Everyday Stupidities

With my 20 year high school reunion coming up, I have been looking various stuff up. Classmates.com has a reunion page which no one has been contributing to [AHAHAAH!] and two people who went to my school in the 1970's created a webpage for all grads of the school, which also has no information about my reunion [MUAHAAHH!] but mentions the previous class of losers and the Class of '66 reunion. Did get one laugh out of reading about the Class of '85: there was this sizzlin' hot girl by the name of Tammy Brown that every straight boy with a pulse wanted to get next to -- she was featured in a rendition of 'Winter Wonderland' in the line, "in the meadow we can have an orgy, and pretend the snowman's Tammy Brown" -- well, it seems she won the award for most children, with five. Seems she married a guy whose last name is Bangs, so her name says what we had long hoped: Tammy Bangs. Just not us. (Except maybe Kenny, who she was dating in high school, but I don't know that. Lucky stiff.)

You wanna play Icicle Liiiiigts with me? Join my Flickr group:
Icicle Lights in the Offseason

Interested in the business names and advertising on the sides of old buildings?
Mushy's 'Ghost Writing' set
(24 pix from Tacoma WA at this moment, with more to come from Tacoma, Toppenish, Seattle, and Portland as soon as I can get them uploaded by dialup)

When I was driving home the other night I had this sensation that there was some event I was forgetting. My best friend Chrome's birthday wasn't for another week, so that wasn't it. Then it dawned on me: May 11 was Karen Strausbaugh's 38th birthday. I've elaborated on her a time or two in the past on the Daybook of Say Something Cryptic so I won't get into detail here -- will merely say that I had a long history in my head with her, but a short romantic history with her in real life, and I learned a few things about the world we live in as our individual dysfunctions interlocked in places and collided in others. Your average summer/winter romance with a three year anticipatory waiting period beforehand, basically. The realization of a yearly event I haven't thought about in a long time makes me curious why it came to mind, and the thought of a person who meant more than she intended and likely forgot about me by August 6 of 1986 kinda rattled me, but I decided not to go looking for more information (I already know she married someone with the last name of Smith, courtesy of the last time I got curious); I just wished her a sweet happy life and fun high school reunion of her own through the thin air and drove on. And if a search engine spider ever finds this posting: I still hold to my promise to never call you names, you did nothing to deserve them (other than letting me be the last to know it was over); it can however be said that I have realized that my blindness to faults was in your favor so you should be happy -- and my naïveté may have been annoying but since that was the last time in my life I wanted someone entirely for their mind I should be happy. Altruistic? Maybe. How many of you reading this can pinpoint when you went from moonstruck teenager to real-world adult? When love went from being something you found only in your heart to something discovered elsewhere as well? I sometimes miss being so blithe... there are days my head hurts from the important invisible subtexts and ulterior motives and peripheral distractions. And I wonder how other people keep from getting lost in the deluge, how people keep their focus on their direction, how folks shake the din from their ears. There was some fuzzy static in my head during my teen years, sometimes resembling pop radio, but Karen was a respectful moment of silence, and after Karen all I've ever heard is noise. That was my moment of change.

The problem with wondering why things happen with people is the presumption that there's a reason which would make any sense.