TheBanyanTree: Reunion blues

[Peter Macinnis]

It's getting harder to hide, so I was hunted down the other day by an 
invitation to a fifty-year school reunion.

I would sooner gnaw my arms off with wooden teeth.  Reunions are full of 
people who have achieved nothing since they left school, clowns who are 
drunkenly hell-bent on recalling their mighty defeat of the Tooleybuc 
Ferrets in the 1958 open-weight jonojouk competition, when Slug took a 
dummy crumpet from Johnno and managed a complex five-point underthrown 
poltroon by a cleverly feinted Immelman turnip in injury time.

If that line of narrative founders in a sea of yawns, they have another 
strategy. To a man (I went to a boys' school), they have transformed 
into golfing bores, eager to recount the hole-in-one they almost got, 
five years ago, using a triple-barrelled yak-horn niblet with a titanium 
shaft and a bespoke shrunken head with a degree of difficulty 3.5 on the 
Richter scale of impossible things to believe before breakfast.

The ones I would like to meet up with, like me, aren't there.  We were
the ones who inverted the on-off switch on the PA system so the whole
school heard the deputy principal swearing in front of an open mike that
he thought was closed.  We were the ones who set the time-fused
fireworks in the toilets on assembly days.  We were the ones who
weakened the bladders of the jonojouk balls and inflated them with
laughing gas and spiked the water bottles with . . .

No, some things (the thing with the induction coil and the stainless 
steel urinal, the Bathurst burrs, the fulminate in the locks, the 
rotten-egg gas that left the dressing-room a no-go zone for two weeks 
and the trick with the flour and the candle among them) are best left 
hidden.  The people I would like to reminisce with know as I do that it 
might be unwise to risk being overheard.  Besides, as solid citizens, 
lawyers, teachers, ministers of religion and the like, strong right arms 
upholding the morality of society with every fibre of our being, it is 
our sworn duty not to let such anarchic ideas loose.

Besides, we might want to screw those jonojouk-jock bastards one last
time.

peter


-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral wordsmith, & science gossip,
/     \  friend of flatworms, pseudoscorpions and onychophorans;
\.--._*  confidence advisor, Australian skydiving trampoline relay team
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm