Day Ten

A picture of the person I do the most messed-up things with:

I can still hear it, in quiet moments of indecision: his cajoling "Come onnn, Daaave," in a drawl particularly odd considering his Boston-area upbringing.  I knew - knew - that whatever I was being asked to do would violate my sense of social decorum; I also knew that I would have a hell of a good time doing it.

I was and am a person chiefly governed, socially, by my inhibitions - as I've shared, I regret this.  But something impish in Matt reached out to the hellion in me; he urged me to push past those barriers in search of life's bizarre comedies.

I haven't done anything "messed up" (in the way I interpreted this prompt to mean) since the night before Matt's funeral: a handful of other mourners and I ran screaming, bare-ass nekkid, into the Atlantic off Cape Cod on a December midnight.  I've done things since that were messed up in similar ways, but the desperate abandon of a late-stage alcoholic doesn't feel the same as a young man's conscious lowering of his inhibitions.  The latter can be freeing, joyous; the former is constricting and shaming.

It was inevitable that with sixty days of photographic self-examination to complete, I was going to come across at least one repeat; more about Matt on Day Thirty.