So I was telling Joe about this, I call it the Year of the Cat because of the various feral attributes involved, it was the period slightly longer than a calendar year in which I first went crazy in 1999.

The first several months of this I refused to go to Reed because I thought it could only bring trouble, but then spent two semesters in a row with all the kids, learning to speak English again and making lots of friends. Making lots of friends pisses people off, the prominence is something they'd rather have themselves, eventually a few people got tired of me being in their space.

I was seriously brain damaged after all, and completely broke, there didn't seem like there was a very good explanation for me at all.

The thing is though, when the Fall Semester of the following year started up, it was still maybe the first week of school after my being there much of the Summer, Eliot Smith the CSO came up and told me to watch out, he said they were coming to get me so they could beautify the campus, he said they were going after all "high profile" individuals in their line of sight, meaning all people who were there often enough that they defined the character of the place somehow. This meant me. I was in deep shit and had to be careful.

I resisted but Eliot was insistent, he said he was doing me a favor already in the first place so I shouldn't complain, he said he fought for me or else I'd be gone already so just do as he says. It was pretty frustrating.

Immediately afterward I went to the IRC's and saw the Bad Man there, the Bad Man at the root of the Bad Times that resulted in my going crazy in the first place. He was tan and disgusting, at the end of a very tanned and disgusting Summer, I paced back and forth in the hallway outside the computer lab until I could think of what to do.

Clenching fist but not considering violence, I realized that I would be unable to call Community Safety on him because of the conversation I'd just had with Eliot, I realized that on this day of all days, the one and only day that the bad man was down where I spent all my time, that this was the day that I'd just been scolded by the school for being too well known in the Fall of 2000.

That's why it was especially interesting when I saw the New Bad Man in the bookloft in those last few days before the thing we're still calling the storm.

Exactly how did the New Bad Man get involved in all that?