Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Dragging Along in My Ideas


5th December 2017

Dear Cassi,

Dragging along in my ideas I have to clear my head of all the nonsense of high school, because this year my character, JonnyAmerican, will graduate. The funny thing is that I think I’ve gotten over high school. Every now and then a memory pops up that upsets me, sure, but that is more do to being reminded of other things that invoked the same emotions. 

The funny thing about memory is that you tend to remember the beginning and the end, but all that stuff in the middle gets fuzzy. Still then, I have not decided if Jonny’s younger brother, Nick, will be depicted as attending high school after Jonny. I really haven’t given nick an age at this point. Some of my memories could be attributed to Nick but the point is that at the end of this year I need to be focusing on Jonny after high school. 

My high school was a remnant of Cold War America with the mascot being originally a titan missile. The Titan family of rockets was the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile operated by the United States, and they had been around since 1959 with the Titan I being taken out of service in 1965.

The Titans are now a thing of the past being retired in 2005, but even as I went to high school from 1994 to 1998 the namesake of the school mascot had been out of service for nearly thirty years. They had changed it to the Greek Titan by then, but the legacy of the cold war stuck. 

When this was adopted the Titan was a symbol of American strength. The missile was a great protector that kept the Russians from waging war against us. Then the Cold War ended in the eighties and so it had become a symbol of American decay.

At the main entrance to the school they had built a mock launch pad that looked like a bowl to hold a boiler flask. In this trees had been planted making the sculpture look like the ruins of some high tech facility.  That was my high school all right, a ruin of a better time inhabited by the ghosts of the past.

Rise from the ashes, little sister,


Richard Leland Neal

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