Last night, I broke out Eric Clapton’s Unplugged. At the time, I tweeted, “Breaking out Eric Clapton’s /Unplugged/. You may hate it, but this was 1992 for me.” As I listened to “Lonely Stranger”, I had a memory and a revelation. The memory: I had a line from the song, “Some will say that I’m no good / Maybe I agree / Take a look then walk away / That’s all right with me” in my MSMS application essay until Mom made me take it out. She had my best interests at heart, to be sure—I didn’t need to be the cocksure kid who didn’t care if he got into MSMS or not. [After all, they were really interested in taking kids who wanted to be there, because it was so damn hard. Honestly, I really wanted to be there, but man, I just didn't care about shit at that point in my life.]

The realization was simple: I self-identified with “Lonely Stranger” because it was really the first time in my life where I didn’t have anyone close to me. I can count on one hand the number of people from my old high school that I even bother to keep up with anymore—and two of them are married to each other, which makes that easy enough. For people that know me now—the person who networks relentlessly, even putting together two folks a time zone away—you might be really surprised to see me back then. Sure, I was still my talkative self, but I rarely if ever truly engaged with any of those folks. Kari has often expressed some … well, I guess concern … about how I consider my life in Mississippi pre-MSMS from when we’ve talked about it. I think that she’s right to do so, but honestly, I think that a lot of it comes from the fact that I was first depressed there—without realizing it until years later—and so I associate all the crappy, negative stuff about myself with that place, which is neither fair nor healthy.