I been thinking about my meetup with my old pal Dr. John (good lord, it was already TWO weeks ago! I hope we don’t let ANOTHER twenty years slip between our next meetup…).

During the course of our somewhat drunken weepy reminiscing, John responded to my bitter recollections of some of our high school classmates by wondering what they were like now. “Who knows? Maybe they’re good decent interesting people now,” he said.

“Who cares?” I replied, then went on to express a certain sympathy for the protagonists of the recent spate of high school shootings. While I agree that such acts are morally reprehensible, I said, I can understand the anger, fear and frustration that spending time cooped up in a faceless bureaucracy of a purely constructed and arbitrary social caste can bring on.

That minor controversial point aside, in the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about my immediate and bitter response. I’m coming to the realization now that I’ve essentially pigeonholed, generalized and demonized unpleasant people from my past. My high school nemeses are sociopathic torturers, my first girlfriend a psychotic angry drunk, one of my various ex-bosses a less intelligent Simon Legree (OK, I still hold by that one).

I guess that all of those people might actually be okay – maybe I’d even get along with them now, maybe we’d even be solid friends. Maybe I should be less rigid and more open and understanding.

Nah. Why screw with the personality that’s brought me so far?