First Encounters - Prologue. Prologue

Mid-life crisis! I used to think it was just an excuse for a middle aged guy to run out and buy a shiny new convertible on credit, or an apology to justify a little bit of marital indiscretion, or a justification to get up and leave your dull boring job and drive up to the mountains for a week--Boy, was I ever wrong! Because I’ve got it...Real Bad! I feel like I don’t quite fit into my life anymore. Not that I have it half bad. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I have a wife of many years, two healthy, intelligent kids, a nice house in a nice suburban neighborhood, and money--money’s not a problem. So what’s the crisis? Damned if I can tell you. It’s just that, for the last year or so, I’ve started to question everything in my life: my work, my friends, my family, my religious beliefs, my tastes in music, movies, books, the way I talk, the way I walk...you get the idea. Everything feels just...not...quite...right. But enough of this babbling. That’s not what you’re here for. I’ve decided, as a bit of self therapy, to go back to a very different part of my life and try to write some of it down. I’ve never done anything like this before, and it may not help--in fact, it might just make things worse. We’ll see...

I have to go back more than thirty years to get to the beginning of the story, and that’s a long way to go back. Surprisingly, some events, some moments, remain incredibly vivid in my memory: I can remember exactly the way people sounded, I can remember exactly how they dressed, even what the weather was like. Other things tend to get blurred together: certain people’s faces or voices aren’t as clear to me anymore as others are, I can’t remember the exact sequence of a particular series of events, I remember things one way one day, and another way the next day...But rest assured, what I’m putting down here is not just a gilded memory of the past as viewed through rose colored glasses. Certainly, there will be some exaggeration and compression of dialogue and events, and a very limited amount of dramatic license to move things along smoothly. There may even be a bit of editorializing--after all, I’ve learned a few things over the last thirty years! But be warned that some of what you read here will be dark and disturbing in nature, or just downright strange! And yet, all these things happened, and all these people are real. I’ve changed the names, and most of the locations, and left the year unspecified for now. I’ve given myself the name of Perry Thompson--a quiet, unassuming name for a quiet, unassuming kid. Suffice it to say, that it’s not too long after the dawning of the new millennium. And if I’ve forgotten some of the slang of my youth, or the name of a particular video game or pop music group, I hope you’ll understand...You can blame it on this damned mid-life crisis!