To wit: I’ve spent five years (2007 through 2012) reliving one bizarre year in the late 1980s. Have I gained any clarity, some sort of well-worn perspective? Have I become trapped within a period of my life I so longingly wished to escape? A little of both. I do not think this level of introspection is healthy. Further, my mental health is now tethered to the success or failure of this project. The Pallbearers Club (title of book, not the club to which it refers) has become my raison d’être, more so than my music, which is unexpected in a sad way that I cannot describe; an unspeakable, eldritch sadness, but one worth exploring in this chapter.

Maybe I should’ve taken all this energy (for lack of a better term) and done as Mercy once suggested in 2007: write an insufferable, bloated, postapocalyptic vampire series.

Anyway. The next twenty years will wash by in a figurative and narrative blur: I only spent six months (the cost of time, the price of time) writing the following section.

Best of times, worst of times? You’re not quite Dickens, there, Arty boy.

* * *

[Note: This was the initial opening of this chapter]

Let’s hit the double arrow Fast-Forward button, not on the cassette player, but the compact disc digital audio boombox, as we’re entering the wrapped-in-flannel 1990s.