Stark terror recollected in tranquility: I haven’t previously looked at the weblog Izzle Pfaff!, but idly clicking links I stumbled across a three-part memoir of the author’s high-school folly, full of needle-sharp recollections of the transcendent horridness of being a teenager. Context for the following: In a goofy moment in typing class, our hero has impulsively typed up a fake bomb threat, and then gone on to surreptitiously leave it in the school office. A little later, the school is evacuated. Uh oh.

Right about then, had any school official happened to look at my face, they would have been able to save themselves the trouble of the search, because I had the whole thing written right on my face. (And let me tell you how happy a lot of students were to have their lockers searched. Bye bye tobacco, booze and porn!) I felt a terrible sensation in my gut not unlike the feeling one gets when viewing a Steven Seagal movie; I wanted, on a cellular level, to die. I knew I was fucked; it was only a matter of time. And this was brought savagely home to me one moment later, when my friend Bill leaned in and whispered to me, “You’re my hero.” Because…oh yeah. Oh fuck. I had told people. Only two people at that point. But that was enough, and I knew it.

There was really only one thing to do, I realized. I could still make things better. So I immediately drove down to the river and drank beer with the rest of the student body. Things, I knew, were just getting started, and there was still ample time for me to make everything massively worse. So I did.

That’s from the first of the three long posts that tell the whole story. Particularly recommended if, like me, you’re about 2.75 blog mentions of “Thomas Friedman” or “inspection process” away from losing it. [10:43 AM]