dragnet reunion
I’m really saddened to report that after decades of hiding, I was recently ‘found’ . I haven’t dug spider holes like Saddam, but I did go to the end of the world the way the Unabomber did, just dropped off the radar, got deep into the hinterlands, eschewed credit cards and cellphones and the other obvious digital crumbs that lead the hunters to the lair. I didn’t change my name —- although I sort of inhabited the alias Skeeter of late, who, judging by a Google search, is more real than me in virtual reality.
But it wasn’t Skeeter who was Outed. Naw, I got a phone message from some mumbling person who apparently knew me as a high school graduate of a Northern Wisconsin paper mill factory prep school and want More Info on me to put in their anniversary reunion book. The ‘tracker’ left a call back number and an e-mail depository that, incomprehensible to me, referenced an old schoolchum that I should remember nearly half a century later.
Now I know High School is pretty much a war experience for most of us unpopular kids, one indelibly etched into our scarred brainpans, a peak experience. Add to this the fact that I didn’t grow up in this redneck burg, didn’t ask to be transplanted there and ended up in classes inhabited by two different age groups. I was an Outsider, in other words. Or what I like these days to think of as an Outlier. Although not yet an Outlaw.
Damn the stupid internet! Damn the idiotic Facebook! Damn these boosters of a past that holds no nostalgia for some of us! I couldn’t leave my hellhole town fast enough. Although apparently I left without the memories. Course, judging by my rentention level of recent events, this was no hard task. My interrogator even sent me a j-peg of some group of us Young Turks offering a prize of some sort if I could identify the others. Yah, they looked vaguely familiar. Me too. Vaguer still.
All I ask: let me live in obscurity, gang. Let me forget the war years, the snubs, the adolescent angst, the petty politics of cliques and in-crowds. You NEED a few of us who left and never came back. You NEED a little mystery. That, or a scapegoat. I don’t much care. Just don’t call again. And please, don’t ask me to join Facebook. There are limits to my forgiveness.
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