Please allow me to introduce myself? rewind a little. After I moved back to my mother’s house in August of 2007, I didn’t pick up my guitar for eighteen months. I’d returned to a familiar place, but I was not, as they say, in a good place. To my eternal gratitude, Mom knew the living arrangements had to be tweaked so my prodigal return didn’t in any way resemble a turning of the clock back twenty years. She relocated to the first floor and gave me the second. Aside from a common entrance (otherwise known as the front door) and my not having a full kitchen (though over the years I’ve added a mini refrigerator and microwave to what used to be my bedroom, which is now my hangout/rehearsal/writing space) we split the house into two mostly separate apartments. I got a job at Newbury Comics, a New England chain of alternative-chic stores that, in 2007, mainly sold CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, and some comics, where my sullenness could be read as an affectation.

My first days back in Beverly were the bleakest, so much so I prefer not to write about them, other than to say I survived. (Fine, I will write about them a little. There was no escaping that twenty years later I had returned home, utterly defeated. I knew I had been irrevocably changed, but I didn’t know how changed. How much of me had Mercy consumed? Was I doomed to become something like her? Was I like her already and I didn’t know it, couldn’t recognize the transformation, because I was so radically different my now-thinking warped and changed everything I had thought previously? Each morning I conducted an Art Barbara systems analysis that was inconclusive because I felt different and I felt the same.)

You continually and stubbornly live in two worlds of many. You do it throughout the book.

Then day one at home became week one became month one, the days as wooden blocks that piled into a haphazard foundation from which I hoped to build. Maybe it’s not much, but I have built a life, which is a terrible capitalist idea, isn’t it? That we must manufacture our lives (strictly adhering to a consumer-culture standard) to give them meaning instead of simply living them.