My Life as a Juvenal Delinquent

MY LIFE AS A JUVENAL DELINQUENT

When soliciting ideas to trigger future offerings for this venue, I received the sage advice to write from my own experience about actual events in my life. Well, I thought, such a grounding in Reality would certainly defeat the hero of these tales ere he dons his chimerical armor with which to face his foes upon the philosophical battlefield. Albeit the same advice repeated in every composition class in which I ever enrolled, I find myself more closely aligned with the sticker my RPG briefcase bore for many years – Reality is a crutch for those unable to cope with Science Fiction.

But perhaps Reality is more misunderstood than overrated. From before Plato's cave to long after my trip across this mortal stage, Experience and Reality may dance to the same silent music, but they produce different sets of footprints on the sticky surfaces of our minds. It might be argued that Reality truly never descends to the level of our perception and knowledge. If there is only one Reality, there are nonetheless billions of varying views of It gathered by the witnesses upon our plane. Tolerance begins when we realize that nobody (including ourselves) is ever fully correct in the Truth about Reality. We may not all be equally wrong, but we all have missed something that others have seen from a different vantage point.

So, indeed, my wise friend has suggested that my tolerant and curious readers may be interested in my view from the other locations in that metaphysical cave through which I have traveled.

How have I traveled my path? I have spent some time watching (listening, smelling, tasting, touching) the shadows of the physical world about me – although I have tread upon less than one-tenth of one percent of its dry land in a brief moment of its billions of years of existence. But in my mind, with the guides humanity has provided to me in literature and other communication media, I have traveled across time and space with nearly unbounded opportunity. DaVinci, Gulliver, and Obama are as real in my Experience as my neighbor, co-worker, friend, and family member; Egypt and Oz as real as my livingroom and workstation. Not equally detailed nor daily referenced as I stumble about observing, cataloguing, and analyzing fresh stimuli, but yet all truly possess internalized presences.

So, what topic might stymy my ability to have an opinion? Allowing that opinion to be in disagreement with others' Experience releases any inhibition enforcing social conformity. Without the need to occupy it physically, at what height or depth can my imagination not create for itself an avatar to inhabit for its new perspective? What absurdity can I not hurl along its hyperbolic path as eagerly, if not as ably, as any politician or pundit?

When my sister asks if these postings are mine or reposting of others' works, maybe I should answer “perhaps not the me you (nor I) know”.

Will I believe everything some persona of mine composes from thoughts to words? Perhaps no more often than you, my patient reader. I shall be sitting in the audience too, hoping to be entertained or enlightened by these performances. I also expect to be disappointed by some (and might spare you from the opportunity to suffer those similar discomforts, but you might not be so lucky).

So, if you are prepared to peruse the travelogue of a man who has come to believe that possibly his joking father was “a wooly caterpillar once” (and a hundred other incredible past lives and truth-tickling lies), I welcome you along on the journey.