So that troublemaker @artistikem was going on about how her husband — who is older — went to his class reunion and was shocked to find old women there. His classmates.
She kept going on about this and my wee brain got it into my head to search for some people I used to know.
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.
This is an exercise in stupidity I’d commit at least once a year, several years ago.
And it always came up with zero results. So I stopped.
Ah, but we live in the Age of Facebook now. Who the hell hasn’t heard of Facebook, right?
Let me explain something first. Just about everyone I knew as a kid grew up with advantages I didn’t have. I won’t enumerate these but just let me say that any sociologist would recognize that my life had plenty of deficits compared to their childhood lives. Plus, I was never a good student and always had crappy grades. Everyone else always got better grades.
This was the case both for my elementary school and high school years.
(I skip my college years because that’s another case entirely and some of those people I don’t give a shit about at all, plus I generally know where some of them wound up.)
Anyway.
So, my upbringing compared to theirs always led me to believe that all of those people would go on to make a significant mark in this world. That I would someday see their names out there in public. Hell, one of them is even related to Senator Al Gore!
But the years have passed and … nada!
Without going into details, because I don’t want to give a frikkin resume here, I have been the one to make a damned mark. Me, the one who wasn’t the most popular, the one without the best grades, the one without all the advantages all the rest of them had growing up.
Yeah. I go WTF? all the time over that too!
So anyway.
Facebook. I wind up finding several people from my childhood years who have never before popped up in my past searches! One became a lawyer. But, for all know, this could be a real estate lawyer, not something really important. Another became a gardener(!). Another went to a Theological Seminary(!!!) — and his picture makes him look like his father! Another worked for mass transit and his picture makes him look like an old man! One other person I found on Facebook too, who I will discuss separately. I found some scant information about an old girlfriend outside of Facebook. She’s married and moved away. I found someone else with the same name and it looked like the same face as an old girlfriend, and she’s married with kids.
Now that other Facebook person. Back when I first got cable TV in the 1980s, CNBC had this nightly show on at 11PM EST. It was a show about sex. One night I was shocked to see this person on that show. She was a childhood neighbor with many of the advantages I didn’t have. She was also considered one of the smartest people of our cohort. And you know what she was on that TV show talking about? Her job: writing pr0n movies! — and under a pen name!
WTF?
If she had the writing gift, what the bloody hell was she doing wasting it on that?!
So, anyway.
I kept searching for more names from my past and basically that was it. Everyone else isn’t there to be found. I wound up with the same feeling I had all those years ago during similar fruitless searches: As if a giant hand had come along and just wiped away all of those people.
I’m not contacting any of the ones I found. I really don’t want to hear about their kids or their failed dreams or broken marriages or news about how many others — including our teachers — have died (and worse: how they died).
You can’t go home again. And as I told someone on Twitter earlier this year, once you leave home, it ceases to exist.
This dog is finished returning to his vomit.