TWENTY-ONE

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

[Early Spring, 2004]

I will try and identify the moment when I first realized I had stopped being myself. No, wait – that comes across all wrong. “Realized” and “myself” are words too imprecise, and assume a certain stasis of definition. And I never stopped being myself, insofar as I ever was myself, but I did stop being myself only. There was this entity called “myself” and there was this other as well; this other within me, a mind alongside my own, positioning itself as an observer, another who lent commentary (which was mostly unwelcome) and guidance (which was typically ill-conceived, often outrightly malicious) and whose voice I was obliged to listen to, if not compelled to follow. This thing I provisionally call “myself” was, prior to this dual condition and perhaps by design, a very loosely-defined entity lacking coherence, without stability, without clear edges, yet which I could, at least for a time, still call me. I believe it is as a result of this inherent instability and lack of coherence that this me, this person, was able to be partly supplanted, to be superimposed over by this other, but this is only speculation. And “realizing” that this had happened was, on the one hand, only to come much after the fact, while on the other hand, was hardly something to become clear all at once, but only by slow degrees. The voice of this other, though not only foreign but also largely incompatible with my own, was complicit in the deception – the deception being that it somehow belonged in (or near) my head – masking itself and making the realization of its invasion difficult, almost impossible.

But so far as I can pinpoint it, focus it down to a moment, the moment came in 1994, I don’t remember the month or the season (because what meaning can seasons have in a place like Hollywood anyway, when everything is the same? When there may come a day, once, when there is rain, and then not again for months afterward, when the days are hot, and then they’re hotter still, and then somewhat less so?) but I do remember the doughnut shop well, and I remember looking first at my hands, thinking, these are my hands? THESE ARE MY HANDS? [the remaining text in this entry is unreadable]