The second time, history repeats itself as farce.
The lure of San Francisco proved too much in the end - what a betrayal of Bluefish that I should have even travelled here at all.
How is it possible to betray someone who is but a distant dot located somewhere in 2009, space increasing with every breath that is taken? Ah, but the dot is the eye of the storm, quietly seething as events coalesce around it; an organising principle emerging from chaos.
Even when occurrences fall into the void of history, as they all do in the end, the principles which caused them to hang together in their pomp can still be violated, and we can still be criticised for our lack of respect.
You can laugh at the idea of Yugoslavia if you want - what utter insanity it was to draw together six disparate countries and yoke them all under the one flag, these Christians, Muslims and Orthodox Serbs - and defend your giggling on the basis of lessons learned since the early part of the 1990s.
There is a difference between laughing at the failure of something, and mocking representations of it. You should never laugh at Doris Dragovic singing the old national anthem, Hej Jugosloveni, not even when she reaches the line about nothing ever being able to break the blue unity.
You should never laugh at the raising of the Yugoslav flag, even as you detect the punchline inherent in its central feature, the red star. One by one, all the star's points were snapped off, and all that remains are the old videos, and the memories, both invented and real.
This is the debt owed to old girlfriends: you can laugh at the hilarious circumstances which brought you together, and take the piss out of the history itself; but the little river of sentiment which perseveres after death, if you like, is sacrosanct.
Yet here I am in San Francisco, with perhaps the last person you would have ever have wished for me to spend time with. I am awkward and quiet and out-of-place. A redfish out of water, no less, and longing for the grit and rain and misery of England.
This repetition of history is farce, at once hilarious and sad, simultaneously significant and meaningless, everything and nothing.
