Preface

For the sake of privacy, I won’t use real names-

"Dan" is the person that I had one of the most profound, eye-opening experiences with and the reason I’m choosing the name “Dan” is because “Drug-Addled Narcissist” seems most fitting. So, in the following entries, you, the reader, will eventually understand not only why I've chosen this name, not to mention how I came to my lesson in Altruism and meeting face to face with someone with a serious personality disorder. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I do recognize when someone is seriously abnormal.

When one finds out they are seriously sick, with a disease- just about everyone goes back to their past. Don’t ask me why this behavior seems to be common, but networking sites do provide a base in which to start that weird behavior of finding people from your past. Only because most of us (or we hope) have moved on from our childhoods, become adults, had our own families, successes and failures- when faced with a serious illness- we go back to where it all started and connecting with some people from our past seems to be important to us.

Cutting your modem connection the moment you are diagnosed with a serious illness might be a wise idea.

For some stupid reason, specific people stand out to you- not because you were “tight” or had very close relationships. Even their oddities and reasons you rationalize as to why you never kept in touch might be tapping you, one will still seek them out, for whatever esoteric or mundane reason- many of us do in fact, seek people out from our childhood.

I spent an incredible amount of time online, searching for specific individuals I had not had ANY contact with when I was diagnosed back in March of 2006- even spending small amounts of money, subscribing to different sites, searching for archived obituaries, even managing to connect with relatives that I had not spoken to since I was a small child. There is something about “connecting” or bridging that past that maybe only a shrink could define, yet I believe it is part of the healing process- coming to terms with what got you to where you are at now.

Dan and I had a “friendly”, "hang out with on occasion" relationship during my teenage years- we are both the same age, didn’t run in the same circles, yet we had known each other and occasionally hung out together on and off from about the age of 14-19 years of age. The last time I saw him was before I left home, which is Albuquerque, NM. Drug capital of the U.S., meanest streets on the planet (in my opinion and I have lived in larger cities in my adulthood). It is by far the most politically corrupt state next to Illinois- most police departments look angelic compared to the APD, not to mention the County Mounties. Even the State Police are something left to be desired. In other words, New Mexico is not the Land of Enchantment, it’s the Land of Entrapment- and I left in 1976, at the age of 20, leaving what I knew would eventually be my demise. Obviously, I’m still here to write about it, so my demise has not been met, yet.

I’ll never forget that moment in time, of seeing Dan and walking away from him- he was calling out to me, “Come back, come back”- which to encapsulate the scenario, I just got sick of his “neediness” and realized at that point that he was running in circles. I remember he was staying at the dormitory at UNM, claiming he was starting law school. His room was bare- no real possessions adorning the room, not even linens on the bed, curtains on the windows. I saw him one time, briefly after that- he had gotten an apartment, which I accepted an invitation to visit him there and that environment was also void of any personal adornments. Which even in my drug induced haze, I still had the clarity to think, “Something is wrong here”.

I never got high with Dan- for some odd reason- never even smoked a joint- most of our hanging out consisted of stupid, inane conversations which amounted to me finally tiring of his strange logic and perceptions of life in general. For the better part, Dan is a fairly intelligent person- not all the conversations were that stupid- we did share some common threads, a history so to speak- and if anything, when I was a "runaway" juvenile, Dan did help me out when I had nowhere to go, sneaking me into the his family’s garage that was made into a apartment, vacant- but the basics were there and he’d also sneak me food from his family’s dinner table. So, yes- in essence, he helped me when I was in need of shelter and food.

So, there was a very basic curiosity as to what happened to Dan over the years and even though I found his name on a networking site, there was nothing in the profile, no response to a message I sent to him and I didn’t pursue it any longer. Until recently……..