perfidy

I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:

Outline for Autobiography

1. Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
2. Working at apathy (1985-1988)
3. An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
4. A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
5. A moment of clarity (1996)
6. The moment passes (1996-1999)
7. A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)

CHAPTER ONE

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn't the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary's Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.

At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.

Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot's license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.

I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work - in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.

But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes' ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.

My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.

***

"Praise not the day until night has come."

That's as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.