Then It Hit Me...

After a lifetime of unexplained anxiety and nearly forty years of amateur psychotherapy involving the liberal application of copious amounts of alcohol and/or psychedelic drugs, I think I’ve isolated the source of all my problems. Finally, I know why I tend to write needlessly convoluted, disjointed sentences, why I consider drape color a major influence point in story development, and why my topic selection sometimes falls outside of the norms established by society for the limitations of good taste.

The age of thirteen is a volatile time in anyone’s life, a time filled with raging hormones, developing attitudes about the major components of life in general and the tug-of-war being waged in the psyche of every youth between the yin of parental influences and the yang of society at large. I certainly was no exception. There, in a head filled with Cream Of Wheat and dedicated to the pursuit of lecherous activities of the highest and most perverse order, existed a very small region of reason capable of stabilizing the entire load, if only for short periods of time. This remote island in a sea of mayhem was capable of sustaining only one thought at a time and communications with the outside world were muddled at best, even during those glorious times when not bombarded with homework or chores.

Then, it happened—on a Wednesday night in early October, the single event that forever changed the course of my life—I saw my parents joined together, grunting and sweating, cavorting in a manner so lewd and distasteful that its image still burns in my psyche. There, on our living room floor, my father and mother stood smiling and embracing—in their square dance costumes, gyrating to some up-tempo form of music in a manner that I can only describe as disturbing. Even now, I vividly recall the words “Allemande right with your left hand, promenade your partner to a right and left grand”.

I think I better stop for now…