The Big Questions...

Via Mark Morford, in his latest column titled "Ex-Cheerleaders I Never Groped - In which Mark Morford survives his high school reunion, still unmarried and childless":

...This is the high school reunion. It is the most curious thing. You attend one and you are calmly slammed up against the wall of your past, and your head convulses and you memories frappé because there are all these, you know, people, and they seem to know you, and you take one look at them and you are hurled into a nifty time warp and you say, oh my God, that's right. I remember now.

...Ah, there it is. The true Ultimate Point. I feel it now. It is, of course, the hot breath of time, bearing down. This is the dark secret of reunions: They are all about mortality. About aging and the vagaries of the flesh and, you know, death -- how fast you are racing toward it, clinging to the walls of your life like a child being dragged off to bed and you feel compelled to ask yourself, Well, how are you thwarting that feeling? What have you learned? What the hell are you doing about it?

Are you beaten down? Are you singing as you go? Screaming? Have you made the right choices since you were 18? Do you know who you are and why you're here and did it turn out at all like you imagined? Well, why the hell not? Or if so, where are you going from here?