You’ll have to make special provisions for me. I’m not myself anymore. Something’s missing, something important. Maybe I’ve had a stroke, or a brain tumor. It’s probably too late to do anything about it, so I’m not going to waste time and money seeking professional help. I wouldn’t follow their advice anyway. I don’t trust doctors.

Oh sure, I trust them to cover their asses regarding liability by ordering a bunch of expensive, invasive, sometimes painful tests that would get to the bottom of nothing. No, I’ll go this one alone. But if you want to talk with me, I could sure use the company, as my world has gotten pretty small ever since I stopped being able to remember my name.

Didn’t we know each other thirty years ago? Weren’t you the Director of the Institute for Advanced Research and I was your star faculty member, the one who almost won the Nobel Prize but lost out to Dick Cheney and HR Haldeman? It all seems so familiar, yet vague, like a half-forgotten dream. You used to wear pink three-piece suits. On clothing-optional days I would show up for work in the nude, but then so did at least half the staff.

But oh those parties we used to have! The times we’d stay up all night around a campfire on the beach, boiling crabs and occasional house pets. By dawn we’d be coming out of our blackouts, unable to remember what we had done or said the night before. Those who had cuts requiring stitches, or broken bones had to wait for the ambulance, but the rest of us could stagger or crawl back to our vehicles. Yes, those were the days!

Now most of our old friends are dead or institutionalized. That’s what happens when you party that hard for that long. Me, I just got lucky I guess. Of course the fact that I became a celibate monk for almost a decade slowed down the progression in me. Well, to be honest, not really. When it came back after all those years of abstinence it came back with a vengence.

I woke up in a jail cell in Brazil. Brazil! How did I get there? Believe me, it cost me plenty to get out of that one. I’m still paying back the family members and old friends who intervened. Although I speak no Portuguese, the pictures the police showed me of what I did to that young woman haunt me yet. For a while I used the “because I don’t remember it, it must not have happened” defense, but in the time since that unfortunate incident, I’ve had a few blackouts, some of which lasted days. Can you believe I came to on top of a Ferris Wheel in San Antonio? My clothes were all sticky. Fortunately, it wasn’t blood, but pancake syrup.