I’m way behind on a deadline but rather than buckling down I am instead attempting to purchase xmas presents on ebay.
Procrastination can be fun!
Though technically I am struggling with the thing I am supposed to be writing, since it is about stuff that happened in the late eighties.
You might think the fact that I’ve published a memoir means I have exhausted the topic of youthful indiscretions, but no…. in fact, several years and most of the formative experiences were skipped entirely.
I still haven’t figured out how to accurately describe the way madness, matrimony, secrecy, and poverty smacked up against each other and eventually forced me to leave the peninsula.
My tshirt might have proclaimed One Shot, One Kill but I was intent on rescuing everyone –regardless of their desire or need to be saved. I never had any problem messing around with any sort of bad kid, so long as they were prepared to be reformed. Lonely addicts, violent thugs, multipurpose assholes? I always believed that if they followed my simple rules each and every one could find a better life.
Strangely, my messianic approach worked in most cases. It appears that I was very convincing. Especially when they wanted to sleep with (or marry) me.
Now of course I am bored by the results.
I have no grudges, and care so little I do not even wonder where they are. It all seems like a dream, not just because youth often fades to a strange luster, but because I was recovering from a major head injury.
I do not recognize myself in any of the stories from August of 1988 until, oh, the winter of 1993. During which time almost everything you could fear or imagine happening…. happened.
The bifurcation of my life was tremendous yet I had almost no emotions at all. Nor did I sleep, except occasionally passing out in the car during my 120 mile daily round-trip commute. The only bits I remember enjoying were playing with my kid, reading case law, and arguing with housemates about post-structuralism.
Nothing really made sense then, and the intervening years have not helped. People who were around are often surprised when I reveal some pulpy and preposterous true fact that was hidden at the time.
And yet I’m still unable to remember large swaths of the daily reality. It seems odd that I have to write to KTS, James, Byron, the other Byron, and occasionally my mother to ask Did XYZ actually go down the way I remember? No… really?!