In my late teens--through to my middle twenties--but especially when I was 18 or 19 years old,

I was, besides being a Mozart worshipper, peculiarly ideologically susceptible to a kind of Generational Supremacy, in which I perceived, in my own generation (in Maynard G. Krebs, and in Beatniks), and gloried in, an intellectual and ethical superiority to all previous generations. Dropped into my local land-grant college in my freshman year, I was a buzz-saw: consistently making the Honor Roll, while drawing a steady hour per Quarter of F in ROTC (and, significantly, having destroyed--rendered unusable--a Rifle, when it was given to me to dismantle, clean and re-assemble). I recognized perfect Goodness and Righteousness when I met it in the person of Donald Egbers in the third quarter of my freshman year, and vowed within myself to dedicate myself to it. To it, that is to say, and, as I perfectly understood, through him. And  I was absolutely right to have done so, crazy as it sounds. Nutzo, yeah perhaps. Carlo Goldoni describes a very similar case in his life. How sorry we should all be if he hadn't taken off with a shipload of actors, to be a player and a theater person, rather than the lawyer his dad wanted him to be. Anyway, so my course was set when I dropped out--and, while having fun, and often getting high, I lived through the horror of the Vietnam War and the terror of the Drug War, without being inducted into the military, or contracting the HIV virus, or being incarcerated for more than a few days. I was smart, yes, but most of all I was lucky. And, occasionally, I had good (fun and no regrets) sex.