"Once, when I was young,

Ev'ryone called me gifted

And words flowed simply.

Now I have to work,

Each new word a paradox.

What gift then, is this?"

"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"

("Anything said in Latin sounds profound.")

So... Who am I?

Let me get back to you on that. Apparently, 55 or so years haven't quite been enough to get the complete story. I do know that the person I believed I was, for about half of my life, turned out to be someone else, who simply vanished one day like a chalk drawing on the walkway after the rain. Yes, the general shape is still there, but most of the content...

Sort of like the avatar, (from Expo '86, Vancouver, BC) the outlines seems intact, but the features are quite fuzzy.

Nonetheless, the person that I always was - the writer - is still quite alive and strong, and wants to know why it's taken so long to get the words out to the world.

So here I am, a little fuzzy, but willing to give it a shot.

I guess that requires finding direction, which in turn requires eyes, however, something missing from the avatar.

Certainly there's enough content from the past to fill a library, but, as a student of mine once said in a song, "What have you done for me lately?" Ah, that remains to be seen. My output has always been unpredictable - years of nothing and then several hundred pages in a few months - so I can't say what the future holds. In the many years that have elapsed since I started calling myself a writer, (goin' on 40) I have composed far too much for it to be a fad, fluke, or the passing interest of some dilettante with too much spare time. I've composed 408 sonnets - just sonnets, mind you, (those 14-line, iambic pentameter poems that drove you crazy in school - 25 of them in a week for a friend who wanted a 'book of poetry' for the Renaissance Faire) so that gives you some idea of my output. Perhaps, if there is a call, or I have some vague desire, (or a bout of boredom only the tedious process of uploading anything in the proper format could alleviate), I'll put them here for people to puzzle over.

In the meantime, enjoy the detritus that's shaken loose from the musty old museum in my head. It's an interesting place to be - for awhile, anyway.

The curator, however, thinks otherwise.

I can promise only this: Wear a seatbelt. The curator warns that the content of my 'stories' is as erratic as the author, and that the years of contact with 'disturbed elements' has definitely had its intended damage.

-your local cantankerous apoplectic bombast