It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything about my formative years. Most of the memories seem unreal at this point. Did any of it really happen? Am I really here now in some second-tier city in China reflecting on the many phases of my life? I only have so much time before the nicotine-induced inspiration to get all of this out wears off, so don’t expect anything more than a few paragraphs of jumbled nonsense. I’m trying hard to remember where I was at in my mind before I left home. The two weeks prior to my departure are a blur at this point. It was a very hurried experience. Anticlimactic to say the least… The two or three months before that rushed two-week period contained just enough madness and hell to send me off properly, so that’s probably an appropriate enough time to set as my true departure. I suppose everything can be broken down into a few distinct time periods. I won’t list them, because it won’t make a difference. But here I am now, working in China. Sadly, it seems that the shortest of these periods has ended up being my “innocent childhood”. Jesus Christ, is that ever sad when you really start to think about it… What it means is that I’ve spent more time caught up in bizarre states of paranoia and self-doubt than I ever spent with my family simply enjoying our time together. What a horrifying realization. (I guess that’s inevitable, since you spend more of your life AFTER the age of eight… Sounds obvious, but I didn’t think of it until I wrote it) Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of doing something, and then all of a sudden have a vivid flashback of something that happened years ago. More often than not it’s just a memory of something like walking in the forest while stoned, or something else that seemed insignificant at the time. Whenever I have one of those feelings I think to myself “What in the fuck am I doing here in China? Could I not be a productive member of society back home? Jesus, I’ve truly cashed in all my chips and have abandoned everything I ever knew”. And then I’ll go back to doing whatever it was I was in the middle of… Well, I’m already out of inspiration to write about myself. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, but haven’t put anything down on paper. It will come eventually. I’ll probably need to go back home, then come back to China again in order to set my mind straight. (I’ve been back to Canada once since then, but it was just a short visit… I think I need a month to really get back into the swing of things). Until next time…
