All year long people have asked What are you working on now? and I’ve answered Not much.
This is true insofar as I throw away ninety-eight percent of what I write (and this is not an exaggeration). I have produced enough material for two long books but didn’t like any of it, so I erased the lot.
Lately though I have been working very intensely on a top secret project that has required me to research the fashions of the eighties. Specifically, this involved opening my yearbooks.
Oh, the horror of the decade. The best picture I’ve found so far is an image of the punk kids sitting in a hallway, hunched over their lunch trays, squinting up at the photographer suspiciously. It was not in fact safe to eat in the main lunchroom, and this is I am fairly sure what inspired the attitude and posture of cool that infected my social scene.
But regardless, the fact is, looking at the photographs, we were simply not in any way radical. The strangest thing about my appearance? I had straight short bobbed hair.
Not by current standards a transgression. Though back in the day revolutionary.