Having come a long way from the days related herein, I thought for a while before reposting this 26-year-old piece of writing, originally posted on my old website.

I think it has merit as a piece of my own writing and as a remembrance of someone I liked and cared about, despite how difficult he sometimes made it. But now that I'm doing things online under my real name, I do have to stop occasionally and think twice about how some of the less conventional anecdotes from my youth might be misinterpreted. I lead a very quiet life nowadays, but when you do business with people, sometimes you find yourself in an unwanted relationship with someone who loves dirt, reasonable or not, and you'll get painted as a bad guy by certain of those people only because they feel it may profit them to do…

For some reason, I've always been particularly moved by a sense of loss. It's the sole valuable observation I ever got from a kindly but not particularly effective therapist I saw for a while in my 30s, one of the few deep and profoundly true things about myself I hadn't already excavated on my own in my decades of frequent navel-gazing before that.

I've always written a lot—although I never considered myself a writer, so much as just someone who writes things down a lot—and in my 20s I had started occasionally writing longer essays, when I felt moved to. At a certain point, a few years after writing this one, I believe, I realized the longer pieces that I always felt were the most successful, the ones I had labored in love over and really eventually did manage to express what I had set out to…