Memory

I recently learned, after 20 years, that I had a head injury….in addition to all the other injuries from my Big Wreck.
I have always known that the Wreck marked a large blank spot in my memory...a dividing line, kind of....I have no memory of the wreck itself, or of the few days on either side of it.All I know about it is what I pieced together, afterwards. I attributed this to the trauma, and then the morphine haze I woke up in....
Turns out that at first, the EMTs were less concerned with my legs than I had thought.
They were worried about the cloud on the X-ray of my head...right around the base of my skull, where it attaches to the spine. :"Water on the Brain", they called it...
It went away by the time I was done with the helicopter ride from Tomball to Hermann....
I'm wondering , now, just how much of my memory haze....before, and immediately after the wreck....is due to this.
With my discovery of Facebook....and the resultant end of my Exile...I've been remembering many things I had forgotten. Mostly things before the wreck...a few things from after.
For a few years after, I had lost my mind.(again, how much is due to head trauma?)
I had this almost instinctual Urge to "Suck the Marrow Out of Life."...this is how I learned to walk so quickly....(that Tenacity is still very much a part of me.)
I drank, ran around looking for Experience....jumped out on the Road.
I call this period my Wild Years....and I only remember a broad outline, punctuated by specifics.Drink and Drugs and a kind of Mania...I was channeling Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.
I am sure that some of this was psychological. The whole Cop Experience, the very real sense of being unwelcome at home and around town...of wanting so badly to leave, but being unable to...having nowhere to go....all this played a part in this craziness, I'm certain.
But before the wreck?
I haven't remembered, or even realised that I didn't remember, so many things.
Now, with all these folks "finding" me, online...it's coming back....and, coupled with this new awareness of the head trauma...I'm really starting to wonder.
I was a Crazy Person!
I have always known this...it's just confirmation, really...but Damn!
Add Madman to my Resume, I guess...
There are worse things.