The existential ermine of erstwhile ennui.

Last night as I was drifting off into pinot grigio-induced slumber, my thoughts became occupied and I tossed about, unmaking my bed utterly and filling me with the concrete heaviness of sleep-expectancy. And by "occupied" I mean "occupied, like France during WWII." None of the fleeting images made sense, even in a larger context. Britney Spears was in there, and she'd had surgery to split her tongue to resemble a serpent's. I briefly remembered what it's like to step in a profoundly fresh and intensely warm cow-flop in thong sandals. I could taste the footlong corndogs from the West Virginia State Fair in their deepfried, animal-offal goodness. In the distance of my mind's ear I could hear gurbani music and smell chapati bread cooking. And there was my grandmother, covering one of my wasp stings with cooling balm from her "sting stick", which I choose to believe to this day was a magic wand. I remember how hot the asphalt was on my face as I got stomped on the way home from school, and how the frat-a-skank who did it to me smelled of cigarettes and extremely cheap deodorant, which suprised me even through my whuppin'.

I guess I shouldn't have dropped so much acid in high school. [Hahahahaha! Kidding! Maybe!]

I was flipping through a young man's file today trying to find something weird that he said would be in there when I noticed one of his old school's documents. Apparently, this young man had gone to high school in Pittsfield, Maine, a mere forty miles from my palatial digs on the banks of the mighty Penobscot. "How'd you like it in Maine?", I asked, curious despite myself about how someone who'd grown up in Hong Kong (Xianggang, the Fragrant Harbor) felt about living in a county in Maine where fully 3/4 of the townships are unincorporated lumber tracts - there's nothing like asking someone what town they live in and having them say "GT-987-F". They get a little touchy if you ask them if they skin their own moose (most likely) or if they've been sodomized by aliens (7 out of 10 report that they sometimes feel "tender down there" after walking in the woods... that, and that nagging memory loss) or if you "cahn geht theyah from heyah." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I miss it a lot", he said, and if I'm not mistaken, he looked a little misty. So I told him I was from Banguh and that I'd gone to high school there. "Good swim team", he said, almost under his breath, "and their Junior Classical League was pretty good."

JUNIOR CLASSICAL LEAGUE!

I audibly gasped. He looked up at me while filling out his request for a travel signature. Both of us knew, in that pregnant moment, each other's filthy secret: we were Latin Club dorks. Oh yes. Toga-wearing, Caesar-quoting, Aeneid-translating, certamen-playing mutants, lucky to have survived the high school experience in a state where being able to blow your own supper's head off makes a man a man. I maneuvered one of my eyes unnaturally in the socket to check the document to see when he was in high school. Class of '98. My class. I threw caution to the wind.
"Uh, so, um, did you go to that one meeting of the JCL (I used the acronym; he knew, oh yes he knew) by the lake? The one where we played certamen in those weird huts?" His pen vibrated in his hand like a tuning fork. "Yeah. And some of your kids wore togas with the purple senatorial stripe."

That was IT. That was us. I was one of the consuls that year and it was *I* who was wearing the special purple-rimmed sentatorial toga that day. And here, standing across the desk from me, a man who grew up on the rim of the Pacific in a city renowned the world over for being one of the most profoundly exciting on the planet, who'd met me in high school on a lake in central Maine while I was wearing a goddamn toga. I had to sit down; clearly, my world was falling in on itself.

He filled out his form and left, looking at me once more over his shoulder as he did so. Et tu, Brutae, mothereffer, et tu, Brutae. I puked in my mouth a little and moved on with my day, humbled by fate. You have to come back for your form, my little Asian friend, and when you do, I'll be waiting. Waiting and watching. And when you do, you'd better believe I'll kick your ass at mythology. What? You don't remember all of the names of the emperors of the Julian dynasty? Sad for you. I'll cut you. Cut you so hard.

I remain, as ever,

Dom