  Damn, I should know better than to break the seal on a whole mess of Eighties memories. Swept up in the whole "Reagan's Dead" craze, I retrieved a few yearbooks, put I-Tunes in a massive New Wave/Power Ballad loop and had a bad trip down parachute pants lane. I am occasionally assaulted by dreams in which I end up back in junior high or high school with all the knowledge and experiences I have accumulated after my parole from the public education system. The whole experience terrifies me as I try desperately to explain that I don't belong; that I have already paid those dues and have the paper and the emotional scar tissue to prove it.
I know people who play what-if. They live with the nagging doubts and the desire to change things and the if-only-I-hads. Why in the hell would I want to go back to that? What good would it possibly do? Sure, I could probably tell off the handful of dried-up excuses for educators that I, at that time, felt ruined my life over some science-project diorama or ten-page research paper or drum major tryouts; all of those seemingly all-consuming adolescent goals that, if not reached, presented an insurmountable obstacle of crushed hope. But what would that accomplish? At the time, nothing. What good would it do to piss off those who had your success and failure so squarely in the palms of their collective hands?
Looking back, it was all pretty meaningless. I can recite, from memory, all of those fictional characters who held the post of Captain aboard the Enterprise. I can't, with any reliability, recall the thirteen original colonies of the United States; nor can I tell you the state bird of Florida, how to do that bizarre algebra thing where you rip an equation apart at the parenthesis, or the major exports of Canada (I'm assuming it's some variety of wheat, followed closely by that ham you see on pizza). At some point, my future somehow hinged on knowing these things, and somehow I managed to bluff my way through and came out the other side, none the worse for wear. But I'll be damned if I can tell anyone why I felt such concern over my success or failure at knowing such trivia.
In any case, my trip to the past reaffirmed my choices in life. I am, for the most part, satisfied with what has transpired since. I closed those yearbooks with a chuckle at the hair and a mild curiosity as to who was gay and if they secretly found me attractive at the time. The past is securely the past, and that's the way it should be. Let the historians worry about it. I'm more interested in what's up around the corner. 
