In the spring of 1999, before a small but rapt audience of students in the library of Governor Livingston High School, I confessed that I was capable of asexual reproduction. I sat somewhat stiffly in my chair, probably in a defensive cross-armed stance. I had no formal text or even notes, merely an outline that I ran and reran in my head for days in advance, which involved a brief introduction followed by opening up for questions. I knew that someone would ask “How?” for which my answer was “My leg hairs,” sprouting forth miniature replicas of myself for some nefarious but surely clever purpose I’d forgotten. It was reported in The Highlander (our newspaper) the following week having more or less taken the hint that it was meant to be funny.
Open mic nights were organized by the school’s literary magazine (“lit mag” for short), of which I was a member from the first meeting of my freshman year, when I attended with a pile of my horrifyingly nascent literary work, until basically graduation1. They were biannual, in the fall and spring semesters, held well past operating hours and took on an intimacy uncommon to mass-rituals of public education. I’m pretty sure there was tea. My mind also conjures candles, but that seems like a fire hazard, and our adviser, my English teacher Miss Sample, was guided by a spirit of renewable nervousness.
The audience was actually fairly diverse across cliques. I suppose if you had nothing better to do on a Wednesday or Thursday night you could come watch your peers sing Ani DiFranco songs or read poems by themselves or someone else. One girl stands out to me for reading a love letter arranged through William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method. At another one, she did an impassioned rendition of Dave Foley’s “Letter to the Guy I Clotheslined” monologue from Kids in the Hall.
For me, open mic night served as a platform for what could be seen as my extensive impulse in what is now “shitposting.” I’d debuted the previous fall with a “short story” far too indebted to my readings of Naked Lunch to be worth remembering now. This was followed in subsequent years with sonic “freak outs,” such as playing a badly tuned guitar with a screwdriver while a group of underclassmen huddled around the microphone doing primal scream therapy, and some other musical stuff that either never materialized or collapsed midway through the act.
Of all my pieces, that monologue was perhaps my best and most complete. I do not remember what inspired it, let alone where the confidence to perform it came from, or why it had been as successful as it was once I had done so. Though it’s not like I had many options. In 1999, with the internet as unsophisticated and as little explored as it was, it never occurred to me that I could engage the dial-up and sink into some forum to post my ideas from the safety of my cubic family PC, among trusting, admiring confidants. Even now that sounds entirely pointless and stupid. In that specific moment, I found I loved the challenge of presenting a creation to the people I saw in person every day, some of whom may not have been all that nice to me, seemingly by virtue of the fact that I could and they could not.
It’s easy to slip into the cadence of cliché when talking about high school. Those clichés exist for a reason. I could have gone in a thematic direction that leads to a moment in junior-year chemistry when a classmate turned to me and said, for the whole class to hear for some reason, “We thought you’d shoot up the school, but you actually turned out pretty cool.” But for my present purpose, I’m turning GL into this toothless fortress that blithely tolerated some of my most absurd bullshit. Such a status is accomplished by the easy feat of no expectations. I was not a model of academic flourishing or a source of prestige. My grades were serviceable, my disciplinary burden was minimal (I will clarify this later). In a sense, I barely existed at GL. I was not at prom. I was rarely at parties. I did not go on the senior trip to Ocean City something or other. I have completely misplaced my graduation yearbook, the only one I bothered to have signed. The art of enduring high school comes from being able to choose when you exist. It’s like being the complete (and preferable) inverse of a gifted kid. It's also not easy. I was fortunate to have pulled it off a few times.
I sometimes wonder what happened to Miss Sample. She may well still be at GL. For the short time we knew each other she was my greatest enabler. Not because she had any subversive streak that I was aware of, but simply out of exhaustion. It was probably tiring having to deal with a student who had few apparent disciplinary issues but who also seemed to be a lunatic. In truth I was bored out of my mind. At no prompting whatever, I wrote a verse poem, inspired by this Drowningman song, from the point of view of a stalker. I don’t have it anymore, but the rhyme scheme was solid, and she liked it enough to read it out loud to the class and apparently an entirely different class2. I don’t think I actually got a grade for it, though. And to be sure, that was a rare gem among many literary-satirical abominations.
Aside from open mic night, the next best creative sanctuary was the New Jersey Teen Arts Festival, held for us every year at Union County College. Freshman year was a boon for me. A poem I’d submitted got selected for inclusion in a student best-of anthology (which I never saw) and which required a second reading at Barnes and Noble, after which the presiding poetry professor who once complimented my pronunciation of “visage,” as if people get it wrong all the time, compared it (with typical Boomer overreach) to Bob Dylan. So sophomore year I pledged to be both totally unserious but more ambitious. I’d formed an acoustic grindcore band with me on vocals and my late friend Chris on guitar. We played a “song” in a lecture all to a flummoxed by game music teacher, some very amused friends, and some unamused would-be indie rockers who went on before us.
We performed a second time, now with a drummer, our friend Ed, and the moniker “Morgancore,” because sure, why not? It was technically an audition as the musical interlude act for “King of Hearts,” a joke male beauty pageant that I think might have been banned for a couple of years. Of course we lost to a POD cover band. We were wasting everyone’s time; though the teacher in charge, Mrs. Tonto I think, just let it happen, like it was fine and normal and we were fine and normal.
I like to think Morgancore less like a band than a concept … a social construct, if you will. Not because we were terrible, though we absolutely were, but because it carried over the same spirit of all these other endeavors. The spirit of the shitpost, literal in-yer-face shitposting. Mostly it was an excuse to make, like, 10 t-shirts, which probably still exist somewhere on this earth.
There are certain advantages when you are not invited to your high school reunion3. You get to choose what you remember, and you can remember them on your own terms, even if another classmate’s terms have a fair amount of truth in them as yours do. But you are, in perfect isolation, the final arbiter, curator, and editor of the tracking-shredded, likely unspooled VHS reel of your history.
You can also get ahead of certain Todd Solondz memories that may unpleasantly be recalled after successive rounds. Like the one time I decided to make Very Bad Day worse by impulsively stealing an ice cream sandwich and carting it off in such a way as to assure that I would be caught within seconds; which I was, by a football coach, who took me to the principal’s office where I talked my Saturday detention down to two after school detentions. Then there was the time I went to the winter semiformal, having not bought a ticket or wore any formal attire, but just milled around the hallways and outside corridor for maybe two hours. And fair enough, that was a rather moronic thing to do in the Columbine era. I should have at least gotten a tuxedo and made it somewhat less unsettling. These, for space reasons among others, are all I care to remember.
At the same time, these recollections, both triumphant and embarrassing, belie an unfairness on my part. While shitposting is clearly my calling, memory is the basis of my career. I’m a professional rememberer. Context, something the internet corrodes unhindered, is everything. Even when I’m writing about something that has nothing to do with me. Being so easily given to reverie allows me to overlook how little memory actually factors into a reunion. The past is the catalyst for taking stock in how each of us has weathered our progress away from it, by how little we resemble the people we saw every day for four years. On that, my presence would only incur redundancy. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes’ conversation to notice the echo resounding from the person in the above screencap (found somewhere in here, if you want to work in a 10-minute vibe binge) to the person writing the text beneath it.
To illustrate, I’ll leave you with another, more prescient piece of high school juvenilia. This time, it was the end of senior year. I was working on The Highlander, and (I think) was asked for some kind of pre-graduation thinkpiece. You know, like in one of those teen movies. Anyway, rather than a straight op-ed, which I could never properly do even in college, I wrote a short sketch where I got cross-examined by a sentient Abercrombie & Fitch mannequin in the Short Hills mall. Again, like in the teen movies. It actually got published, the editor thought it was “cute;” it is now, like everything else in this piece, lost to history. But as with those artifacts there is a clear rhyme pattern, of an exactitude that I haven’t been able to manage on paper in a long time.
I held onto my fancies of youth even while my youth was circling the drain. Some I kept jealously close, adapting them from moment to moment, surviving many successive context shifts. Others I set aside but kept nearby, triggered for a moment of rediscovery and renewal when the potential of loss was quite serious. I’m not saying that’s good for all people; it’s certainly not a dignified approach to adulthood. In this circumstance it simply signals that there may be nothing new to discuss. I might have left after, like, an hour.
An email would have been nice, though.
Though, to be sure, my activities were light compared to others, mostly centered on approving submissions.
A lot of what I recount here is going to sound like absolute bullshit seeing as I failed to save the physical artifacts. You’re just going to have to take me word for it.
I get it. Planning an event is hard and reasons for exclusion can be many and various: timing, venue logistics, lingering COVID concerns, the ease of marshaling a close-knit, hardly disunited circle of definite yeses rather than the more disparate likely noes. I should probably be more annoyed (concerned?) by my non-invites to the Compact party at KGB, or Curtis Yarvin’s weird Shakespeare truther event everyone was flexing about/dunking on in the summer.