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I like this about being “old”: the feeling when a memory that had sunk somewhere unreachable inside you floats up from the bottom, and it feels like it happened to a different person. It’s disorienting but good. Like all my shame is biodegradable. Anyway, it happened last week. Out of fucking nowhere, winter 2008 came rushing back with alarming clarity—probably the darkest season of my life so far. I don’t think I had tried to forget it on purpose so much as my brain tried to do me a solid. But now, all I can do is laugh.

If you’ve ever experienced an Indiana winter, I’m sorry. Not that it’s different from other varieties of Midwestern winters, climate-wise, but you’re also in Indiana, our nation’s shittiest state. Specifically, South Bend—I’d been going to school there, and then I dropped out, and things were really sad back home so I kind of just hovered around. The part of me that would have given a zippy thumbs up to a terrorist threatening to fire-bomb South Bend off the map was outweighed by the part of me that wanted to drink my way into oblivion in a town where you could still smoke in bars. I liked a guy there, anyway, so I passive-aggressively lived in his apartment most of the time, with his roommate and a small white bunny we bought at the mall named Miss Patty Potato, whose incessant barrage of turds covered the carpet and wedged between the couch cushions.

We were a generally unmotivated bunch, and I didn’t really have shit to do anyway, so we watched a lot of cable. Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, waves and waves of SVU. I got super into The Glow Part 2 and smoking Camel Crushes, which should tell you all you need to know. I spent a lot of time watching other people play video games, eyes glazing over from malt liquor and boredom, which I actually liked—a comfortable, place-filler boredom that shuttles you safely from one month to the next. At one point we got really into White Russians. Sometimes my friend J, who conveniently doubled as our friendly neighborhood coke dealer, would come over and we would do lines and freestyle, and I would pretend I could DJ on the free version of Ableton I had just downloaded because bloghouse. I never told anyone I was sad because my mom was dead. Maybe once.

What I mostly remember, though, is that we bought a bunch of puzzles. I don’t know why we were at Toys R Us but I got this Thomas Kinkade “Lighthouse Collection” puzzle set: 10 puzzles of varying levels of difficulty, each depicting an idyllic coastal scene rendered by none other than the self-proclaimed Painter Of Light, god rest his soul. Years later I’d learn that Kinkade, America’s most collected painter and rabid Bible-thumper, was a straight up savage—a raging alcoholic and known pervert who was alleged to have spitefully urinated on a Winnie the Pooh sculpture at the Disneyland Hotel, shouting “This one’s for you, Walt!” But then, he was just the weirdo responsible for the gentle pastel lighthouse puzzles that occupied my days, as I took hits from the disgusting gravity bong we’d set up in the kitchen and searched for corner pieces. When we’d finish the puzzles, beaming with achievement, we’d attempt to keep them intact for visitors to admire, but it’d never last long—try preserving a 300-piece puzzle in an apartment of three absolute wasteoids. The accomplishment was simply having passed the time, but that alone felt like a minor miracle.