10 August 2004. I got back from my trip north today but wasn't up to typing this until 11 August, but figure it belongs to this date. It'll be a while before I get fully up-to-date (i.e., have an entry for every day since I began the blog), but I'm sure I will because of the multi-part essay I have for the missing entries when I get around to giving it the revision it needs. I won't be able to do that for a few days, at least, because I have a review deadline four days away to meet first.

My trip was to a high school reunion where I saw a few people I hadn't seen for FIFTY YEARS. Actually, they were at a centennial celebration of Harbor View, the neighborhood I lived in from age 6 to age 12, that happened to be going on the same weekend as the high school reunion. As I've mentioned in a previous blog, I hope one day to compose an epic poem one layer of which will be about my boyhood there.

At my high school reunion, I ran into others I hadn't seen for years, notably two of the girls I had secret crushes on and hadn't talked to since high school (although I saw but didn't talk to one at my class's fifth reunion). One I'm almost sure went for me in junior high school before I was out of my girl-hating stage, then went out-of-my-league in high school. The other had too many steadies! She was the only one I actually almost asked out. I had heard she'd broken up with one guy, but the day after I found that out (probably belatedly) and got confirmation of her status from someone, she'd already become the steady girlfriend of the guy she eventually married. I chatted briefly with a third female classmate who went to a different junior high than I but whom I thought attractive in high school; she (I think) had been going steady with the boy she married since junior high school or earlier. All three still haz it!

I also met a woman who is in touch with one of my best friends at high school (probably my best friend during my senior year) and lost touch with after he went off to Greenwich Village after college to become an actor. She's going to send me his e.mail address. All this got me remembering intensely into long-ago situations I haven't thought about for years (as well as long-ago situations I've often thought about). Result: my fragile psyche has been kind of loopy since last Friday. I truly like people but they too easily discombobulate my synapses. The ideal class reunion for me would be at some luxury hotel and take a month. I'd stay in my room, or leave the hotel entirely except for lunch and dinner, which I'd have with different classmates. And I'd spend the weekends in a cave somewhere.

No poems related to my experience hit me, but on my drive north, I had an idea for a mathemaku I later made a sketch of and will definitely finish, and while at the hotel I stayed at while in my hometown, I wrote a few lines of something that I'm fairly confident will turn into a solitextual Poem poem. On my drive back, I had some great plot ideas for plays, but don't know whether I'll ever get to them or not. I thought about a sequence of mathemaku, each of which will have an astrological sign as its dividend, but I didn't get too far with it. I thought it had commercial as well as aesthetic possibilities.