I don’t have a lot of memories of the time before I was five. I remember lying on the floor in, I think, the living room, having just found what appeared to be some sort of gelatinous excreta, presumably from the cat. This was the first time I had ever encountered such a thing, and I found it to be bewildering, like finding a jellyfish on the beach.

I remember falling down the stairs to the basement once. That is to say, I fell down the stairs, and what I actually remember were the stairs quickly rotating around me as I got closer to the bottom. Amazingly, perhaps via some extra-sensory motherly intuition, my mom caught me before I hit the bottom. I’ve always found this memory to be perplexing as well, mainly due to the peculiarity of how I remember it.

I had a pretty average childhood for the most part. Went to public schools, didn’t move around too much. Had a decent number of friends, but wasn’t super popular. It was all just pretty average.

However, there were some things that occurred that were not average at all. In fact, they were pretty fucked up. Now, everybody’s got their crazy stories about weird shit that happened once upon a time, but most of them don’t have anything to do with something so quaint as a spiral notebook.

I often tell people that I don’t eat raisins because I had a bad experience, but I don’t always tell them what that experience was. In fact, sometimes merely telling people of my experience makes them not eat raisins as well. But what horrible thing happened to make me stop eating such a seemingly harmless food?