“A TEEN STAR FOR A NEW, BLEAKER AGE”: Have been looking over the zine I used to do with my best friend from high school. It went through 26 issues (# -1 through # 24) and I said a lot of stupid stuff, oh well. But it was a good exercise in humility, like reading old diaries. Angsty, Magritte-influenced (yet still cliched) fiction; obsessive gay-pride stuff; and willful obscurity. It was fun though. Certainly a precursor to this blog. Lists of “vanished joys of childhood” (your sister making you a latchhook rug for Christmas; making kazoo noises without a kazoo; the intoxicating smell of blue ditto ink); reviews that reminded me to dig out my Severed Heads tapes, get Diamanda Galas’s “The Singer,” and re-read Genet to see if I still think he’s terrific; “evolutionary ideas that failed” (trilobites of the tundra, rampaging squid of the deciduous forest–no, I don’t know why we printed this list any more than you do); a paean to PBS because it used taxpayers’ cash to run unpopular programming; bizarre rants that occasionally skidded into actual insight or oblique expression; and a music review that ended, “(This is the end of the review, in case you didn’t guess)”. It was strange to watch the trajectory of my high school years–junior year was totally fun, a big punk rock party, probably the happiest year of my pre-20s life, but then in senior year a lot of things fell apart (breakups, illnesses, hideous actions by ex-friends–objectively hideous, not just hideous from the perspective of melodramatic teens) and the tone of the zine got much darker and angrier. Odd to revisit the time when I could quote the first paragraph of Neuromancer from memory, shouted “Keep hell beautiful! I want it nice when I’m there!” at anti-gay protesters, and used pretentious Brit-spellings like “recognised” and “stylised.” Grunt. Sigh.