glory days

Last week i received the invitation for my 10 year highschool reunion.

My first few weeks in highschool were palpably miserable. i would get a ride every morning from a friends mom. As i waited by our front door for her brown Buick clunker to pull up..i felt nauseous. i was nauseous because i desperately wanted to be cool and fit in and have people like me and to find people who i genuinely liked. but i had no idea how to go about doing this.

It seemed to me that people knew each other already, that is the only thing i could think of as to how they could be so comfortable with each other so fast. i was naive and didnt know about peoples different ways of coping with new situations. I didnt know how people make Armageddon instant best friends in the first week, only to realize that, much like instant mashed potatoes, they just arent as good as the slow and steadily cooked real things.

Anyway as highschool continued the nausea subsided and things got better, but they were never great.

I made some friends, but i never quite felt like our good times were innocent. Maybe I had some warped sense of things, being of the the Anne of Green Gables persuasion. Maybe the worst thing I ever wanted to do was get drunk off of raspberry cordial, but things were much worse than that.

My friends wanted to get drunk, that was the goal. and with the alcohol came what seemed like good times, but if i were sober i cant say that the jokes would move me. I remember dancing in bars at age 16, jumping up and down feeling the warm buzz from a kamikaze shot and thinking...so this is what fun is i guess? but as i look back i see only that we desperately wanted the times to be as good as the music made them out to be.