It’s ironic, actually, that I should choose the age of 17 to return to. When I was 17 the first time, it was in many ways the worst year of my life. I had acne and bad posture and a lousy self-image; I hadn’t had sex yet and could think of little else; I was frequently sullen on the outside and depressed on the inside. Two months before I turned 18, on my first day of college, my stepfather died suddenly and left my mother alone, just when SHE had presumably been counting on starting the best years of her own life. Her depression was terrible for her and pretty rough on me too.

I can’t fix any of that, and I have no reason to expect this year to be a bed of roses. Who knows, maybe I am tempting the evil eye by going back to that year. Well, if history repeats itself and things turn to crap for me, at least it will give a nice symmetry to this literary masterpiece….