I used to love it when, upon re-entering the country after traveling abroad, I’d get a customs agent who’d stamp my passport, look up and say, “Welcome home Ms. Laurent.” I’ve been traveling a lot lately and with strangers I use a fake name. Josephine. Online I’ve started using the moniker Howard LaGrunt. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a protection mechanism, maybe it feels like my name is irrelevant, or maybe my name is just nobody’s bee’s wax. I was standing in a TSA line this week holding my boarding pass and I.D. and as I looked at my license it felt like I didn’t recognize my own name.

Every school year would end the same way. Signing yearbooks. Exchanging telephone numbers. Telling people that we should totally hang out over the summer and then never seeing or speaking to them again. I would look my peers in the eye while saying my goodbyes and think, “This is the summer where I break the five-foot barrier. You wait and see.” And every summer I would return from break to find that the exact opposite had happened; everyone had sprouted upward and I had remained the same size. Year after year. The same thing.

I have never once walked into a house filled with human skulls, and I doubt you have, either, which is probably for the best. Human skulls went out of vogue long, long ago, but Dr. Spiderqueen likes the old ways best.

Pastey the Drunken Sailor. Boy was he. True to his name, a ship did not pass without holding Pastey in a state of ridiculous inebriation. It was common to feel a whip of breeze over one’s head as Pastey swung from ship to ship, determined to be drunken on any and all.

All of you deserve gold stars. Yes, you. And you, too, random person reading this over your neighbor’s shoulder. Gold stars for all!