This is a web log about life; about walking along and taking time to really live through experiences rather than letting life crush by with its desperate urgency in a suffocating rush-hour surge down the freeway. The selections included here are all short. Some are extremely short. Their relationship to each other is simply their relationship to the author, who walked and lived them all first hand, and wrote them down, mostly in third person.
Everything here is deeply personal and I wrestle at times with how much of the long walk is appropriate to put into print. Sometimes, something close to full disclosure wins the day. At times, the writing ventures dangerously close to emotional and spiritual nudity. Some of the work is about shadow. Real and sometimes dark disclosures of the heart might pop up from time to time in the stories. If I might overstep your sensitivities, so be it, but I hope you will walk along with me and perhaps touch a little of your own shadow as we go.
You might find a thread or two running through the collection, but I’ll leave that to you to find for yourself. This blog is an account of living. As such, it is sometimes not so obvious how the events are related. They simply happen unexplained, without tidy connections and transitions. Some of the tales pop up out of sequence by as much as 40 years. As these stories began to accumulate, a good friend advised that I put in some connective tissue between the selections to make a more linear story. I have not succeeded in doing so. That would be good advice for a novel, but this is not a novel. It is a life. I have never known of a life that played out so neatly as a novel.
The cast of characters is large and varied, and each is crucial to the development of the mood and integrity of the collection. All of the characters are real, and several of them are the author.
Some of them just might be you, the reader. Any resemblance of the characters portrayed here to real people is fully intended, and is in fact, the driving force behind a work of this kind. Identities of actual people have not been purposefully revealed or concealed. If you think you recognize someone you know, you are probably right, although the likelihood that the author also had that person in mind is remote.
