There's certainly a story for each of those moments, the ones loaded with cringing ripples in the spine, the way a horror movie or that scene in any Farrelly brothers movie is both laughed at and recoiled from. Mostly we shut up about those moments, and sometimes at night right before bed, or in an odd quiet hour of morning, the scenes jump out at us and we recoil and cringe for our past selves. Know that there isn't atonement; we can't consciously let go of those things that make us. We can consciously cover them with iterations of patterns, like wiping a hard drive, patterns of words and platitudes to make us feel better about the bare truth we hold like a wire on the edge of sleep.

Always something stupid, like that time your fly was down and literally everyone noticed. That time you gave a talk to a group of people and didn't just stumble over your words but ended up shaking, choking, walking away mid-speech to consume a huge rattling breath right before passing out.

Here's one: I was a younger version of myself, must have been 19 or 20. Those late teen / early twenty numbers are always bad for me; I was a mess of messes, a gigantic endless pool of socially awkward stupidity wrapped in very cool poses and cigarette smoke. Living on my own for the first time but still taking care of my parent's house when they were gone, which was every weekend at least, so not quite all the way out the door. I'd been working for the law firm, my first full time gig, so I must've been 19. Went out one night with some of the secretaries to a bar that wouldn't card me any more than they'd card my mother. I got so badly and completely plastered that I could not drive, and caught a ride back to my apartment (which I shared with two roommates) to get smokes, road beers, and cash for more of both. The plan was to drive to the desert and continue until dawn. By this time, though, I was so very, very far gone that I do not remember the precise sequence of events, but the scene was: riding in a random guy's car (someone that one of the secretaries had picked up) on the way to my apartment, I scream (from the back seat of what I think was a Camaro) "PULL OVER!" and the guy knows what's coming and pulls over, leaps from the seat and I start to projectile vomit all over the side of his car (having poked my head out just in time) which then leads to me stumbling into oncoming traffic while throwing up.

Then calmly getting back in the car and getting to my apartment with the other four people in the car now alternating between silence and giggles, except for the random guy driving who was super cool....every time I apologized he would launch into a "dude, we've all been there" speech. I crash into the apartment (it must have been 2am) and stumble badly first into the bathroom to rinse (breaking a bottle of Drakar and a mirror in the process). Then into my room, where I stripped off and started looking for non-vomity clothes. At that moment one of the secretaries who'd been getting me trashed all night walked into my room, one eye sort of half closed. She gave a drunken exaggerated "shhhhhh" and weaved across the room toward me. She was a divorced mom (of a girl seven years my junior) with a yoga tuned body and a heated intent that was almost as obvious as her intoxication. She pulled her shirt off over her head and continued her drunken exaggerated sultry walk to where I stood.

I'm a gentleman, mostly. Born lower class, raised by women in a Catholic family, I was never one to take advantage. But there I was, see, in nothing at all and there she was, twenty years my senior and it was a textbook case, a letter to Penthouse, a moment that would engage all of my hormones and all of hers in some crazy Lego lock that would consume the two of us in fiery passion until the first pale fingers of dawn would draw us from the sweaty sheets into a cold shower and some hot coffee.

Or would have had I not that moment thrown up on her.