George woke up to the sound of his 1993 Mercedes 190 Diesel horn's incessant scream to the world. His blood-smeared face graced the steering wheel of the sturdy, if out of fashion, automobile. He gazed up and glanced through the windshield to find unfamiliar Parisian surroundings. A new Parisian dawn was in the works, and it was still dark. Hints of a new day were present, since a luminescent glow of a rising sun cast a blue-hued warmth of a decidedly cold variety. He guessed that he was somewhere near Avenue Foch, but he wasn't sure. He noticed that his car had smashed into a parked MiniCooper, that he had hurt himself either from this particular impact or from other sources, and that he was still drunk. His watch read 5AM. His mental faculties required for the basic tasks of short term memory, rationality, and reason, were clearly only immediately being retrieved from his consciousness. He ultimately realized that he had embarked on another journey into the wee hours of the night in Paris, in search of drink and pussy. He rubbed his sweaty forehead and gasped for a much needed full breath of air. Then he thought about his actions. He tried to remember what happened to no avail. He sat in his car for at least ten minutes trying to solve this quandary.

Yet, this was not a new experience for our hero. He had traveled down this path to oblivion before, and had been lucky- lucky is the only word that can describe the cumulative events with regard to this- that he never met the gates of oblivion. He never met the abyss face to face. He stared directly into it and said, "Fuck you", but he never fell into its grasp.

George Oren Beckmann III was the first of the Beckmanns to go to college. George Oren Beckmann III had achieved a modicum of success in life. His wife estimated their net worth at 2.5 million dollars. His wife submitted that at their growth rate, he could retire at 55 to a net worth of 7.5 Million. Not bad, thought George, the son of a mechanic, the grandson of, yes, a mechanic. He had slaved away since 1982 in the middle and back offices at banks, honing in on his political skills in the process. And yet, other than a modicum of managerial skills and a database of anacdotal knowledge about banking, he had no particular skills. In the same vein, he was no clear genius in any sense of the word. He was not analytically inclined, nor was he particularly complex in his reasoning. He played the political game well, he networked, he kept a tidy office, and he always looked impeccable. In his perception of value in business, these qualities mattered, and his personal credo prescribed that he have the discipline to adhere to simple rules of presentation, organization, and cleanliness. In fact, these were the only qualities that he had to offer in a world obsessed with youth, arcane and every changing skill sets, and blind ambition. And thus, our hero packaged his own version of rare human traits with abandon. Even though he was the son of mechanic, he promoted, at least implicitly, his presence with the flair of an American Aristocrat. And thus, George became George Oren Beckmann III, and while this assigment of name to person is accurate, it must be said that it indicates nothing more than George has a middle name and is the third in the grand line of mechanics to be named George. He knew this. He knew deep down that a middle name did not mean anything, nor did the moniker III. After living in Paris for three years, he fully understood the psuedo-bourgeois inclination of Americans to ascribe middle names to their children. But, he used it. He signed his professional emails at work with "GOB III", rather than George. This subtle tendency served the ostensible purpose of letting the world, or at least his thousands of colleagues know, that he was the third George, and that they should assign weight to a rather sophisticated sounding acronym of a name that suggested a mixture of royalty and militaristic discipline. For, he had worked for the Swiss before, and, it was the tendency of the Swiss to sign emails with three letter anagrams that represented the identity of the email deliverer.

And so, we can understand from my brief exposition of GOB III's life that he wasn't a genius, had achieved some success, and yet had some very serious problems that are currently, that is, in the context of the opening of this little tale, at odds with his proclivities to promote a package of organization, tidiness, and general discipline. The fact is very simple, but hard to swallow at first. GOB III looked and acted perfectly on the outside. He was clean cut, always wore Zegna custom made suits, always spoke softly and clearly at work, and generally conveyed the image of, virtually, a Puritanical orientation with respect to life. As one explores his person more deeply, more dirt, as it were, surfaces. Beneath the tidy hand tailored Zedna suit, shirt, tie, belt, shoes, and socks, lie a tired corps. Sagging skin, folds of pasty white fat, and odd scabs polluted his exterior. But the end of the personal exploration lay not at this facile layer of the exterior. Deep down, deep in the core essence of GOB III lie a disturbed and very troubled mind. And therein, after the telling of this tale, lay the roots of the problem that led to the car crash, the bloodied nose, and disorientation in the dawn of a new Parisian day.