fb

For mysterious purposes of my own, some time ago I opened a facebook page under a rather predictable anonymity. Eventually someone from my primitive past tracked it down, and now, months later, there's actually some "networking" (as you kids say) going on. It's a little unsettling. Sort of plugs me back into a place I never belonged in the first place. I've skimmed through some of the pages, and there are familiar names, to which no face attaches itself.

We can explain infantile amnesia by the incomplete development of myelin sheathing. We'd have to look elsewhere for an etiology of adolescent amnesia.

I have used these pages to conjure more than exorcise the nightmares of the past. My sententious and sentimental mewlings have no therapeutic function -- they are an amusement, an exhibition not a competition. I was so dissociated in those days that I didn't have a shadow. When you're a kid you're not allowed to be aware of how sick the world is. Something to do with myelin, no doubt. It's necessary. I never felt envy or jealousy about those peers who seemed happy. It was just too alien.

Three, no, five now, people have, uh, whatever the term is -- gotten my attention. Two of them I have no clue about. The first three, well, I remember them all, after a fashion. One always wore a jacket. One had a sarcastic sense of humor to match my own. One was class valedictorian. They were actually friends, sort of, at some time or another. I must have had classes with them. But slavish habitue of these pages that you are, you will know my many qualifications of the idea of friendship.

It's like watching caterpillars -- well, larva. What ever shall become of them? I'm a death's head moth. I wouldn't have recognized them. Something to do with the hair? Man, what a horrifying decade. Where's Vietnam when you need it? For my part, there are four changes. I wear my hair short instead of as a shapeless blob, my skin cleared up, I've got hair on my chest, and if there ever was any softness to my face, it's gone.

I thought I had fb figured out, but I don't. Anything I write on mine shows up on other pages? No matter. I looked to see if there was a 25 year reunion. Found nothing. Looked again for 30. Found nothing. Crappiest class ever. Perhaps reunions have been supplanted by the internet? But I would just have been interested in seeing how they've changed, those I remember. My social skills are still as rudimentary as ever -- takes me a long time to pretend to be interested in anyone but myself. Is that wrong of me?

Anyway, you know where you can find me. As I said to God once, I'm just a left click away.


J