When Salad Gets Boring

While at lunch yesterday and for no reason I can think of, one of the famous ethics questions popped into my head:

If you could have sex with anyone in the world, and nobody would ever know, and they'd never remember it, would you?

And then the follow up:

What if you would never remember it?

It then occurred to me, holy shit, I might have been taken advantage of hundreds, even thousands of times, and I'd never know it! Maybe I've even taken advantage of thousands of other people - I don't know, I CAN'T REMEMBER!!!! What kind of MONSTER am I?!?!

I then devolved into a fit of giggling, which I'm certain made the table next to me pretty nervous. Maybe even the people sitting at the table, too, but they were harder to read.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

I love a good story, especially when I get to tell it. What sometimes gets me in trouble is that I tend to like a good story more than I like a true story. One look at the books on my shelf will confirm this beyond possibility of contradiction – Isaac Asimov, G. G. Kay, Robert Jordan, Ursula K. LeGuin, all of them prevaricators to one extent or another. This particular personality trait usually manifests itself in a tendancy to… oh, call it elaborate on actual events in order to make a better story out of them, regardless of whether or not the events as they transpired were plenty entertaining enough on their own merit. Sometimes life gives us stuff that needs no embellishment at all. Sometimes, however, the embellishment is the story.

The title of this blog is “The Atlanta Chronicles”, a nod to the 4 years Wanda and I spent in Bloomington, IN while she worked on her doctorate, during which I would occasionally write a missive to the folks back home relating the things which were happening to us. These missives are collectively known as The Chronicles - contained therein are some really, really good stories. Some of them are even true. I will begin to post these stories on the sidebar of this blog, in addition to new ones that come along in the meantime. This weekend I will post two of my favorites:

• Benjamin versus the Bloomington DMV, from the original Chronicles


• Remote Control Terrorism, from actual events a few years ago

I will welcome your commentary on these pieces, as they will begin to shape, with any luck, the nucleus of an attempt to build a new career.

This computer stuff, it’s for the young-uns.

P.S. – If any of you have original Chronicles e-mails squirelled away (I have no idea why you would, but some of you are pack-rats, I know it), I would love copies of them – my entire archive of Indiana e-mails has gone missing, which fact I find monumentally alarming.