By "need," I mean "want."

I've been exposed to a small amount of philosophy through the osmosis of a bachelor's in the liberal arts, and I've read a couple of SEP articles-enough to know when to roll my eyes when some idiot like Harris (or Peterson, god help us all) starts talking. But I would like to actually learn a bit about the discipline, rather than trying to pick up disparate pieces without any real foundation.

The problem I have found is that once you get beyond the absolute basics (a guy named Plato had some ideas about these things he called forms), there's an abrupt and impressive gap between introductory texts that treat you like a newly literate child and "introductory texts" (I'm looking at you, SEP) which begin their articles with sentences like "[Postmodernism] can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning."

Normally I'd just turn to a good book, but frankly all the surveys of western philosophy I've seen either look untrustworthy, too basic, or specialized to a point that they fly way above my head.

So. Help? You people must remember a time before you somehow learned everything.