High school was the best days of my life but not for the reasons you think

If I ever had to go back and relive an era of my life, it’d be my high school days, but with one caveat: I’d want nothing to do with the actual school.

2005-06 to 2008-09 was a magical era. For starters, my middle school days were so bad that I had nowhere to go but up as I steamrolled into high school.

Still, high school itself was the worst part of the era. I mean, who the hell wants to spend most of their existence sitting in an aging building (built in 1939) that was boiling hot in August, September, October, April, and May, and so cold that you needed a jacket in November, December, January, and February, while March was the wild card?

And don’t get me started on how they packed us like sardines in a cafeteria during lunch, where we ate so much garbage that I’m surprised we don’t all have cancer diagnoses or at least chronic health issues. Yet, anyway…

Honestly, high school was fucking forgettable. But man, was that era perfect.

What I miss isn’t school. It’s what existed around it. Movement, freedom, proximity, unstructured time, and people who hadn’t yet been scattered by systems and survival.

What made my high school days perfect?

Where do I begin? I might start with this: I found myself in high school. No, not as a writer, but someone who started living a fitness lifestyle and taking it above and beyond. That started in June 2005 when I was a scrawny little fourteen-year-old. The rest, as they say, is history.

Playing “backyard sports” but somehow in the front yard

After school, we couldn’t wait to go outside and throw the football. That was one of my methods of cardio back then. We’d be out there for hours, homework forgotten, in my cousin’s front yard.

And if we weren’t in the mood for it, we played basketball in the driveway. My cousin, myself, and the frenemy I talked about a while back all had basketball hoops, so we’d play nearly every day we didn’t have a football in our hands.

When we looked toward the horizon and to the next hill over, we’d see the bustling section of uptown Steubenville. In the evening, it’d be all lit up. The good part of town that the media never bothered to show you, opting instead for the rundown areas near the river.

A mall you could spend hours in

Every time I visit that old mall, I walk through it. It’s dark, dank, the floor’s a roller coaster, shit’s leaking from the ceiling, and about seven stores are left from my high school days. I’d say there are maybe a dozen stores in there now, and about a dozen people walking through the place at any given time.

Even when I was in high school, the place was long past its heyday. Still, it had a movie theater, an anchor store with a “living room” you could lounge in and nobody gave a damn, a video game outlet, a CD store, three restaurants, two pretzel stands, a pizza parlor, an ice cream stand, five jewelry stores, a supplement outlet, a bookstore I’d sit in a corner and read in, a joke store, and four anchor stores.

There wasn’t much to do in the area, but at least we had a place to convene that you couldn’t get lost in. But somehow, three hours would pass and it felt like seconds. Five if you decided to watch a flick.

Family functions

Yep, the ones you don’t appreciate until you realize they’ll never be the same. Today, my extended family is all over the United States, from Texas to Florida to South Carolina, and everywhere in between.

Once upon a time, it wasn’t like that. There was an era when we were all together. And even if we didn’t know it yet, the last hurrah came during those old high school days.

I would elaborate more on those awesome family times here, but instead, I thought I’d inject them into my dystopian survival novella, Beyond the Lost Horizon. Quinn Cozens’ flashbacks to better times mimic my own. Hell, every one of Quinn’s flashbacks in that book are so identical to mine, you could play montages of them side by side and barely see a difference.

If you’re a fan of dystopian survival fiction that touches on themes like libertarianism, revisionist history, and nostalgia before everything else, you’ll want Beyond the Lost Horizon. Get it now for a kick-ass price and experience America’s ultimate collapse alongside Quinn.