[Edited/revised for errors]

[FAQ, added 5/28/01]
Q: What is this webpage I've found?
A: The author has the problem of an old acquaintance with an over-energized nostalgia gland. As a result, this acquaintance seems to have trouble letting go. The simplest way to explain it is to compare it to the scorn of an ex-girlfriend. The old acquaintance, Jake Dobkin, is very much like a scornful ex-girlfiend. Think Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction". One approach to this problem of the scronful--and occasionally threatening--acquaintance is to keep a good record of mutual interactions. That way, when something goes wrong, there will be a document.

Q: What is the format?
A: From time to time, the author makes entries. They are presented here from most recent to oldest.

Q: What is this particular entry about?
A: This entry was occasioned by an odd coincidence, not quite on the scale Paul Auster's variety. The author's good friend--and the fellow around which the trouble with Jake was triggered--is moving in with Jake's first girlfriend from high school! Ironic, and so meriting a comment. There have also been a number of vaguely "I'm going to beat you up"-threatening emails from Jake. As such, it seems appropriate and in the spirit of this little journal to create a post.

Q: Why was this post "Edited/revised"?
A: Due to errors.

Q: Will you pay for Jake's inflated psychiatric bills that result from his obsessive viewing of this 'journal'/cruel diatribe?
A: No, but his insurance should. Of course, the author does not intend him to read this. It is hoped only that he will go away. It is the madness itself that draws him to it, and the test of any cure is that he leaves this poor site be.

Q: Where can I find more information?
A: Here, and here.

[The main body of the post]
Strange events call for the dusting off of this old journal. I think I shall cast it in punctuated historical narrative.

So a friend of mine appears to be moving in with a person named XYZ. It turns out that XYZ was the selfsame as Jake's often talked about first girlfriend. How he talked about her! Always coming back to speak of her whenever his occasional romances went sour. Old reliable, on his view. He seemed always in mind to keep her close, as if this one person (whom this author had never directly encountered) was that one angelic, mythic perfect darling of days past, so different from the cruel and maladjusted tramps of daily life. This information, of course, may be out of date, but it was certainly current through 1999; and that was five good years since this affair had ended. So, for example, when troubles would arise with the last girlfriend of the college days--when she acquired the epithets "insane" or "bitch", or when she slept with rivals--this XYZ's name would turn up again and again, proof that Jake could indeed do better than this.

[Some edit were made here.]

I have noted some information on Oven below. But moreover, he teaches some courses at one of these vocational night schools in the city. A professor!

Let me recall an odd occasion near the end of college. On a ballfield in New Jersey a number of us considered the future. I weighed in on the merits of the examined life, and weighed harshly on the pursuit of occupation over endeavor. The point just was, don't go to Wall Street, go to philosophy. A self-serving point if any! But poor Jake was devastated that the medical school in his future counted merely as vocational training school, a dull and unimaginative choice. How sad was Jake!

Indeed, the next year Jake found himself teaching back at Stuyvesant, the high school we both attended. Every week we would receive updates on the delicious 14 and 15 year olds he courted, how certain he was that he could have them, how he brushed up against them, how he collected their phone numbers and saved them, how he trolled the neighborhoods where they lived and ran into them, how he volunteered to "direct" the extracurricular musical so better to leer at them in leotards, and so on. What had he kept from us? And then we heard about the NYPD investigation of him and some other teachers at the school. We heard how they drew him aside for questioning, confronting him with widespread rumors about specific girls he was sleeping with. Nothing was pressed against him, though Dr. Plass--the longtime Biology teacher--was removed from the school. Jake loved to talk about these things, though I should hope he never did half of what he dreamt about.

Clearly this teaching business captured his imagination, since he is back at it at the night schools. Admitted to Columbia medial school, he began that Fall (1999). He dropped out within a month and overdosed on some sort of sleeping pills the month after. He resurfaced some months later and filled in his wondering friends on what he had been up to.

He decided to start an Internet company, to pay for rent outside the family nest where he had been sequestered, and inquired whether I could recommend a partner. Reluctantly I passed the name of a friend, who did some weeks of work only to be stiffed for a few thousand dollars. Jake never paid him, cast recriminations upon him direct and to me, and drifted off into never never land.

From time to time, he tries to get in touch with me (as this journal records)...but I really can't see why. Perhaps a future psychohistorian of 21st century mental disease will have more luck than we can, in the impoverished present.
posted by Amol Sarva at 6:32 PM