That’s my high school. The place where Boy Mark became Slightly Taller Boy Mark. Can you handle the subtlety of that metamorphosis, Ovid!? NO YOU CANNOT. IT IS TOO NUANCED FOR YOUR NYMPH-CRAZED MIND.

Hark, everyone! I’m harking you! Lend me your ear and let me tell you about my high school reunion, an event I didn’t attend but still experienced, in a way. Ready, internet? (“Bleep-bloop-porn.”) Good. Let’s go.

I got surprised by a facebook invite. I didn’t think anyone at my school would organize a reunion, but someone did. Unfortunately it was on the other side of the country, so I settled for visiting the facebook event wall to see how my peers were doing — how their lives compared to where I was at — which is the perfect thing to do if your self-esteem is peaking and you hate that. Like, it’s grossing you out, all this self-esteem. And you’re like, “But HOW can I get rid of this? How can I turn my new confidence shoes back into the shit-clogs I’ve grown to love? Oh, just by comparing my life to other people of a similar age and background? Cool okay thanks! I’ll do that immediately!” 

The main thing I learned is that people from my class are adults now. Real ones. With kids of their own. Kids! I don’t know if I want kids yet, but I’m nowhere near ready to make or own them. I’m way too teenagery. I still have posters taped to my wall. And one of those posters is of two pigs snuggling. (Honestly, they’re probably just rubbing faces cause the friction feels good on their skin, but it looks like love.)

Also, my clock is a gorilla in a business suit looking at a banana. Behold:

Aww.

The problem is I’m not ready to give up these childish things. When I look at that clock, I don’t think, “Well this is not something a man should own.” I think, “What’s this sneaky gorilla thinking?”

Because seriously, he could be thinking lots of things. The picture is amazing. Like for instance, the banana doesn’t have a bite taken out of it, but it’s peeled. So either he’s on the phone talking about whether or not he should eat this banana, or he’s trying to wrap up a business call so he can get back to his banana, which he was about to eat before he was interrupted.

Or maybe he’s describing the banana to someone who can sell him more bananas. Or his wife’s calling and she’s like, “What’s up?” and he’s like, “Yo honey where’d you get this banana? Cause I haven’t even bit this thing yet but I know I’m gonna love it and I wanted to make sure there’ll be more when I get home, otherwise I’ll probably go nuts and destroy our house. I’m like dead serious. Honestly man, I’m a gorilla and every moment I’m not trashing property is a moment of restraint.” 

See? Business Gorilla is an inkblot. A sphinx. We come seeking answers but find only more questions. He’s the Mona Lisa of gorilla clocks. And none of these questions even address the fact that a gorilla attained what appears to be a management position at a company. Well done, Busy G!

“I don’t have kids, but I do have the World’s Most Interesting Clock.” - Mark Little, 2011 

“Really starting to wish I had kids.” - Mark Little, 2022

“Bury me with my clock.” - Mark Little, 2046

“So yeah apparently this clock is like a radioactive healing fount or something? All I know is I can’t die.” - Mark Little, 3188

No kids, but an awesome clock. And someday I’ll bundle that clock up in a stroller like a weird barren spinster and walk around town with it. Then a bus will hit my stroller because it can’t slow down — bomb on bus — and the driver will think he murdered my baby until he sees a clock spilling out. At which point everyone will breathe a sigh of relief except me. Cause fuck, man. That’s my clock.

Speed. A movie with a lot of really good scenes that you can just USE, man. For analogies. Anecdotes. Whatever you want! Free of charge!

So okay, I didn’t go to the reunion, but I’m pretty sure this was the highlight: amid the excited posts on the facebook wall, this guy, Doug Something, wrote an epic rant about how he didn’t want to spend time with people he hadn’t cared about 10 years earlier (fair enough), all the “cool kids, still working the cool jobs at McDicks” (hmm, starting to feel a little crazy) and the “school slut” who “slept with half the football team” — full crazy, since, as one commenter noted, we didn’t have a football team. Although what that commenter failed to note was that Doug did a Grade 11 exchange into the plot of Varsity Blues.

Varsity Blues. I don’t know if Doug met James Vanderbeek, but he definitely had some sort of negative run-in with the whipped cream-titted football slut.

Then this woman responded to Doug, saying he had no right to paint everyone with the same brush (totally fair) because when she was in high school, she wasn’t a “cool kid” (okay…), in fact, sometimes she went without food so she could feed her brothers and sisters (why are you telling us this? Please stop telling us this…) and now she’s a single mom who works at McDonald’s and do we have a problem with that? (…No?)

So I didn’t go to the reunion, but I got a good double-dose of lunacy and tragedy. Plus, the last post I read was some guy calling Doug a fag. So yeah, high school.

…

“Back in my day, Advanced Cybernetics Life-Camp was called ‘high school.’ And radioactive healing founts were called clocks. Ohhh I’ve been around.” - Mark Little, 4080