Google

I just this moment learned that Google made its debut on my 35th birthday {September 4, 1998}. I built my first computer and got on the internet two months after that. So, I’m 35 years older than Google.

This also marked the end of what had been a brutal and debilitating depression that lasted for five long years and broke me down completely. I did and experienced things during that time that I wrote and laughed about in later years, but which at the time led me to believe I was beyond redemption. The summer of 97 marked the end for me of years of IV drug use, mostly cocaine and methamphetamine, and the long, slow recovery from that – not only the chemicals but the attendant ritual nature of that life – probably also abetted somewhat my escape from that interminable journey through perdition.

It was something of a watershed moment in my life, I suppose, though more of a process than an event, certainly. And even that process, the breaking free, the escape from Hell, was itself inextricably tied to everything that came before it, just like any journey, I suppose. However, with each step, each segment of what became my life story, there were significant moments, memories, and people. Some belong more to what came before, some were markers of change, and yet others, especially people, existed throughout but perhaps represented various characters, principles, or psychic elements manifested by me which drew them to my story. It was in this way I experienced the power of metaphor in my life, something which til then I only grasped intellectually. I had read Campbell and watched his lectures on the Transformation of Myth more than a decade earlier. But it wasn’t a part of my own experience in a way I could transmit, until I had gone into my own wilderness, my own dark forest and returned. And that wasn’t something I actually realized and understood until some years afterward. In many ways those realizations continue into the present.