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I Graduated High School 20 Years Ago Today
… and the world never got any better. But I did. For now.
20 years ago, today — June 24, 2000 — I graduated high school from a backwards lil’ slice of quasi-incestuous Upper Appalachia, in a town I was neither born in, nor am I from, and while I had friends and activities there, I could never wait to leave. I wanted to explore the world — just as I always literally drew my ambitions on my driveway in chalk as a youngin.
Yeah, this lil’ ol’ Eagle Scout graduated with high honors from Whitesboro High School, and immediately after the ceremony, I bleached and spiked my hair, and preceded to have between 1 and 4 beers, at between 12 and 30 parties. We dropped a toilet in a bonfire. The shorter list was who I did not make out with. For better and worse, that was always the shorter list.
In the intervening two decades between then and here, three utterly bizarre things happened; I’d like to describe them to you here in painstaking detail — as if there’s another kind of detail in which I describe things to you.
I. The World Only Ever Got Worse
Truly. The world literally never got any better. At 18, as a sophomore in my third college, I watched 2,000 people plunge to their deaths off a skyscraper just down I-87, and…
