confessional

My twenty year high school reunion is this summer. The idea of "twenty years" is so terrifying that, off and on, I have considered backtracking on my youthful vow never to attend a high school reunion. But international travel, and the exigencies of visiting all sides of the family when stateside, have made it impossible for me to go.* Hurrah. My adolescent zeal remains uncompromised!

But it is also true that I am sorry, I think, to miss this, for reasons that I have not been able to untangle for myself. And now I must decide whether or not to submit a photograph and biography to the so-called Reunion Book. What would such a biography say? Would it be written in the first or third person? Perhaps it is written in the second person. Yeah, that could be my trick.

Having aped one of Joel Brodsky’s “young lion” photographs of Jim Morrison for my senior yearbook portrait, captioned with a confusing quotation about anarchy or something, I feel -- and in this I have not risen above my adolescence -- that it is important to double or double up or double down on the rebellionizing now, twenty years on.

But negation and provocation are not indifference. I am uncompromised, to appearances, but I am also unfree, as in un-indifferent. So I may as well send something in?

There is this, and then there are all of these, uh, social media profiles...which one supposes a clever robot could assemble into a nifty dossier/profile. Aye, a robot. Aye, robot.

So I may as well send something in? No, putting all of this into writing has succeeded in working out the kink. Sorry or not, I shall do nothing. There.

I have passed the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain an asshole.



* In a delightful twist, I will arrive in the locality of the reunion, to visit my family, just days after the event.