Back When I Was Crazy

(Writing exercise at EDVP Adult Creative Writing Group, inspired by Roberto Bolaño's "The Romantic Dogs")

Back when I was crazy it was normal to put beer in my gut before breakfast, perched on a carved up picnic table with a warm, empty can of Miller Lite in one hand and a stale, untouched raisin bagel in the other, beneath a Seattle drizzle as common as air, drawing slow, easy stupidity down like a curtain in my brain before the experiment of the morning classroom proved me right.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fight for hours with a girl I was making ugly and being made ugly by, shirking our costumes of cool to become red-faced lunatics over something that scarcely mattered anyway, something that was merely an excuse to strike at each other for loving someone so far away.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to drive cars down the black throats of liquored nights, telling myself lies about my ability and fate, as if simply knowing which direction a back road curved would be enough to keep my blood inside my body instead of painting the asphalt and trees like countless fools before me.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fling a dish, upend a table, even press a knife to my fingers in a dish-filled sink, to hate walls and the limitations of fists, to hammer my spirit and hers with blunt words or pierce our minds bloodlessly with the filed down tip of insult.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to imagine myself at 32, far beyond the dangers and excesses and torn affairs of youth, to imagine myself bald and good-naturedly grumbling through a career, as close to happy as I'd get having left behind the violent bafflement of youth.