For the most part, we’re a very “new” people. Every generation is somehow new, more thoroughly cut off from the past than the one that came before.  

- Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)

- introduction -

Present Day

For anyone who knew me during this decade, it was not easy. And there weren’t many that knew me. I had lost friends along the way. There had been heartbreaks. Not Jane Austen heartbreaks, though. Mine didn’t involve romance, or even love. These heartbreaks were more of the Orwellian sort, with heavy doses of Hesse and Murakami. Existence broke my heart. 

It’s odd how life has a way of working itself out, you know? Or should I say, moving along. It’s not even odd. Even, odd… get it? It’s just life. Yin-yang. Black and white. Harmony and chaos. 

So what am I talking about, anyway? Oh, yeah. I had basically distilled my life to a nucleus of friends and family that still loved me enough to speak with me, albeit on an irregular basis. To make an effort. It takes an effort to keep in touch. This is why so many friends had turned acquaintances. And acquaintances turned strangers. 

What happened to me during this period would seem shocking to most people. Not the fact that I was a single, 42-year-old male that lived alone in a tiny Brooklyn studio apartment. This is just shocking to those that knew me. Those that know me, although they can’t fully understand how I ended up here, empathized. Perhaps they still had hope that my life would get back on track.

I loved that phrase. Get back on track. Each time I heard it, and I heard it a lot throughout my thirties, I laughed a bit. Not an outward laughter. Just an inward kind of, ha. Those proclaiming it could usually read the expression on my face – but there were too many layers for them to truly know how it felt. 

Get back on track. Fuck you and your trains. 

The truth is that I lost faith in the human connection. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually, as life does – without any true reference point. Time simply passed through my existence and the world became a bleaker and bleaker place. But we don’t need to get into that now – those are nothing but forgotten ruins. Let’s just say I found complacency, perhaps even peace, in the eye of the storm. 

This is the fundamental reason that Q found me.

Chapter 1 >>