I am fresh from a stint perusing the world wide of myspace.com which I am sure everyone here is abreast of yet I myself am not an active member though I did create a 'fake' persona complete with not one completed identity field. So, I look through the 50 million or so myspacers trying to find lost peers of yore. The old high school chums that didn't magically appear at the ten year reunion thing that took place in the Vets lodge at a small park indistinguishable from any other park located in the small tourist plagued beach town I grew to be a young clueless adult therein.

And there they are paginated nicely in easy to scroll through ten-to-a-page allotments. I see them with pictures and blurbs carefully outlining the wonderful lives they so adequately carved from the maw of society. I was surprised how many of them actually wear cowboy hats in a non-ironical or hip fashion pushing more towards the Midwest than the Pacific Ocean we all grew up so dangerously close to (the fear of tsunamis was real and all to powerful for us in this small beach community. I'm not sure why? Maybe it was just me?). Many others look like adults which to me is strange though I'm pushing middle age I feel little like what I thought an adult would be or even look like when I was plugging away at multiplication tables and the whole 1492 thing and Ohlone Indians and noun versus adverbs and you get the picture.
Where was I? Oh, these people I spent such important years of my...whatever...growing up, have children upwards of three or more and have homes attached to doubtless mortgages and jobs afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome or union dues or inter-office squabbles and countless other things of which I have nothing even close to resembling in my life.

I'm losing my point if I had one. Um...am I in anyway connected to these people with anything more than just the passing memories of cafeteria food and Mr. Lachman's suspicious bulge and that big brawl in the quad my junior year and the way we ate at 7-ll for lunch for like three months straight or how all those awkward homely girls in eighth grade got somehow extremely hot in ninth grade and by senior year more than say 65% were in the T.A.M. Program (TeenAge Mothers) or what have you? Is that all we mean to each other? Or more to the point if I like search someone out who I once shared this all too important painful-life-altering-transition-to-adulthood period of at least four years in my life at a time when that represented nearly a quarter of my entire life up to that point, then does this mean I have anything to say to this person other than, "Hi, wow two kids? No not me. Of course do you remember when blah blah? Oh yeah I remember when blah bleh."?

Even those people who I think back fondly upon, the ones I called my friends, even with them I struggle to find any good reason to reconnect. It's been more than a decade since we shared that sweaty day on the football field listening to teachers and admin gush bountiful amounts of idiomatic praise and conciliation and the occasional lack luster joke. Do we have anything to say to each other?

Maybe or even probably, but I'm too much of a true coward to find out.