Sorry, folks. I feel like absolute shit and am having problems looking at the screen. Everything else will continue as scheduled and I'll put up 2 "Missing Reels" columns next week.

I know, Bunk; I'm disappointed, too.

Thomas Wolfe once famously said, “You can’t go home again.”  While I tend to shy away from clichés, I happen to think this sad adage about growing up and apart from our childhood selves has special significance in my life.  Halfway through high school, I moved to a different town and school.  While this is a pretty huge event in the maturation and formation of anyone, for me it didn’t just signify a change in zip code and social circles but instead it changed the way I thought about “home”.

I grew up in Lincoln, MA, but I don’t consider that my hometown.  Sure, that’s where my earliest experiences and oldest friends come from, but I never saw it to completion.  I never experienced all of the dizzying drama that the last two years of high school bring, never experienced the collective insanity of graduation with those people.  I drifted apart from so many of them, since high school is all about immediacy and I lived 2 hours away.  I don’t even know where half of my old friends ended up, what college they went to, or with whom they went to the prom.

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Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

-Dorothy Parker



The greatest tragedy of my life is that I’m not a figment of someone’s imagination.

            My mind constantly exists in the world of fantasy, a world filled with adventures and daring deeds.  I desire larger than life scenarios divided along black and white lines of good versus evil.  I long to look out my window and see the skies peppered by brave men and women in capes and tights righting wrongs and beating the bad guys.  I wish to read newspaper headlines about some nefarious organization that doesn’t mean harm for ideological reasons based on religious fanaticism.  I prefer my shadowy groups lead by a man with a predilection to reptile themes and bungled attempts at global domination.  I want to find treasure maps, destroy ancient cursed relics, encounter creatures that exist beyond our planet, our dimension, or simply beyond the ken of our understanding.

            But that’s not the way this world works, nor the way my life has gone thus far.

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Remember when we were young: we looked forward to things.  "I can't WAIT to drive. I can't WAIT to get a boyfriend.  I can't WAIT to graduate." Etc., Etc.  Now it's "remember how great high school was?"  Or "nothing compares to the feeling of first love.  Life was so much better back when we were young."  Somewhere between anticipation and nostalgia we should have been happy.



-from Too Much Coffee Man: Parade of Tirade by Shannon Wheeler