One clear image from this time:
working on the floor of the living room.  We lived in a huge apartment owned by the Whyte Museum on the Buffalo block.  Looking up from the couch, realizing there was a long blue stripe of fresh paint along the wall.A long-haired white cat had crawled in through the window.  It was watching me steadily, and neither of us had noticed he’d dipped his tail in a bucket of blue paint. He got up, stretched, and began to rub himself against the walls. 

I picked it up, headed for the bathroom, where I dropped him in my tub.  He flattened and fled in a mad wet streak of blue out onto the roofs of Banff Avenue’s souvenir stores. I never saw him again, but wondered what the owners made of their drenched, blue-tinted cat when it finally made it back home.  Still… in a town where small pets were referred to as cougar-bait sodden blue but alive couldn’t have been so bad. 

Other people have exciting reasons for losing track of their 20’s. But for years, and in the mountains, I barely shuffled in a sea of impressions without name.  I lost any sense of existing as an individual entity.  No one ever saw these paintings, I still have a couple, I sold one to a friend, and the rest were probably trashed when I moved East to re-start my life.