Chorine & Sailor

Another foray into color. An anonymous chorus girl quickly watercolored onto cheap paper. In case you haven't caught on, I'm using the "cheap paper" excuse because the painting is a little messy.

I've been in this enforced isolation because a dreadful cold (believe me. no one wants me around right now. I sound like Doc Holiday on a particularly bad day), so I've been working on all kinds of projects and schemes. Since the split from Virgodog, to be honest, I've pretty much been behaving like a sailor on shore leave. So maybe this forced inactivity for a few days wasn't the worst thing ever. I'm so capable of making terrible decisions right now, just being swept along in my newly rediscovered enthusiasm.

So, yeah. A few days of (cough, cough, cough) sitting around and writing things and making stuff was really okay.

But I'm so ready to jump back into my life, thank you very much!

West Egg Revisited

Last weekend I drove down to North Carolina with Virgodog, where I was his guest/Sig Oth/arm candy at his 20th high school reunion.   After arriving in Little Chicago, North Carolina*, we hung out with a good friend of Virgodog's from high school and his wife.  They were both delightful.  This was a huge relief, as I hadn't at all known what to expect.  Aside from the Virgodog support aspect, I was attending in the spirit of anthropological zeal.  I didn't grow up in a place anything like Little Chicago.  I grew up in a place called West Egg.

Tacky North Shore suburb, over-indulged, over-privileged, gold-plated pressure cooker that it is, I hated it.  I left as soon as I could.  I did my best to carve out a life for myself that wasn't too informed by what I perceived as the narrow values of the place in which I grew up.  And then the two fold way back machine of my own high school reunion and joining facebook happened.  

It's nice to have perspective, or so I've heard, and I don't know if I do.  At my reunion, I felt exactly as I did when I was in high school and I didn't terribly enjoy the acid flashback aspects of the event much.  I looked around the room, and thought "who are these people?" and was sorry I'd come.  Most everyone was nice, some extremely so.  But everyone seemed a little shell-shocked, or maybe I'm just projecting.  Thank god for the open bar.  The people I liked in high school, I still liked.  The psychopaths were still psychopaths, and it was mildly comforting to find that my opinions of these people weren't completely colored by the hormonal hysteria of adolescence, but were, in fact, accurate.  Everyone looked good, everyone was successful in their own way, which, I think speaks more to the self selecting nature of reunions than anything else.  At the end, I would have regretted not going.

And then I joined facebook, which engendered another, slow motion high school reunion.  A particularly interesting aspect to this is that I link my blog entries to my facebook account, eschewing all anonymity.  I have reconnected with lots of people.  In a nice controlled way, I've messaged and chatted and said hello to lots of people I grew up with.  Which has been fun, really. 

I have no animosity for anyone I grew up with.  We were raised in strange circumstances, in a place where none of our parents were from.  (I remember the day when me and four friends all discovered that our fathers had attended the same high school.  We thought it was a remarkable coincidence, we didn't realize we were the product of a cultural cliché.)  Our school system was a sophisticated mechanism devised to achieve exactly one end:  to get its students admitted into an array of elite colleges and universities.  Inevitably, one of the byproducts of such an education are the acquisition of the tools required to analyze and dismantle the machinery in which we were caught.  If, like me, any of us chose a different path, we knew we could.  Like Gatsby before us, we saw that green light.

*all names have been changed to protect the easily embarrassed, i.e. Caviglia