Hunting Ghosts

This has been a weird week, folks. I'm not sure good or bad, but it's been a very haunted week. I suppose that it's appropriate given that it's Halloween.

last week, I was routing through my car and came across a bunch of tapes that some motor oil had leaked on. I had to toss them, but among them was a tape that I felt rather odd about getting rid of. I probably haven't listened to it in five years, but it was a sound-collage tape given to me back in 1993 or 1994.

While tripping around and surfing random blogs, I came across the blog of the gent who had given me the tape. and it all got weird for me right then. really weird.

There's an entire saga that I could tell about one year of my life, spent at New College of Florida. It was the year that i probably learned more about myself than I ever wanted to know. The entire time was spent dancing on the extreme edges of emotion, sanity, success and failure.

I fucked off a lot and flunked out. Pro and Con: I don't think I could have taken three or four more years at New College, but I regret neglecting the academics and undermining the chance to choose whether i would have returned. I like where I am now, most of the time, but if I Had it to do over, and only one thing to change, I'd go back and unfuck that one thing. I think I missed something that I should not have by screwing that year up.

Mostly, what I regret is that there were a number of very promising friendships beginning to take form, which from either a sense of shame, or misplaced anger, I brutally aborted at the end of the year, when I chose to simply disappear. I regret it not because I think I hurt anyone particularly by it, but because I fear that I didn't - that I merely passed out of NC life so quietly that my passing went unnoticed - just another burn out.

Was I a person there? or just a ghost in waiting, wandering the Palm Court?