Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up, but give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

Hey everybody, it's been a while. I apologize for that. Partly it's been a case of crazy travel. I think I've been to Spain three times in the last two months.

I had to go for business stuff basically, signing contracts and getting documents and things that I could only do in person.

It wasn't really pleasurable travel to Spain. It was more just back and forth, back and forth stuff. I'm trying to write the book as you know and churning out the monthly tangentially speaking episodes.

I was thinking about this last night because I think I got three emails in the last day or two of people saying, hey, what's up with talking on my ass? I enjoy it. Where once the next episode coming.

People are really nice about it. The fact is they don't have to be nice about it because most of the people listening to this paid money for it. It's not cool that I slack off on this.

I apologize for that. I've made my excuses, but the truth is that this episode has been delayed not just by stuff happening in the real world, but by the nature of the episode.

This is the episode of what happened after the second summer in Alaska. After I had this life plan of, okay, I'm going to go out into the world and expose myself to chance and open myself up to happen stance and just see what happens and sort of roll with it.

What I did was I went to New York City. I think the thing that delayed this is that I can't really tell this part of the story without getting very personal.

I don't know. Somehow when I thought of doing this, I thought I would just skip over the really personal. It's personal to tell you stories about drug use and prison and stuff that's happened to me personally is obviously personal.

I can't tell you the story about why I went to New York without talking about a woman who was a very important person in my life and some situations that I haven't really spoken about publicly.

I never really thought I would. I think that's why I shied away from this. I kept thinking there must be a way to tell the story without including all that.

But that felt wrong because the whole point of this is I'm telling the stories of my life and to leave that out, it wouldn't be a real story.

So here's what happened. I met a woman in college at Hobart who I'm going to call Marie just to try to protect her privacy as much as I can.

I'm not going to get into too many details because it wouldn't be hard to figure out who I'm talking about. I don't want to she's not a public person and she never agreed to be part of this.

But she's somebody that I was involved with from the time I met her, which was nineteen, probably eighty, eighty one maybe until we finally really called it quits in the early nineties, maybe ninety one ninety two.

So we're talking a long time that she and I over a decade that she and I were together. The thing is we weren't really together.

When I look back on this period of my twenties and the time I spent with her, it was more like we had three relationships, distinct relationships with big, empty gaps separating them.

So I knew her at college. She was this fiery, sexy, beautiful, lovely, Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx who came from a difficult situation economically, family wise, personal experiences she'd had a rough childhood.

And she'd lived in group homes and I think she got a GED didn't graduate from high school. But she was really smart and some people around her recognize that and she did some some sort of standard testing or something and scored very well and she received a full scholarship to go to this private, very expensive country.

She was a very club school, Hobart College. So she was there in a scholarship, but she was angry, really angry and alienated and did not a deal with these rich privileged white kids.

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