Yeah. Reunions. Thinking about reunions
to me is akin to thinking about taking a trip to the zoo. Why would I
waste any time- even thinking time- on either one? And I don't think
I can charge this one off to having cancer. Even though looking into
the past should be added to the list of cancer- any cancer- symptoms,
I'm not feeling it around this latest reunion fetish.
See, reunions strike me as odd things
to be involved in. Basically, to me, we're saying: “Hey! This event
was great. We had soooo much fun and we are all closing our time
together on a fabulous high. I love you. You love me. We all love
each other. It's a veritable luvapolooza.
“I've got a great idea. Let's get
back together for a reunion in a few years, after we've had the
chance to really burnish this memory into something special, taking
it from a truly wonderful and fun time together, and making it
legendary.”
We mess with it so much, that, in the
end, what was once a wonderful memory becomes just another
oh-so-close, but not quite, FAAAAHbulous spot on the Circle Lines
Cruise of the island that is your life.”
Now, as someone who has struggled with
weight issues most of my adult life, any thought of any reunion must
first be ID'd and assigned a weight age. Like the mesozoic,
neanderthal, cro-magnon eras, my chubby, mostly near the right
weight, and wow I don't remember ever being that big eras must be
accounted for.
If you think of the chart showing the
evolution of man, and, instead of it showing how upright you walked
as the eons went by, it revealed how your stomach looked from the
side, you'd maybe get some idea of what I'm talking about.
And once you've decided what those
pictures are going to show, then you have to consider what your
weight has done to you now.
So, what seemed like a good idea at the
time- let's get back together to remember this in five years- morphs.
Even when you get the reunion invitation in the mail, or email, you
spend the first few seconds remembering the fun and the rest of....
oh, let's say...eternity remembering all the other bits. Time to hit
the old excuse book, brothers and sisters.
Or maybe that's just me.
But, then, there's high school
reunions. You'd probably guess that I don't like them. OK, but that
wouldn't really be right unless you put at least seven reallys in
front of “don't.” You'd have to also become so self-centered and
hateful that you couldn't entertain so much as a glimmer of the
thought that other people might enjoy going to their high school
reunion. No way, man. There is no good reason for going back to high
school... for anyone.
If you're like me, you surely have a
list of people you've always wanted to see having had some terrible
thing happen to them. There's a couple you might still want to serve
a glass of punch that you've spit in (sorry, but it could be true),
and, more to the point, a much larger number you want to grill on why
making your life so un-happy was such an integral part of making
their life happy-happy. “Seriously, man, why did you have to pull
all that crap?”
It used to be that I wanted to be sure
I measured up, that I was at least less of a failure, if I couldn't
be more successful than my classmates. I wanted to be able to have
all this “Stuff” to compare with their “Stuff” and have
everyone agree that my “Stuff? was way better.
But here's the issue: you cannot go
back. I might want to be 16 again and experience wonderful success,
whatever that might have looked like back then, against a whole bunch
of mean people. But I can't. The best I could do would be a
66-year-old guy laying some petty revenge on some poophead who
wouldn't even remember what he's done or why I would still be so mad
about it almost five decades later. Besides, having cancer took
whatever minimal pleasure there may have been left in that. The
person I didn't care for could have had any number of completely
random bad things happen to them. I wouldn't want to add to a
person's upset for even a second.
I did go to one high school reunion. It
was my ex-wife Janice's high school reunion and it think it was the
fifth, though I'm not sure. Actually, my ex-wife and her sister
Jeanne are twins. So, being in some manner joined to the twins made
it very easy to put people out of their misery when they stood in
front of me putting undue pressure on their brains trying to figure
out if I had been in Mr. Walker's sixth period trig class with them.
I just said, “I didn't go here. I'm with one of the twins,” and
that was more than enough.
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere
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