by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwriter@gmail.com

[Narration: And so now the breakaway private reunion was about to begin. It was a reunion of the ex bullied kids of Dunciedell High. They’d all been in contact via email from all over the country. Now finally they’d made it happen. Mal Matakinski had came up with the idea first – he was the unelected but seemingly fully accepted, leader of them all. The ‘Nerdies’ as they affectionately called themselves were now all together in one room. They had had a few nibbles and peripheral re-connect chats. Now was the time for Mal Matakinski to shine a little. The tall, late forty-something small business owner and ex high-school-nerd probably hadn’t yet reached his true potential. But at least now he was looking the part all suited up and being the leader of the Nerdies, and about to start the speech. Matakinski’s speech would be the official opening this rebel ex-Dunciedell High , ex-nerd re-union weekend. He began speaking in a confidant leader-like manner].

“We members of the E.H.S.N.C that is The Ex High School Nerds Coalition, aka us ‘Nerdies’ don’t know much – but we do know this:

Those mean, monsters – the popular ‘in-crowd girls’ who picked on us without mercy, who made our pimply bespectacled faces blanch for their and their lackeys based enjoyment? Well I can report that time has done its due justice – they now also look on the outside like the monsters they were on the inside when they were young. But I’m not telling you anything you all already don’t know- am I? But I think it’s worth revisiting these things, lest we forget.

Their formerly pert breasts are now around their knees, if not their ankles. Pretty soon they’ll be venturing out by themselves, slithering like snakes knocking on doors and sitting down on some barstool at some bar ordering the finest ‘bitch diesel’ on offer….while talking to some flakey old dick who’s doing the same for the same reasons. Excuse my exaggeration dear members, but the world needs laughter just as much as truth.

Those demon-chick-in-crowders former mean but still supple bright faces – yes the same very ones that they wore at Dunciedell High – have now totally collapsed under the weight of decades of concealer, caked on make-up & the collective weight of mega-wrinkle making mean-girl mean facial contortions. Truly they look awful friends, far more ugly than we were. But we were only ugly only on the surface at Dunciedell, never was our ugliness deeply ingrained, at Dunciedell.

Their mean-girl hair once long flowing & lustrous, is now as frizzy as their bad to non existent ideas once were, and surely still are. The mean-girls hair is now so frizzy that some scientists contend they may have indeed had a full dose of radiation applied to it by their local suburban beauty therapists, in a vain CIA vs JFK like effort to hide the sad truth of their decay. The old bags always wanted Jackie-O’s hair, but they got Oswald’s friends!

The now saggy, wrinkled, soggy & frizzy old high-school mean girls only joy in life is hating their rich ex husbands, who they have at least half cleaned out of all their cash, cars, children & property – and of course they took 100% of his joy, that goes without saying. Well that’s not entirely true – they do get to mistreat their customers at their go-to mean rich girl jobs – at the malls & charity shops that they now all work at – or should I say ‘dispense sneers at’.

I could go on in further laundry-list like fashion – but I’m sure you all E.H.S.N.C’s catch my drift. I’ve surely covered the basics of mean-high-school-bitchology 101.

So let’s now refrain to raise a glass to glorious, glorious, poetic justice – for it has been done. And as a special sign of respect – let us do our special unique sign of high respect: Let us raise our eye-glasses to the sky & make a high-voltage transformer humming sound, while learn forward with a slooping stance, slightly to the left. This greeting greeting has served us well much better than the ‘secret handshakes’ from those other shadowy lesser IQ clubs that abound – The Free Masons et al.

Great now we have done that now please forgive me – I have been talking too much of the bitches, & not enough of the mean high school bastard jocks. I will now make amends immediately.

And what of the ‘Mean Jocks’ from Dunciedell High? – well, for the most part they just became bald, boring, hen-pecked, pen pushing schlubbs in some non-descript office, still dreaming away at the keyboard of their intellectual social & physical high point in life – Zombie High School limited aka Dunciedell High. They of course are hardened bullies – rumor has it they only shed a tear when they remember that no longer can give us nerds wedge-ies or verbally harangue us at will in the hallways.

They still dream of the shitty fake glory the got playing football for Dunciedell High – didn’t they get beaten one hundred nil every game? They were f*uckign useless! And of course their former muscles are gone, their skin pasty, their eyes crossed, their words mumbled and barely audible.

Their youthful confidence has left them entirely. For the Jocks thought they were on top of the social pecking order, then they turned eighteen, and never mentally recovered. Oh in looking back how delightful the Schadenfreude is fellows!

So ladies & gents of the E.H.S.N.C – let’s again raise our annual ‘get f*cked glass’ to that sweet slither of justice too those now pathetic losers who used to bully us so long ago with reckless demonic intentions and reckless abandon.

Yes – I’m sure they – the mean girls and the jocks – still have their little ‘mean arseholes from high-school reunions’ – where they play act that they have not been totally found out by life, and re-live their past glory days of picking on the temporarily socially weak – i.e. us ‘nerds’. . .

…but alas it can’t work…and deep down they know it…

Because even though the world is indeed a f*cked-up place….

Those assholes from high school still aren’t capable of creating anything good…

let’s face it my fellows – if they were still assholes by age 16 – nothing was going to ever change..as the Jesuits correctly alluded to long ago in their tale of ‘show me the boy & I will show you the man’ etc.

Now yes I have been one sided in my appraisals of them. Of course I applaud the reformed high-school bully come good. That my friends is as beautiful as the lark singing right outside your morning window. Let us always repay good with good – I talk not of the well reformed high-school bullies out there. God speed to them, they have, I must sorely admit moved mountains to rehabilitate themselves. But they are surely as rare as Helium-3.

Of course unlike us nerds – they mostly didn’t graduate from ‘proper courses’ – you know Maths, Chemistry, Economics, Physics etc. In High School they naturally finally graduated to the now barely living, sloop-walking, poetic-justice-empty receptacles they see daily in their cracked mirrors and in the windows of shop fronts as they shuffle by them. They amble along with the gait of a true ex-convict with a long ancestral knowledge of crookedness imbued into their DNA. For surely – as sure as gravity warps sunlight – their ancestors were a long ancient shitty lineage too . For the particular blood lineage of the high-school bully/mean girl sure goes as far back as the primordal ‘cave bully’ times.

Yes fellows, I’m sure my ancient grandad-nerd Eugene, was having his fig leaf regularly stolen by Brad the neanderthal. I’m sure if he complained of his nakedness to Brad, he would have been clubbed over his overly large head, with his ancient proto-glasses – perhaps transparent christals of some sort – duly ending up smashed on the ground in the process.

Yes my nerd friends – all in all regarding the fate of our High-School bullies, summarily speaking – their ‘Just deserts’ have been eaten….nay gorged down on at the ‘all night’, ‘all you can eat’ buffet of that hard unforgiving taskmaster known old lady time.

But comrades, let me now show my softer more forgiving side. For vengeance is not so admirable. My soft side has not entirely bean beaten out of me. It does exist for sure. Luckily it has not been made quite so as extinct as the Tasmanian Tiger from all that childhood high-school trauma.

Now fellows and fellow-esses of the E.H.S.N.C let me float an umpopular idea: perhaps we good reputable citizen folk should even thank those now aged, zombified, mean ‘cool kids’ of yesteryear…

No no, quieten your mutterings… let me explain: they made us battle hardened for later life, we saw life’s bullsh*t early, we dodged it all so much better…they gave us all a distinct advantage, don’t you see?!

This is why we ex-nerds – our should I say current glorious nerds? – have risen to at or near the top of our respective fields. Where we have nor attained external material & career success we have at least retained & developed our highly attuned excellent knowledge seeking & respect of true wisdom! And that my fellow Nerdies, if you’ll excuse the double negative – is not nothing.

Of course fellows – I hear your pertinent cries. I’m not living in la-la-land. All that prison-like pain, anxiety and grief – while it did eventually build upwards our characters, it still wasn’t entirely in-the-end-beneficial for all of us. No No No – there was some collateral damage…perhaps more than some...yes…we lost quite a few nerd-souls…some of them are rocking back & forth in some halfway house, or more likely a quasi -halfway halfway house….or perhaps never left their parents basements…many more of us still reside in dingy clutter-filled units in roughshod probably violent drug-filled suburbs of those many overly populated hell-holes – the worst of which being of course the ghastly, ghastly Schmelbourne City.

But that bad stuff for us collectivized-aging-ex-bullied Nerdies is not the rule at all my comrades – as you all know firsthand as you go about your stellar lives! Many of us have even become ‘captains of industry’ or Top University professors for crissakes! And on that, I don’t need to tell our colleague over their, the one now hiding in the corner, Sir Wangle McTangle – that his beer-cosie that also cools your beer in only seven nanoseconds hasn’t changed the world for the better.

And what of the bad, I hear you say? It is true my friends – a bit of ‘Colat Dam’ – ‘collateral damage’ – is all but the the price of engaging in the ‘Nerds Vs Jocks Everlasting War’…and don’t be so foolish to think that the word war is an overstatement, is made-up, or a delusion of the mind. It’s a capital W War, indeed a War of good vs evil. Alas back then at Dunciedell we didn’t know we were fighting pure evil. Now my Nerdies, we are not so naive – nor so foolish. Now we have the knowledge, now we have the advantage. After all – you all now the adage knowledge is power, I don’t even need to ask.

The Nerd Vs Jock War is on and always has been, since Eugene & Brad. And I now say in hushed tones:

It is all one hundred percent worth it, my fellow brilliant Nerdies of the E.H.S.N.C. After all – the adage is ‘The Nerds win in the end’, not ‘The Jocks win in the end’, is it not? But alas – we probably should be good winners – even if it’s a hard and bitter pill to swallow. After all ‘payback’ is a thing. But do we need to seek it? No, of course not. Life has figured it all out for us perfectly, we didn’t need to lift a finger towards the arms of our glasses even a millimeter.

And in that vein, I’d like to say I’m not happy to see the Jocks/Mean girls deteriorate into the walking dead corpses they today now so surely are…

I really would like to do that….but I gotta be honest – it’s a beautiful thing to see them suffer….it really is!

After all – they can only blame themselves…they cold have easily quit being – and please excuse my bad Scottish accent – ‘total nasty coonts’, at the age of twenty five…

Yet they doubled down…

They cold have again – easily quit being total coonts at age thirty-five…

Yet again – they doubled down…

In fact…they cold have even easily quit being total demonically inspired total coonts at age forty five...

Yet they again, again, again – simply doubled right down…

et cetera, etcetera, et cetera… – and to continue with the Latin phraseology – mala facere elegerunt – they chose to do wrong.

So my friends while they still insist on being aging mean high school coonts…surely, I am free to report the dry facts of it all.

And now my glorious victorious soldiers of the E.H.S.N.C Army – my Nerdies – let us all retire to the bar of our privately hired club…

aka an oasis of the Post High-School world…

The one where we still ‘Rule OK’ despite and in-spite of it all. I declare the Ex-Nerdies of Dunciedell High school re-union begun! Now lets file out of the room in an orderly fashion”.

[Narration: As the celebratory clapping of all the audience of Nerdies had just only finished, it was then just before the first nerdie had left the room that someone dressed as the buildings maintenance staff rushed in, pushing his way through the amassed Nerdies, storming the stage and aggressively he grabbed the mic. It was the now-well-aged ‘King of the ex-bullies’ from Dunciedell High – Tony Klackener. But people didn’t know that was who he was yet. He now started talking far more calmly than was expected given his abrupt Napoleon-like entrance.]

You probably don’t recognise me – but I heard all this as I was outside checkin’ a broken light switch. Yes it’s me Tony Klackener. It was me who bullied you all like mad at Dunciedell. I’ll say it now I’m sorry for all that and on behalf of the cronies that egged me on to pick on you guys mercessly. Carrie – I’m sorry I called you a ‘tiny titty girl from a tiny titty city’. Geoffrey I’m sorry I stole you lunch money for three years straight, and I still owe your parents for that exploratory surgery to recover your coke-bottle glasses. Lex, I’m sorry I punched you in the nuts half way through your valedictorian speech. Tamara I’m sorry I…well look you all know what kinds of horrible things I did! – I’ll just say it here on my knees…I’M FUCKING SORRY OK!! Now I don’t want to stay long, I’ve disrupted things enough ok? But I’ll just say one more thing. It might help you understand things better. What you guys got, bullies like me got a lot worse at home. Why the f*ck do you think we were like that? We didn’t at heart wan’t to be like that. As was said from this speech that i listened in on – you could see in our faces were were being fucked up by something dark. What he -Mal Matakinsi said was true – it was a WAR. And by the way Mal, that time I buzzed cut your long flowing but greasy as hill hair while my cronies tied you to that chair. What Mal said just now was right in what he said – it was a Nerd Vs Bully War. But he was only half right. The Nerd Vs Bully War at Dunciedell has just one front of the War. You guys didn’t see the other theatre of War – the Bully Kid vs his Bully Parent or if in the rare cases that the bullies parents were still together – then sometimes we were bullied by both parents. Let me talk about me. I got punched at breakfast, punched at dinner & literally had to scrape shit of my street sweeper dad’s shoes. Once because I hadn’t done a good enough job at wiping the bench – he even made me lick that fresh dog shit that was stuck in the groves of his work boots right off his shoe.Then he made me thank him for him allowing me to spit it out instead of swallowing it. My dad was such a mean drunk we were in constant fear that he’d beat us all up. His beatings often included my mum and once or twice it went so far as to reach even my seven-year-old sister. And after my dad had finished, our mum would turn on me because I was the oldest one and somehow that meant it was my fault. And I could tell you a lot more sh*t – like how he would kill my pets in front of me, but I won’t because it’ll just make you sick ok?! I know now you’ve heard enough to get the gist of it all. So now you know why. I’m not saying it as an excuse for what I and the others did to yas all. All bullies everywhere had lives kinda like that and worse. And Mal Matakinski – he was right in his speech – we’ve lost compared to you the guys the ones we dumped all our shit from home on in Dunciedell High. So can I ask you all to quit your fucken wallowing in pity ok? Why the fuck would you make an event of all this past pain? Take your fucking heads out of your asses – each and every one of you!

[Narration: Tony Klackener physically left the stage then through the crowded room in mix of diplomat style swiftness and military type rigidity. This time on the way out he didn’t need to push his way through. Though the Nerdies were all in shock, they all parted to let him through. After his brutal but genuine words, they’d all realized their folly. They now saw things far more clearly. No one said anything just yet, they’d need a few drinks before they could collect their thoughts and chat about it all to each other. As the Nerdies – including Mal Matakinski who himself was still frozen on stage – stood in the room, they all looked at each other rather sheepishly. They were all an equal mix of being embarrassed, confused, angry, enlightened, and humbled.

As the noise of Tony’s exit dissipated – his loud steps on the hard flooring no barely audible, they all slumped out the door in single file, avoiding direct eye contact to go on to the bar as was originally planned. They knew that the wind had been taken out of their sails, but it was also true that they were happy to have some new information to mull over, to ingest and to try to come to terms with. Despite their party being crashed, they all knew this was not the time to be angry, upset or even bamboozled. After all, It was actually a good thing. And as Mal Matakinski had said matter-of-factly in his opening speech, they were no longer high-school sissies anymore – they could well handle the ugly truth when it arose.

Though this sentiment was true of the Nerdies group as a whole, because of his leadership position Mal Matakinski himself did start to have more conflicting thoughts: should he have stepped in early and stopped Tony Klackener’s speech?, or was it right to let the truth or falseness flow from Tony’s Klackeners lips? Could have just pushed or manhandled him off stage? Was this just a opportunistic stunt by Klackener? Was he re-bullying the Nerdies all over again? Had he Mal Matakinski failed them as a leader all by not acting swiftly? And Why did he freeze on stage like that?

Perhaps what was more annoying than what had just happened, was the fact that Matakinski couldn’t know exact truth of the situation. Surely a man of his now ample life experience should know what the case was. Was it was a case of the Nerdies metaphorical myopia being at fault, or was Klackener simply the returning bully-villain here, having never mended his mean ways? Maybe both parties were right and everything had played out perfectly to uncover the true anthropological complexity of the situation?.

Matakinski was looking forward to having a big pint of beer with his fellow Nerdies. He also had the unnerving thought of what if Tony Klackener turns up – it might get worse than what just happened, after all alcohol is on hand! All hell could break loose! He noticed was losing a bit of composure. Was Matakinski the supposed calm ‘leader of the Nerdies’ mind running away on him? He didn’t like these conjured up feelings.

For Mal Matakinski, It was all now feeling a little bit deja-vu, it was almost like he was back at that dreaded Dunciedell High, being bullied all over again. A socially backward teenager under attack, having no idea how to navigate the social landscape whatsoever. He tied to block it out.

As he was catching up to the group, who had gained ground on him while going to the next venue, Matakinski then pulled himself together. He reminded himself he was actually a very accomplished man in his late forties. This helped his heart rate return to normal. He forgave himself and kept walking, quickening his pace. The up & coming pint of his current favourite beer – Indian Pale Ale – would taste pretty good he figured. He told himself that he had wanted the weekend to be interesting anyway.

It was very much the truth that Matakinski was an aging ‘confirmed bachelor’. He was saddled with the typically trailed off social life that all those who embark on that journey do. Matakinski’s life had indeed been far to dull for too far at least a decade. He knew it unquestionably. Dullness but also stability had fallen swiftly on him at age thirty-five like a falling theatrical curtain. But at heart he knew this effect this wasn’t exactly rare, or strange – it was just life playing out. So what was he complaining about? Life was probably just giving him what he needed. A nice little jolt in the arm. The bad memories of Dunciedell, his fellow Nerdies around him, & Tony Klackener’s dramatic unannounced return was surely simply just the mule by which the ‘doctors orders’ were being accomplished.

It was either that or perhaps there was no meaning to it all. Perhaps the universe wasn’t interested Matakinski at all. Perhaps that was the entire problem. Perhaps that’s why he was now hurtling towards a very bad outcome while he sipped his overly tasty, extra hoppy India pale ale as he chatted to the now well composed also drinking Nerdies. This is the problem with life. No one really knows anything about it. The blind lead are leading the blind mostly pretending they can see a lot more than misshapen fuzzy indistinct outlines. As far as human progress in concerned – It’s all a giant scam. But as Mal Matakinski always said – at least it’s an interesting scam. And the Nerdies reunion had barely even begun yet. Their was a whole two days to go, packed with the usual type activities. It wasn’t clear yet as they drank more of the night away whether how the weekend started would make the weekend better or worse. But Matakinski knew you could never prove a negative anyway – it’s not like he could go back in time and stop Tony Klackener from entering the room.

And so the future held, what the future held. Some minds were changed a lot, some barely at all. Some minds had even reversed their original position, and thought worse of it all. But most felt the Truth had at least partially appeared that weekend. And what can be better than capital T Truth? It is the medicine that tastes bad but slowly cures.

Not long after the weekend was over Mal Matakinski received an anonymous email. it had the following points:

It was a pity that Matakinski hadn’t done a few more checks on what had happened to the ex-bullies of Dunciedell High. If he had just done his due diligence as a leader, he would have read the file on Tony Klackener. It could of all been so easily avoided. Who would have seen that after an embarrassing drunken moment on his part, he’d be unanimously deposed, summarily banned from the Nerdies entirely and facing the ignominy of having his former arch enemy now appointed the new leader of the Nerdies?

Although in time Matakinski did feel better about it all when decades later while he was in his sixties his novel ‘Full Circle Indeed’ became the biggest New York Times best seller of all time. This is not to say the intervening years in the wilderness were not difficult – of course they were. But luckily making ‘stain glass windows out of broken beer bottles’ so to speak, had always at least ‘kind of’ been a hobby of his all throughout his life. He was glad that weekend had happened, and the fallout. For It created a lot of things that would never have existed otherwise.

Nowadays so many years later Mal Matakinski realized It’s really just a ‘minor pity’ that it was only the American readers ever really got him as a late-blooming writer, but then again, by then America was the singular surviving true Western-cultured country to still exist. No wonder the rest of the world hated ‘Full Circle Indeed’. During his last few years Matakinski would chalk his trickling & flagging international sales of ‘Full Circle Indeed’ to ‘cultural misunderstandings’. All in all it was quite fitting in a way, given how everything had started off with him while he was at Dunciedell. For Matakinski had by the end of his life come to fully accept that Tony Klackener’s sentiments about Dunciedell were totally right all those years ago, when he’d stormed the Nerdies’ Reunion stage: the problem at base, was simply a clash of cultures.

Due to demand ‘Full Circle Indeed’ is currently out of stock, but a reprint is on its way soon, but only in America].

The End