A couple days ago at work I was in a meeting. Things hadn't really gotten started yet, and we were all just kind of shooting the shit, and then, for reasons that are TOTALLY UNCLEAR to me, a coworker turned to me and said, "Hey, Skot, how does 'Here I Go Again' go? C. here doesn't know that song." What? I looked at C., who is young and did not grow up in this blighted country, and she looked back at me expectantly. I turned back to the other coworker. "You mean the Whitesnake song?" This wasn't really happening, I was sure. "Yeah! C. doesn't know if she knows it. Sing it for her!"

And that is how--if not why--I found myself singing "Here I Go Again" at work to a table full of colleagues, in my best lounge baritone. I gave it a nice swing, I thought. I was feeling nothing like a drifter born to walk alone. I had made up my mind. I wasn't wasting no more time! Here I go again! My tablemates erupted as my voice cracked at one point, and someone said, "All we need now is Tawny Kitaen!" And C. said, "Oh, I know that song! Okay. But who is Tawny Kitaen?"

How depressing.

This was starting to get sort of out of hand, but I couldn't just leave it be, no. Who is Tawny Kitaen? Give me a fucking break. How can you live in this country and not know who Tawny Kitaen is? I had to fix things quick, so when I got back to my office, I quickly found the Whitesnake video on the horribly, awfully named Youtube. I sent the link to C., explaining that Tawny Kitaen was in their videos because at the time she was going out with Dave Coverdale. Then I vomited for a few minutes into my office garbage can, because I was spending time searching for Whitesnake videos and explaining things like Dave Coverdale.

C. wrote back. "Wow, she's really . . . flexible." Yes, and skanky! Let's not forget that. C. continued, "So did you guys all wear your hair like that?" Hopefully referring here to the band members and not Kitaen, but on the other hand, was there a difference?

My first reaction was, "Of course not!" And my second reaction was, "Oh, fuck, of course we did." Well, we tried, anyway, those of us who were sufficiently Idaho-ified to know nothing of Goth and sufficiently repelled by Idahoitude to feel that country was anathema. So of course we did awful things to our hair. And to our bodies.

So tomorrow I am taking a bullet in the spirit of raising office morale. I am bringing in a photo of me from 1987, when I was a freshman in college. (I would totally post an image of it here, had I but only a scanner, knowledge of what to do with a scanner, and then the competence to figure out how to host an image and then link it over here, none of which I actually possess.)

In this photo, I am standing outside of my dorm. My blonde hair--and my, didn't I have a lot of it 19 years ago!--is resplendent and cascading off of my skull like spun, hairy gold! It is carelessly yet artfully feathered on the sides, and above my shoulders the viewer may glimpse--can it be?--yes, it is a mullet perm. How it sparkles in the sunlight, much like the two bottles of beer I hold in my hands! In this photo, I am also wearing a Quiksilver t-shirt as well as some unfortunately tight grey shorts emblazoned with tiny yellow sharks. SURF'S UP, IDAHOANS! I am also seen to be wearing cherry-red Ray-Bans. This whole horrible tableau should be adopted as photodocumentation for the Wikipedia entry on "cultural illegitemacy." The ridiculous surf garb, in fact, was bought for me by my grandmother--you can read that again--whom I would visit in L.A. during summers. This shit came from the same shopping trip where I improbably managed to convince her to buy me a "Mr. Zog's Sex Wax" t-shirt.

My grandmother. I'm pretty sure that this is why she died. Her last words were almost certainly, "I can't live any more knowing that I bought my grandson that t-shirt." This was the same grandmother who took me to movies (at my insistence) such as Aliens--which she slept through, which I thought was fucking hilarious--and, I swear to God--48 Hours, a movie she found thoroughly debased and insulting and profane. Minutes later in the car, when we arrived back at her house in Chatsworth, we discovered that there was a power outage. "Well, isn't this just a bunch of bullshit!" screamed my very proper Lutheran grandmother. "Fuck!" I sat there quietly enjoying all of this, feeling extra-great in my ridiculous new Ocean Pacific clothes, and sensed I was learning something crucial about what adults say versus what they do.

But you only think you learn things. You remember events after you've already fucked up, and think, "I should have known." But you did know! It doesn't matter. I'm an adult now, and I only think I've learned. But two days ago, I was singing Whitesnake songs at the office. That doesn't sound like someone who has learned anything. And tomorrow, because I haven't learned anything at all, I'm going to take that photo from 1987 into the office to show to my coworkers. Why not? Perhaps the horror of the photo will move one of my coworkers to holler, "Well, isn't this just a bunch of bullshit!" in a sort of unwitting homage to my deceased grandmother, and then I can inwardly smile and think:

Here I go again.