Retrocollective amnesia

Something must happen to your brain as you hit your late 30s. A hardening of the arteries, some invisible lesions, a chemical imbalance, something. Otherwise the only explanation I can find for anyone to even consider going to their 20 year high school reunion is retrocollective amnesia. Why retrocollective? It’s something I made up: it’s retro because we have trouble remembering just exactly how much high school really, truly sucked and it’s collective because it seems to happen to a large enough group of people all at once.

And yes, high school did truly suck. Until Dubya actually went and made it an unofficial U.S. government policy, high school was the closest thing we had to institutionalized torture in this country.

Throw a large group of hormonal adolescents (are there any other kind?) into an environment in which there is huge pressure to conform and to engage in actual or practice mating rituals, add the pressure of having to absorb information while telling them that their ability to absorb said information will have a direct and profound impact on the rest of their lives, and mix that with an authority structure that turns a blind eye to the communities’ (because there are many communities in a high school population) self-decided punishments for those who either choose not to or who are physically or emotionally incapable of conforming and voila! You’ve created something that for most kids, the ones who aren’t popular or pretty or thin or (in some cases) heterosexual, is to be endured, survived, something that we come out of knowing that the rest of our lives will go on in spite of not because of it.

And yet, twenty years later we contemplate paying upwards of $100 a person to attend what amounts to a cocktail party with bad hotel buffet food to socialize with people we barely remember and if we do remember them it’s mostly for reasons we’d like to forget. So what is it that makes us even consider going to such an event?

Is it the revenge fantasy, the one where we can look the ex-cheerleader who is now dried out and maintaining what vestiges of her youthful beauty she still has through the grace of botox and another $1000 per month worth of product in the face and know that our mortgage is going to be paid off before we hit 40 and oh, by the way, we got carded last night at the bar ’cause we still look like we’re under 30 thank you oh so much (go me, oh yeah, go me, oh yeah)? Is that desire to “show them,” the same one that makes you want to parade your new paramour around places you know the ex who dumped you still frequents, really that powerful? Most high school reunion movies have some element of this; some are based entirely upon it.

Is it to confirm to ourselves that yes, we really survived the horror that is secondary education? That the lockers are in fact small and dinged, that the gym does reek of old sweat socks, that the teachers, principals, and disciplinarians no longer wield authority over us (even though in reality most of us have traded one authority structure for another only instead of giving you three days in the “white room” after school your boss now just gives you an average on your yearly evaluation)?

Maybe it’s to confirm that we did make it out of our 20s. A by no means authoritative listing on my high school’s alumni board shows that of the 742 people in my graduating class four of us failed to do just that: Two were killed in ordinary car accidents; one was a casualty of the Gulf War; and the fourth was raped, beaten, and left to die while visiting her sister on the Big Island in Hawaii the Christmas after college graduation. I’m betting because of my age cohort and our lovely, inclusive and accepting attitudes (where is the sarcasm font when you need it?) we’ve probably more than one AIDS related death (while he was a year behind me this is how we lost my friend Danny).

Or is the cosmic do-over all we’re really looking for? A chance to in some way go back to “then” knowing what we know “now” feeling more secure than we ever did during a time when a random pimple could mean the difference between a good week and a bad week so we can right some wrong or make a different choice in something that we believe has some sort of primal, formative effect on who we are in that now.

I’ve got about a month to decide if I’m going to my reunion. Given that my case of the retrocollective doesn’t seem to be so bad, and given that there are maybe a dozen people out of the remaining 737 I’d like to see, odds are I’ll probably spend that weekend at the beach instead.