Nostalgic Slams, Contemporary Blows

Kolektyw Kariatyda. CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to the bitchy ways of teenage girls and a classmate’s whiny-victorious, “Miss, she has a slam book,” my equally bitchy eighth-grade computer science teacher confiscated the fantastic slam book I’d created.1 We’ll set aside the fact that said teacher was both exasperated and taking great pleasure in the act of discipline—for one thing, because the slam book I made again my senior year of high school was a massive hit that was never seized by the authorities, making its way under desks from one hand and classroom to another throughout the day, only to find its way back to me by the time last period was over, more filled than before with new entries and new reactions to old entries. The official accusation might have been that such a thing was aiding and abetting fickle teen attention to stray from the straight and narrow: the cell phones of the day. If that was the case, it was only for the briefest of moments, nothing…