bifurcation @ foment.net

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, secrecy, sex, and poverty smacked up against each other and eventually forced me to leave the peninsula.

I can't even quite figure out how one day I was riding around with cholo boys and the next had gone underground with militiamen. I mean, c'mon. Does that really seem like something a polite, politically engaged honors student would do?

Let alone the fact that I regarded sex as a commodity to trade not for drugs or money but instead for eradication of repellent ideologies. Want some action? Then ya gotta change your essential belief system, buddy.

My tshirt might have proclaimed One Shot, One Kill but I was at heart a missionary. 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, racist assholes? I always believed that if they followed my simple rules each and every one could find redemption.

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. My gun totin' sociopath ex is not just a businessman, he wears Dockers! Oh, the horror!

Even the serial rapist grew up to be more dull than could have been predicted back in the day.

I have no grudges, and care so little I do not even wish them well. It all seems like a dream, not just because youth often fades to a strange luster, but because I was crazy.

I do not recognize myself in any of the stories from August of 1988 until, oh, the winter of 1992. 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. I'm unable to remember large swaths of the daily reality.

It seems odd that I have to write to KTS, James, Byron One or Two, and occasionally my mother to ask Did XYZ actually go down the way I remember? No... really?!

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