the less said the better

so...i've been out of high school for forty years and i simply cannot think of a day when i have missed the place or thought wistfully about the youth i spent there...it was a miserable place with its fair share of miserable people...it was where i learned to be a loner....an outsider...a detached observer ( not a participant, coach...no "deep hanging-out")...a fugitive...so i suppose i owe it some for that...but not much...it certainly gave me some early insights into social systems and castes...mail call today brought me the lovely form letter you see....the reunion commiitte has found me and i am invited to attend a bash to celebrate what was...no thanks...i'm not sanguine about returning the enclosed questionnaire either...they didn't find me to invite me until the twenty-fifth in 1996 even though i was hiding in plain sight...perhaps indicative of my relative status in the reunion committee's worldview...my incognito held out for a quarter century...since then they won't shut the fuck up...i am in hobart most weeks at least a couple of times and it is still the self-absorbed, arrogant little burg it has been as long as i have known it...maybe not as bigoted as it once was...but only because it is no longer fashionable or even acceptable...but if bigotry is ever rehabilitated in an arizonan fashion hobart will goose-step right into line with out so much as a backward glance...it's in its social dna from way back...that "friendly city" stuff is a hoax...not that i didn't have friends...but they were misfits as well, and our lives did not revolve around school...( when i set up the inevitable facebook page and came to the question about where i attended high school i wrote in "the less said the better"....for months after that in the margins of my face book page were ads saying "fred! use our site to locate friends from the less said the better high"...who says ad robots don't have a sense of humor? the internet is full of information theives)...we found alternate paths and i felt much better about life and myself when i finally got the hell out...realized that the world was not hobart and hobart was a dreary little corner of a much wider and more tolerant expanse...so...no reunion this or any other year...well...maybe the fiftieth if i'm still here...if any of us is still here...it all depends on how i feel that day.