destructive bender of hope, audacity and change.

Children have unattainable dreams, so we need to help them unattain those dreams as quickly as possible. Had someone handed me a shovel 10 years ago and just told me to start digging, a lot of trouble and woe could have been saved.

Sure, in the short term, disabusing children of their dreams might seem to be kind of harsh, but just remember that in the long run it’s actually a lot of fun for you.

You don’t really need any formal training, what with your already keen, pop-culture-inculcated sense of irony. And you will quickly learn the other necessary skills, like the important role that hypocrisy and outright lies play in moral education. Can you say “it’s possible to have fun without alcohol and smoking isn’t cool” with a straight face?

If so, man, I need your help. The little shit attached to my leg has quite possibly done just that, and I see three kids assuming classic cry posture — seated, with arms out front like they are dangling invisible marionettes.

Gimme some of that Ultimate Truth, stat!

— Reichert is an Oberlin graduate student in law.