My blogging career started on Livejournal, oh so many moons ago. I no longer use Livejournal, but I have archived all of my entries and occasionally check them out. This is a post I wrote nearly four years ago in January of 2016. The woman in question is currently MIA, though I do still wonder about her from time to time.

I haven’t talked all that much about my bacchanalian past on this journal. The daze of my misspent youth involved a lot of loud music, a lot of near-felonious hijinx, and a lot of excess.

I’m nothing like the person I was twenty years ago, but there’s some things about my clubber/punk past that come back to haunt me. Or at least make my life more interesting.

I was recently contacted by the daughter of an ex-girlfriend. She contacted me, even though we had only met once before, because her mother has been missing for more than forty days. She wanted to know if I had been in touch with her mother or if I knew where she was.

This ex and myself had a short yet fiery relationship some time ago, a relationship I ended because she partied so hard that even I couldn’t deal. But shortly after our tumultuous coupling had unceremoniously dissolved, we became just good ol’ friends.

We haven’t had much contact with each other in the past few years, just an occasional run in or two and a few messages on Facebook. The fact that none of her relatives haven’t heard from her in a month and a half isn’t surprising, because this woman has recently become homeless, as well as having become quite delusional. She hasn’t been taking her prescribed medication and the last message I got from her was definitely from tinfoil hat land.

Much of her mental health problems stem from her history of substance abuse. There’s only so much drugs and alcohol certain minds can take. I also suspect that many of the psych meds that were prescribed to her later in life didn’t help.

Her last known whereabouts were in San Francisco where a lot of elder and gutter punk homeless hang out. Even though it was a longshot, I decided to take a walk around those select parts of San Francisco, those places where I knew people like her would congregate; where the gutter punks hang out and where the drug addicts are. I decided I need to at least try and see if I could locate her.

An urban walkabout was the best I could do since most of my contacts with the seedier side of the concrete jungle have long been lost due to my lack of unseemly activities for the last twenty years. I’ve known people who have gone the way that this woman has gone, some becoming so chaotic that I had to cut them out of my life. A few came back to live semi-normal lives, some became living nightmares, and others just kept circling around in generally the same state of mind.

So why would I go looking for a woman who bent me all out of shape with her drug and alcohol abuse and is most likely a mumbling wreck who could barely be reasoned with? Because her distressed daughter asked me to. Because it gave me a purpose. Because I knew I’d have a much easier time navigating the seedy sides of San Francisco than her suburban daughter who was raised in suburbanland by her grandmother.

But mostly because I know there is still a good and dynamic person underneath my ex’s roiling chaos. And even though reaching her and helping her make it back to the land of the semi-sane is an even bigger longshot than trying to find her amongst the homeless in San Francisco, I had to at least give it a shot. I can give even a chaos queen such as herself at least one chance to make that climb back. Or at least let her daughter know where she is and how she’s doing.

Most likely she’s gone to a place where I would have to just keep my distance from her. And there’s a chance her mind may have gone beyond the ability of even her loved ones to reach her. Maybe my walkabout along Larkin, Polk, Civic Center, and the length of Haight street was just my pathetic attempt to make me feel like I was trying to do something to make the world a better place, because I was trying to reach one person who had fallen off the edge. I had to give it a try.

And I didn’t find her. I’ll probably go out again this week and try again.

FYI – I never did find her. I still do not know what became of her.