The Way We Were.

Lately I'm reminded of why I declined to attend my 40th high school reunion in 2018. Maybe I'm finally ready to be honest about it, even if I'm cognizant of it not mattering, in the least, either way.

For one thing, I was busy.

Pints&union was in the run-up to opening on August 1, and there were things that needed to be done. It made me very nervous, because you'll recall at the time that I'd been out of the food and drink game for three years. Getting back into it at an advanced age took effort, more mental than physical, and obviously none of us are as spry as we used to be.

But while it was a valid consideration, it's only a part of it.

Another aspect was lingering annoyance with 2013, when it was my great pleasure to host a portion of the reunion at Bank Street Brewhouse.

It transpired that one of my actual friends from high school arrived loaded (literally or figuratively) for bear, spent the evening complaining about mixed drink prices (at a brewery), harassing my staff (one of whom came to me and said if my "friend" didn't leave him alone, he'd have to begin throwing punches) and being an all-purpose tool.

My 'friend" embarrassed me greatly, and then, as it happened, the very same guy proved to be an avid, unapologetic MAGA-ite, which leads us to the third and most important factor in my (admittedly entirely personal) disaffection, this being the presidential election results in 2016.

In short, via the helpful medium of Facebook, I had a front row seat to observe the extent to which certain of my former classmates as yet were on the same wavelength as me in political terms, and which ones had gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid and become raging reactionaries, white supremacists, religion-obsessed theocrats, and, in short, stranded way out in right field somewhere.

And yet it wasn't anger with this state of affairs that convinced me to avoid the reunion party in 2018. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I disagree with them, it doesn't mean any more than that -- a disagreement.

Rather, it was sadness.

Granted, the high school experience is vastly overrated; it was far more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying rose-colored revisionism to an epic degree to celebrate those years.   

This being said, I look back on various people and phases with satisfaction and affection, hence the melancholy gripping me in 2018. I didn't show up because I'd prefer to remember them the way they were, not grapple internally with what they'd become.

It's as simple as that.

In high school most of the kids were apolitical, many times politically incorrect, mostly sharing the same goal of making sense of adolescence and trying to figure out what would come next, out in the real world.

I'd rather remember them -- us -- this way.

I don't even hold a grudge against the high school (and college) friend who made life miserable for me that evening at BSB in 2013. It's who he is, and actually, it's what he always was, an asshole, which is what drew us together in the beginning because I was, too.

We remain "friends" on Facebook, but I don't follow him, thus sparing me from an endless series of auto-erotic Trump mash notes, conspiracy memes and "all lives matter" bromides.

Unfollow, but remain "friends." It's mental health for our time, and maybe 2023 will be different.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was a slog, but thanks to Bob, I dunnit.

The irony is so delicious I might just dine on it for weeks, because all those looters, parasites and second-raters populating Ayn Rand's barely readable Atlas Shrugged turn out to be precisely the same ones citing her novel today as their primary formative influence as they busily calculate the price of human life compared to the bare necessities of accumulating capital and enhancing profits amid our cancerous late-stage capitalism.

COVID-19 shortly will become their own personalized Taggart Tunnel. I don't want anyone to die, but these real-life moochers need to go far, far away where they can live happily ever after making mad, passionate love to their fattened wallets.

John Galt, my pasty white ass.

However, perhaps even bizarrely, I've read Atlas Shrugged. It's actually one of the most influential 32 books of my life (a list that needs updating this summer). How I came to read Atlas Shrugged is a story worth retelling, though only briefly.

Rest assured that I didn't choose the novel for leisurely beach reading, or because of a fondness for its mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent cult politics it spawned: Woman meets married man and falls for the steel he invented, and they don't live happily ever because her real spirit animal is another guy who is stopping the engine of the world to lead a rich dude's revolution so that millions will starve, and in the process, somehow prove his point.

No, the reason I read Atlas Shrugged is that the late, great Bob Youngblood, my literature teacher as a senior in high school, commanded me to read it in two weeks flat or risk failing his course, this edict coming after I'd devoured the class assignment (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations) in a single weekend, then openly taunted Bob on Monday about it not being sufficiently challenging.

"Fine, you little shit": I was kept after class to be informed that if I was so incredibly bright and advanced -- if I wasn't willing to help my classmates understand Dickens -- a book like Atlas Shrugged should be the ideal, advanced challenge I so evidently craved.

Scoffing, I agreed ... and got schooled, hearing Bob's message loud and clear long before the infamous section in Rand's novel where Galt commandeers the planet's radio frequencies and delivers the single best cure for insomnia ever conceived by a speech maker. It asphyxiates me even now, 43 years later.

Atlas Shrugged was in fact completed, the college prep course passed and Bob's letter-perfect point very well taken ... and retained. I hope I never have to read that book, ever again.

R.I.P. Bob Youngblood, 1943 - 2016.

I'm down with "prom-munism" so long as they do it right.

Okay, okay -- a bit young for prom.

Proms surely rank among the most forgettable of youthful institutions, but if your high school online/high-schoolers-choose-a-unique-prom-theme-communism/">prom theme is to be communism -- or more cleverly, Prom-munism -- then these youngsters best try to get it right.

Presumably, this communist-themed prom will ensure equal distribution of chips and punch, and abolish the idea of prom kings and queens.

HAR-rumph.

Everyday Communism

The people of eastern Europe lived in communist states for four decades in the 20th century. This website explores their everyday lives from the communist takeovers in the late 1940s through the "golden age" of the 1960s to the end of communist rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Topics explored include work, consumption, family, entertainment, privacy, youth, and dissent. The communist countries covered are the eight that were sandwiched between the USSR and western Europe: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

All of the work posted on this website was done by University of Kansas students enrolled in the course "Everyday Communism." Their work, and this website, is indebted to the growing body of research on everyday life under east European communism.