Random thoughts from the road

Traveling north on US 19/98 headed toward Destin from Boca, I take the scenic route to see what I could see, and so far, there was not that much until I curved inward toward Appalachicola.  I occupied my time on the endless expanse of country highway by keeping myself amused this way: From a distance, the paired silouette of the power lines vaguely resemble an Egyptian sentinel; distance and memory are inversed: the farther you travel forward, the deeper nostalgia's return; Be wary of falling debris from gatorboy's makeshift landscaping truck. And, though it might have had all the requisite camel colored markings, that last roadkill you passed was in all probability not an unfortunate goat. No one does goat anymore.

The reuniuon is a bust though I wouldn't want anyone to know how I really felt.  I spent all those years hiding how I really felt, why change it all now?  Reunion unplugged:  Weight ages.  Nostalgia brought me back but reality sent me home.  I never really knew most of these kids well, and now I have finally satisfied those last lingering notes of nostalgia, those having been banished by the utter blandness of the event.  With one or two exceptions,  I could have just as easily have walked in from the street meeting them all for the first time, for all the superficial salutations that ensued over the course of the three hours or so.  They are as much strangers to me as I am no doubt to them.  If ever my fish-out-of-the-water status held true it was in no greater evidence than in those few hours spent with a group of people who had nothing more in common than that they happened to be in the same place at the same time thirty years ago.  No lasting meaningful relationships followed, at least for me.  This is my fault of that I am certain.  The damages to my ego remain though they have been slightly reduced by this last encounter. That trip was the most direct course of my own conceit, the desire to be socially compared and contrasted, knowing that my father's good genes, the only valuable thing given to me by him, would compare favorably next to the majority of my former classmates who were steadily losing minute by minute their battle with gravity and time.  This shameless victory, however, turned hollow before the night had even ended, as the desire to connect with them one last time, at last, failed.  Desire, as Lacan noted, shall never reach its fruition or end though its pursuit is as unrelenting and insistent as the stream that would turn back to its ocean.