March 21, 2018:
I demanded and took a gap year. Not to travel but to read. Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Campbell, Hemingway, Salinger, Gravity's Rainbow, Kerouac. In my little bedroom, or in the park, or in the bowling alley, or, once my mom was in bed, in the living room chair with headphones playing "Quadrophenia" or "Exile on Main Street" or Led Zeppelin or the early Punk singles from England. It was extraordinary but it triggered one of the most debilitating episodes of depression of my lifetime: from isolation. It taught me my high school friends didn't care about me if I wasn't there to entertain them. It made me long for some intangible other life which I found the following year in The Banquet Years and the Johnston College catalog.
The Banquet Years was a suggestion from my art teacher at UCSD. I'm sorry that I don't remember her name. If you taught art in a quonset hut at UCSD in 1977 please drop a note. It changed my life like a door kicked open. Leading to a room of possibilities and optimism I'd never suspected in my nineteen years of working-class life. Where people lived their art, and Pataphysics made perfect sense.
The JC catalog was a suggestion from a pretty blonde rebel girl named Kelly whose mother had been Registrar at Johnston. I was dying of depression and alienation at UC. She diagnosed me in a single conversation, and, a day later, handed me the cure. My brain thanks you Kelly.
Thank you both.