So now I write.

When I was very young, I spent a lot of my time doodling. I could not yet read or write. I was read to some but never enough. My older sister had control of the the TV and my mother the radio. SO I could sit with my crayons or pens and draw my mansions and time machines and super racing tanks. But then I tired of outlines. I needed to show what was INSIDE the mansions and super fast time machine tanks. Then I needed to show how they worked, what structures supported the roof, made the tires go around, activated the time warp bubble. So I drew those things.

When I bored my father with the pedantry of my childish existence at our monthly dinners out; I made up stories to entertain him. Lies about what I had done and seen, fantastical twists on reality with drama and tension and trial and triumph. He gained interest while I was talking, so kept talking.

When I learned to read, I could suddenly entertain myself with anything the libraries or bookstores had to offer and when it came time to entertain someone besides myself, my father, my teachers, my friends; I told them what I was reading and what it made me think and wonder about. But after the conversation had moved on, I was still thinking and wondering. The wizards guild had found a way to emulate the Home raiders guns using magic in Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series. As the stories in the series drew to a close, I had to know what magics the wizards would use to counter the continued development of the Home Engineers innovations and advancements. I could only answer those questions myself. But fan fiction is for fans of the work and the author, not the idea itself. And an idea can never be singular, not to me.

When I encountered a book with an intriguing map on the inside, I thought "great! Another fantasy world to explore! More ideas to ponder! More dragons to befriend!" Wonderfully, that book I'd purchased with my earnings as an under the table flier distributor at the age of twelve, was fucking terrible...

So I wrote my own story. If that drek was worth publishing, certainly so was anything I could come up with. So I wrote a story about a twelve year old boy marooned on a tropical island and of course since I'd only known cats as pets then, the boy had a super smart cat who would do the dirty work of hunting for him. The boy of course had no interest in hunting all day as he would rather build a ship, one that traveled time and was outfitted like a luxury tank of course. Thankfully my family was gracious enough to lie to me about their interest in my chosen subject matter. Thankfully I was distracted by other ideas before it was finished.

Thankfully my hands would ache from gripping the pen too tight. I had to borrow my older sister's electronic word processor to maintain legibility. Typing became faster than writing long hand. And then came the computer. It was Christmas/ Yule tide in our houses and the budding writer of the family was given a proper computer to get him out of his sister's room. Thankfully it was a pathetic computer. It was quickly made obsolete by a new type of operating system called "windows." None of my friends could bring their disks over to my house and I had no experience playing the dazzling games they had on the school library's updated models. I spent the library time reading instead of joining in Sim City 2000 or Shoot The Bad Guys or whatever it was called. And then I would go home, hide my homework and write the stories I'd imagined in class when the teacher was talking about integers and letters that were numbers and the shapes of things too small to see which joined one another to make other things. The only things like that I cared about were the letters which made the words which formed those things they called sentences and insisted I learn to separate them with little dots.

So there I was in school being talked at about math, chemistry, musical notation, Pascal, Galileo, Saturn and Matise. Then came Squanto and those free thinking wonderful Europeans who came in peace and never intended to spread disease and were only defending themselves from the savage natives who used every part of the buffalo and smoked tobacco which we should never do because it's bad for us and makes our lungs turn black. You see, when I heard all this, it was a bit too late. I'd already been to the library and it was more than dragons I'd found there.

In the library at school they had books about gravity, it bends time you know. They had books about the native's compacts, treaties, laws and massacres at the hands of each other as well as at the hands of the waves of Europeans. They had books about invisible strings vibrating and not vibrating at the same time, stretching across the universe. I imagined that the Ansible in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game used these threads to send their messages to the fleets defending humanity from the Formics. In the library there were Gods and Goddesses who spoke and acted differently depending on who was talking about them, which chosen group of people was telling of how the world REALLY began. So when they took away my beloved books and note books in class, I sat and stopped paying attention to what useless bullshit was before me. My eyes stayed open but I did not see the teachers or the friends amd the foes surrounding me. I did not hear the fifteenth digit of Pi and I didn't bother learning the formula for caustic soap to beat my clothes against rocks on the icy riverbanks of Ohio in the winter. But I imagined what it must have FELT like.

I imagined I could grant myself a wish, or ten, or one hundred. I had five thousand dollars, or five billion. I was a robot like the terminator. I was a robot with wheels. I was an alien, I'd flown my car to the transporter pad and then had a spacesuit teleported onto me as I went through the station's gates and found the pad which took me to the world on the other side of the universe with air I could breath but only one fifth the gravity. That wonderful place with bright blue grasses and silver seas and skies that had auroras of purple and gold. The auroras reflected onto the fish who were all robots and they tended the forests under the those silver seas where the strange things lived. I wondered what I would ask them. I took notes in my head, and when I got home, I sat at my computer and wrote about it.

I have never learned to love a television. The music on the radio distracts me from the silver seas and robot fish to this day, it screams in my ears the same repetitive themes of sex, drugs, violence, breaking up, falling in love and dancing. Yes falling in love is the best thing I've ever done; but that's my and my wife's love, I don't care about your boyfriend's abs or who can shake what or how to calculate the stress of an I beam while the wind blows. I just want to know what it FEELS like to be caressed by the wind over my silver seas. What my love would like me to show her in these worlds of mine and how curious she would find the scents of the mushroom forests, the sight of my purple and gold auroras in a sky lit by two tiny unseen suns below the horizon as we sail forth on another adventure; until we get to the other shore and step on the transport pad and then fly home for a printed pizza and Chianti aged on the moon.

So I write. I let more people in on the secrets of the robot fish, the luxury-time-traveling tanks which shoot lasers of peace and love and shell the ignorant with books about little stings they can't see which connect one end of our universe to the other. I write and hope someone will smell the breeze of the mushroom forests, fly their cars to the transport pad and go so far that when the book is closed; they keep on going.

So now I write.