When I was a young lad, I dabbled in the black art of graffiti. Older now, I have abjured this rough magic. The days of "SDP Aqui", my preferred tag, done with an arrow on the 's' and another on the 'p', are long since over. It has been years since I've put spray can to brick and I can look back on that period, if at all, with distanced nostalgia and regret. Imagine then my surprise at this photo, of our president in the hall of my former high school:





It was a shocking reminder of a period in my life that I thought was long over, and of the lingering inescapable reminders of our decisions and acts. As Joan Didion put it, 'some things are in fact irrevocable, and it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.'