An old man in a seedy little bar once told me that he had two rules which he lived by. He said ‘Know what you’re doing, and know what you’ve done.’ I thought this wise at the time, and tried to adopt it as my own credo, but after one too many violations, ended up abandoning it. I took the easy way of simply wading through the murky waters and being surprised to see how things played out. Would my footing hold? Would I be consumed by eels and leaches? Would I drown? Well, so far so good. Things weren’t always easy, though. Natural, perhaps, but almost never easy. Especially back in the late 1990’s. It seemed that things were always dirty, and damp, and cold. The days were long and the nights were hard, as the delusions hovered near the surface, and the ice cubes in the glass rattled like a freight train full of bones rolling by…