The Bad Kids

The subconscious is a machine running silently in the dark. Silent as it may be, it is still a machine....

I have a massive file folder full of ideas, bits. Most will never come to fruition, never mature past a scribbled or typed paragraph, a handful of words, sometimes a (badly drawn) picture.

The Bad Kids (project) begins in 1993. I was renting a car and I ran into my junior high school "nemesis," who was working at the rental car agency. I wrote down that encounter on a piece of paper and dropped it in the file.

I was looking at that bit of paper a few weeks ago. Most of my notes, ideas for stories or whatever, I just shake my head and feel no motivation to pursue it further. With this note, however, I wrote below it "Sometimes your innocence is destroyed, and sometimes it is you that destroys it."

My friends and I were not bad kids initially, we were normal grade schoolers, all American boys of the late 1970s. But for a period we engaged in deeply antisocial behavior, became photo negatives of the children we had been. The year we were in 8th grade---September 1981 to June 1982---was the pinnacle of our misbehavior, it was quite a story---

OK, how do I recall it? How do I remember things that happened over 40 years ago when I was---full disclosure---often high as fuck?

Looking at that bit of paper, my encounter with my junior high nemesis, I recalled his face, recalled the things he said to mess with me, recalled avoiding him around Petaluma...and I could see Petaluma as it was over forty years ago (very different!). Slowly, things have been returning to my memory and I'm sketching them out in notebooks or in emails to myself.

Petaluma was much more innocent back then, a small town. That would all end when I moved back in 1993. I remember that clearly: Polly Klass had been kidnapped and posters of her were everywhere. You couldn't escape them, pictures of this smiling child; you understood she was dead and the implications of the minute yet profound increase of darkness in the world.

Petaluma was no longer a small town after that.

A new town had been overlaid on the old one like when Seattle flooded 150 years ago and they built a new city on top of the flooded out one.

So, my job is take the stairs down into the basement, where Petaluma used to be, and recreate everything that happened when I was 13/14 years old, in a much more innocent world...