About once a week for the past few weeks, I’ve been having these Vietnam acid flashbacks where a neuron has suddenly come out of retirement. I don’t know if I’m getting more sleep or way too little, but I will be driving to work or washing my hair and suddenly relive something I haven’t given a moment’s thought to in twenty years. I would love it if these were my opportunities to redo my first kiss or the day I got my driver’s license, but typically they are vivid Quantum Leaps back to that Thursday my friend Rob and I went to Forest Park and played racquetball in 1992. It’s possible that I’m dying, and my life is just flashing before my eyes very, very slowly.

Today, for some reason, I was thinking about my high school’s literary magazine, Sisyphus. I never submitted any stories to Sisyphus (in fact, I don’t know if anyone has ever read my fiction except for my father, who once fished a story of mine out of the garbage grave which it so richly deserved, but that’s a story for another time) but I did submit at least one poem a year.

My poetry style, best summed up as “what do you mean there’s already a Dr. Suess?” was generally a hit with the Sisyphus editorial board. Everything I ever submitted got printed, with the exception of one poem. The poem was called “Sisyphus,” and its central theme was that the editors of Sisyphus were posers with their heads shoved up their own asses so they could gaze at their navels from the inside.

Again: they had published the first drafts of everything I ever sent in. A couple of them were avowed fans. A couple of them were personal friends. Why would I do that? What motivates me to behave in this way? This morning, I suddenly found myself remembering that day at the Sisyphus meeting when I came to see what they thought of “Sisyphus” and my friend Adam looked at me as if to say, “Keep your voice down; if the others find out that was you, they’re going to jump you with socks full of quarters. Or at least write tortured free verse about their wish to do so.”

I think I was chafing at being on the same page as some anguished, black-eyeliner pretentious high school nonsense in the previous issue. I remember “Sisyphus” did explicitly insult the other writer by name. What can I tell you? I needed a rhyme for “grave,” and his name was Dave.

That must have been it. That sounds like the kind of thing that would have spurred my pen into action in high school.

“Here’s my new poem. I hope it’s good.”

“This is great, Jim! Let’s print it!”

“Here’s a rejected Pearl Jam lyric about when my junior prom date ruined my life forever.”

“This is great, Dave! Let’s print it!”

The universe would have its revenge on me a few years later when some friends started up a similar lit mag at college and asked me to be the chief literary editor. Our team of editors would read each submission and rate it; it was my job to wrangle these frustrated souls and use their ratings to make the final selections. The pieces were graded on a scale of 1 to 4, but that one soul-patched, black-turtlenecked asshole always insisted on giving each story a 2.5 or a 3.75. It was like he was offended that the Man would try to restrict him to four numbers, when Art has so many more shades. It’s a good thing I didn’t ask for thumbs-up or thumbs-down; he would have graded everything Tall, Purple, or Maximum Strength.

My God, it’s all coming back to me now. He used to supplement his ratings with explanatory comments (trivia: no comments were asked for, or indeed desired) like “the metaphors are too loose,” in effect turning his ratings of bad poetry into worse poetry. He was the same guy who would anonymously submit stories where two childhood friends would go on an idyllic fishing trip to share beers and jokes, and then the boat would suddenly turn over, and when they emerged from the water one of them was inexplicably covered with deadly snakes. It was, you see, Symbolic Irony, at least according to the flashing neon sign he stapled to every page. Looking back, it’s pretty clear God sent him to torment me for what I did to the Sisyphus board.

One year, a girl submitted a poem on a piece of paper that had lyrics to a Nine Inch Nails song written on the other side. We graded, approved, and printed the Nine Inch Nails song and credited her as the author. Nobody caught the error until she saw it in the published magazine. I ran a pretty tight ship.

We rejected a lot of submissions, but it felt like some kind of sin to throw any of them away. Many of them were original, handwritten works. I don’t know what happened to the accepted submissions, but I kept the rejects in a box under my bed for almost a decade. They may still be in my basement. It only seemed fair.