The Author

I am 75 years old as I begin this story.

It is a record that will matter only to the odd surviving relative, such as my adopted son who might, following my demise, suddenly become curious about a father whose life had ticked by in the background of his busy days, as is the case for most of us when young or middle-aged.

And suddenly that person is gone. You're torn with regret that you never properly knew them, or anything about their life, other than they were there while you got on with yours. And then they weren't.

This is an autobiography written, published, and revised in “real time.” Why?

Writing online is disciplining. That someone might be watching creates a mirror to story telling, a reactive mirror. I become both author and reader, speaker and listener, and I critique every thought as it's laid out. 

Probably that's how most authors (of novels, articles, and blogs) work, consciously or not. But for me such necessary awareness has a potent effect.

 I wish to review my life by printing it out, keystroke at a time, and see it grow on this website. To force a constant review, to test those fragile memories, to seek an understanding of a self that has long lain ignored in the bucket list of mental imperatives. To measure any significance at all of what is - well, what was - clearly an insignificant and very ordinary existence. 

And, one might add, in the forlorn hope of thereby grasping some faint inkling of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. One of my most foreboding terrors is an insistence that the universe isn't just an improbability, it's an impossibility. Envisaging its self-creation, or creation by a god, brings forth only the mind-curdling dread that even if it could arise from that non-existence we term the Big Bang... exactly from whence? Not to mention, why?

The 'how' is the least of it.