melinda gates, would you also regain beauty with your regained youth?

I was talking with Melinda and she gave me a piece of life advice, unsolicited of course, and quite often, thats where we find the gems among the chaff, nuggets of wisdom.

Something like, "be who you were in high school."

Paradoxical for me, this advice, because i was honor roll first year, and failed 2 of 3 classes my last year.

I went from doing my homework daily, to, finally, just walking out of school in the middle of class.

I lifted weights one year.

I drank heavily one year.

I made an a+ in psych one year.

I was fatter and heavier in year one than in year four.

I liked a different girl every year.

I had a big old color tv, year one, and that tv was gone year four, replaced by a growing collection of music.  Not having the tv in my room, i lorded over the family set in the living room.

Cable tv came to my neighborhood in high school.

Nicole, at the time, loved and cherished me even without knowing i existed, and later it would seem so effortless and trouble-free, her losing her own persona to my torrential oddity.

As the o.j. simpson verdict was read, i stood alone in a room with a journeyman educator that would later run for congress as a Democrat.  I would watch the dnc debate on pbs and listen to his comments on the war on terror, myself bemused hearing tv pundit lines from a familiar, same face, same voice, but saying that party line stuff, the talking points.....

The question wasnt to be or not, that high school Mike, but which of those?

I have been, now as a senior in college, that honor roll mike again.

Will i see nicky again, in that red silk button-up shirt?  Before i get my b.a. of lit?

There was music mike.

Movie mike.

Wkqb overnight mike, rousing to procul harum, or rolling stones 70s cuts.

Weight lifter mike.

Comic book writer mike.

I had even written a 150-page novel AND read The Stand in one intense five day period.

My first cigarette made me dizzy and i sat still for an hour after.

Which mike.....  i wonder....

I remember him, but i didn't know him, yer know.

I played classic rock songs i loved on the pizza hut juke box.  My cool kid friends were underclassmen and complained to me about the songs.  One of them liked marylin manson better.  Another liked jennifer lopez better.  Yet another preferred cypress hill.

One of those died.

One is an expatriate, absconded to socialist environs.

The other still has no taste in music.

One ver married.

The other married twice.

The caboose of the group married to a man.

A man that flipped me off in the middle of class went on to play awhile in the nfl.

In tee shrts, i went from an atl braves postseason shirt, to a too-tight megadeth shirt, to a multi-pack cheapie indigo shirt, to an el paso truck stop shirt in one of my senior pictures.

What melinda means, maybe, not to go back to that maturing and growing, evolving condition, but maybe, numbly, to go back to being who ppl thought i was the whole time.

What absolute sh*t advice.