Preamble: I Am Here (An Introduction)

History is written by the winners.  A lot of our lives are defined by others.

I'm going to risk boring you out of your collective minds and losing the readers I have by telling my story.

I am not going to start out with my Humble Beginnings, or Growing Up Confused, or even the first 95% of my life.

I have a story with a happy ending.  Yes, the real ending hasn't happened yet.  The hoped-for happy ending is "and he cured all illnesses and went on to live a healthy, productive life until he died at 951."

To get philosophical, I believe that each of us is here because of a series of astonishing accidents.  Richard Dawkins has often said that we owe our existence to a dinosaur sneeze or some other accident of nature ~ if a particular dinosaur was about to eat the tiny mammal that was destined to be the ancestor of man hadn't sneezed we'd all be a snack.  (I paraphrase.)

I'm where I am because of uncountable events, genetic and natural.  We all are. 

If some distant ancestor hadn't recovered from pneumonia I wouldn't be here.  And a delay of an hour over the thousands of years of recorded history might have meant a different sperm reaching an egg producing a different person....  It might have been an ancestor, or a mentor, or a man who killed the man who would have fathered the man who took the last seat on a wagon as my ancestors tried to escape some war or plague....

It wasn't easy for any of us to get here, and we made it without knowing our goals or even what will happen in the next minute.

So, to use an event many of us can relate to, instead of lamenting being born a man, know that if you weren't your amazing children would not be here now.  What might be a personal tragedy might really be a global triumph.  We all sacrifice.

But I'm way off topic.

I'm going to be writing about the last few years of my life (since I'm the only one who knows it).  It involves two main threads, and although it might not be a "and they lived happily ever after" story, at least it's an "and they are living happily" story.

This will take a bit over three weeks.  I'll still have some T content on Wednesday, and cartoons on the weekend.  If you want to come back at the end, I understand.  I kind of need to write this.  It's certainly cathartic to me.  It might inspire others.  It might annoy some.  So be it.

I've already written a post for the last day which will be 11 November (Veterans' Day in the states).  If I change schedule due to having to respond to comments, for example, the 11 November post will simply say "new end date: 14 Aug 2019" or something and I'll continue on.

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