About the time this picture of Michael Stipe was taken, I was undergoing many fierce emotional storms that threatened my very existence. Sucidal, despairing that the voices in my head were telling me I was killing my favourite singers, I became a virtual recluse in my tiny, cramped apartment.

I didn't like living alone, but both my parents were re-married with lives of their own and after all, I was in my twenties and therefore, supposedly capable of looking after myself. But i wasn't. My apartment fell into a state of disarray, filthy, messy and clutered. I began to avoid taking showers and changing my clothes. Worse yet, I was forcing myself to go without sleep because I feared the voices interrupting me and scaring me half to death.

Then I began listening to R.E.M.'s music again, and I began to feel soothed, as if someone had wrapped me in a large, woollen blanket and was hugging me tightly. I will never forget what this band has done for me. I would not be a soon-to-b-published author if it were not for the strength that Michael Stipe's lyrics instilled in my shattered soul. This was the period of time when I thought of him as some kind of Divine soul, complete with eye-liner and hair dye. I was pretty cofused and ill.

I guess the point of all this rambling is to say "thank you" to R.E.M. for quite literally saving my life many times....many, many times. Two songs in particular, "World Leader Pretend" and "Everybody Hurts", mean more to me than words are capable of conveying. "Let Me Make It Good" was, therefore, the only logical choice for the title of my book. It could be me, it IS me. I was completely blown away when I first heard it back in 1988.

So these four parts of my page were meant as a tribute, a fond "thank you" to a band that has been an integral part of my emotional healing. That is why they mean so much: They literally saved my life.

This ends Part Four of my R.E.M.-inspired chronicles