"I am going to give you a piece of advice, Tyler - advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films.  I wish our counsellors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you.  It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't.  Here is a list of symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness if the most universal sensation on the planet.  Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass.  You will survive and you will be a better human for it."


 
Okay... I remember telling you maybe two months ago, Tyler, how there will come a time when you will discover a thing called loneliness.  You wouldn't listen then (and what young person ever has?) but I suspect that now, down in Los Angeles, you have discovered such a thing...

...

But are you lonely down there Tyler?  Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.  Life's cruellest irony.  The point I was trying to get at through all of this is, until you've been lonely yourself, please try to diplomatically avoid speaking about the lives of those who have been.  Like me.

...

What I will tell you, son of sons, is this: shortly, if not already, you will begin noticing the blackness inside us all.  You will develop black secrets and commit black actions.  You will be shocked at the insensitivities and transgressions you are capable of, yet you will be unable to stop them.  And by the time you are thirty, your friends will all have black secrets, too, but it will be years before you learn exactly what their black secrets are.  Life at that point will become like throwing a Frisbee in a graveyard; much of the pleasure of your dealings with friends will stem from the contrast between your sparkling youth and the ink you know lies at your feet.

Later, as you get to be my age, you will see your friends begin to die, to lose their memories, to see their skins turn wrinkled and sick.  You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known - via their minds and bodies and via the stories your friends - yes, Harmony, Gaïa, Mei-lin, Davidson, and the rest - will begin telling you at three-thirty in the morning as you put iodine on their bruised, arrange for tetanus shots, dial 911, and listen to them cry.  The only payback for all of this - for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar - will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place - and they will live you more, too.  Zero balance... Our achievements make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us loveable.  You will have dark secrets, Tyler, and I will still love you...
 

An addition to this website - e-mail me your dark secrets, and I will post them anonymously.  In fact, send them anonymously, I don't care.  If you understand anything from that, it must be that it doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human.  And I'm not putting any of mine up until I hear from you first.

Get cracking.