So, the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, does it? Well, have you considered reseeding, or even laying down some new sod on your side? Might be easier than trying to climb over that damn fence all the time.

I'm tan, rested and ready to face another week. OK, that's a lie. I'm pasty, exhausted and thoroughly unprepared. But humor me, would ya?

Say, did you hear the one about the dumb blonde who, when her college adviser suggested she study abroad, complained, "Gee, I think I'd rather study a dude." (Oops, I'll bet we're not supposed to tell those jokes anymore, are we? It's politically incorrect and simply inappropriate to stereotype a group for the sake of ridicule. My most sincere apologies. Henceforth, I promise: No more college-adviser jokes.)

I wonder: When you're dying, what if someone else's life passes before your eyes, and it's a much better life than the one you led? Yachts and caviar, mansions and servants waiting on you hand and foot, never standing in line at the DMV. "Wait, wait," you cry, "there's been a terrible mistake. I got the wrong life. I want a do-over, dammit! I demand to speak to the authoriti ---- pfft" Beeeeeep.

Of Rutgers, and 'Harvey the Homo'

I thought of Harvey last week when I heard the news out of Rutgers and saw Ellen Degeneres's widely circulated video message (http://bit.ly/9icnF7).

I hate thinking of Harvey because his memory forces me to confront an ugliness in myself. It’s an ancient ugliness, one for which the statute of limitations probably is up. But it’s still ugly, and it’s mine, and I don’t like owning it.

See, Harvey was the guy that the rest of us in our Boy Scout troop decided was gay. Only we didn’t use the word “gay,” of course. You know what words we used. We called him queer, a faggot, a homo.

I don’t remember Harvey’s last name, or why we decided he was gay. The gaydar of young teenaged boys is not a very finely calibrated tool, or at least it wasn't in the mid-70s. If a guy had a lisp, carried his school books funny, flipped his wrist a certain way, or got along suspiciously well with girls … well, case closed.

So, we just casually decreed that Harvey was gay. And we teased him about it -- Harvey the Homo. Clever, huh? We sure thought so. And Harvey cried. Which made us tease him more, because real men didn’t cry. Only homos did.

What a bunch of assholes.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I had a friend who I assumed was gay. He certainly wasn’t “out,” but I assumed he knew he was gay, and we, his friends, assumed he was gay though we never talked about it to each other, and I assumed he knew that we assumed he was gay. There’s a whole lot of “assumes” there because none of us talked about it. Surely it would have been healthier for all – especially for him – if we had, so that it would have just been in the open and no big deal. Still, it felt like progress over how Harvey was treated. And maybe it would have been a big deal if it was out there in the open. I don’t know. If he was gay, I hope he eventually came out and was met with love and acceptance and was treated like it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t, and isn’t.

Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi didn't get that far. He jumped to his death last week after his roommate posted online video of him having sex with another man. It’s an appalling story of how an act of callousness, stupidity and meanness can spin out of control in ways surely Dahrun Ravi and Molly Wei didn’t intend.

No matter what happens from here, Ravi and Wei already have been convicted of a hate crime in the 24/7 media-frenzied court of public opinion, which never takes a recess and rarely even allows for the introduction of exculpatory evidence. It just rules -- instantly, mercilessly and with no possibility of appeal. At the age of 18, they're still kids, and yet they now may be forever defined in the public eye by their worst moments as human beings.

Is it possible to feel some pity for the suddenly notorious Ravi and Wei?

I think I can, if only because I remember with shame my own callous, stupid, mean contribution to another’s torment, and I'd be mortified to have been defined by it for the rest of my life. I feel that pity even as I acknowledge that there’s a wide chasm between ages 13 and 18, between 1974 and 2010 and, most of all, between calling someone names and capturing an intensely private moment and sharing it with the world for twisted yuks.

I don't know what became of Harvey -- whether, gay or not, he eventually shrugged off our cretinous behavior, whether he went on to more of the same in high school, college and beyond and, if so, whether he got past it to become comfortable with who he was.

I do know this: While the events of this last week made me think of Harvey, I sure hope they didn't make him think of me. I hope he's forgotten all about me.

I cannot describe how relieved I am that when we were in college and under the influence of that dangerous mix of too much alcohol, free time and a completely unfounded belief in our own cleverness, and not enough good sense, discretion or appreciation of The Law of Unintended Consequences that at least we didn't have the Internet, cell phone cameras or miniature video equipment with which to cause mischief or worse.

Dirty dancing, the Holy Spirit and so on

Schools here in Lincoln and elsewhere are trying to get a handle on “dirty dancing” (http://bit.ly/bhc25u and http://bit.ly/bhzfKR), and youngsters are indignantly responding, as youngsters are wont to do, that their right to express themselves freely is being stomped on by The Man. Well, Good Lord, one would hope so. Hell, if we – The Man -- could get away with it, we’d lock ‘em up from 12 to 21, when they’re fit again to be set loose on civil society.

For those who are blissfully ignorant, dirty dancing is roughly the equivalent of a dog humping a leg or other object, except that it involves two human beings. As with so much behavior by young people, the conduct itself is bad enough, but it's Where It Could Lead -- unplanned pregnancies, young lives unfulfilled, children growing up in single-parent homes, construction of Chuck E. Cheeses on every corner -- that really terrifies those of us who only dimly remember our own teen years but what we do remember makes all the greater our grim resolve to clamp down on today's teens.

This is a far cry from the school dances of my youth – boys standing warily and awkwardly on one side of the gym, girls standing haughtily and out of reach (or so it appeared to us boys) on the other, with only a few making the occasional brave foray across the line, like soldiers negotiating no-man’s land, where they made bodily contact, if at all, only with clammy hands.

To be clear where my sympathies are, if I were in charge of school dances, I’d spray ice-cold water full blast through a fire hose across the dance floor every 15 minutes or so, bouncing these seething little cauldrons of hormones off the gym walls and shriveling anything that needed shriveling, if you catch my drift.

My wife and I have done a little chaperoning at Catholic school dances, where the standards are appropriately strict. But, of course, kids test those limits. They wouldn't be teenagers if they didn't. Girls' cleavage and dress length are carefully assessed and corrective action taken as needed; chaperones regularly pull boys and girls off the dance floor for excessive ardor; and if you turn the lights on in certain dark corridors, amorous couples scatter like panicked roaches.

Those couples who are pulled off the dance floor at my kids' school are sent to what's called a "reteaching room." There, the youngsters are taught to dance appropriately by an adult. They used to tell the kids they needed to leave room for the Holy Spirit between them when they danced. I don't know whether they still do, since some smart alecks pointed out that the Holy Spirit can take any form including, presumably, a very, very thin one.

It's probably a good thing I've not been asked to staff the reteaching room. I'd require young couples to leave room between them for a nun -- a really big, scowling, warty nun just back from six weeks' missionary work in the Congo with no time yet to bathe. Either that, or I'd say, "OK, boys on this side of the room, girls on that side. Stand there awkwardly for three hours, then go home."