Halloween Countdown: October 10 – she had synthesized her emotions

Up for something really creepy? Like high school?

Seriously, H.P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of alien gods have got nothing on the Pavlovian social control experiment and artificial drama factory known as grades nine through twelve. Even rebellion and non-conformity are factored into the institutional feedback loop in the form of detention hall or a swiftly deployed SWAT team. It’s a type of predestination so total that John Calvin would have wept tears of joy…providing he could look past the ban on school prayer.

And in the end you find out how meaningless it all really was. If you’re lucky, you might come away with some lifelong friendships or happy memories, but the rest is dust, scattered to the winds and soon forgotten. The fact that I know so many people who want nothing more than to go back and relive those nightmarish days (“and do things differently,” they say. Ha!) disturbs me a little.

“Doesn’t it bother you, not knowing what the ‘kids’ are into these days?” a thirty-something friend asked me a while back, the reaper’s distant hoofbeats goading him onto the gilded path of wistful nostalgia and youth envy.

“Not at all,” I replied.

Today’s Halloween selection is a disturbingly clinical dissection of adolescent romance by Washington, DC art-punks, No Trend. It may not seem like it fits with the theme at first, but bear with it, and all shall be revealed.

No Trend – Teen Love (from the Teen Love 12” EP, 1983)