If you're still reading, either you must know me and are curious as to what manner of vainglorious tripe I would write about myself, or you must have seen something in my other writing that made you think there might be some words worth reading here.� Well, I can't say I agree with your decision, but just to make you happy, I'll provide you with a brief biographical sketch, though, for reasons that will become clear later, I cannot go into too much detail.� Right, then.
In the beginning, it was the seventies, and two young people who surely loved each other very much must have been surprised and annoyed to find their love was going to be tried and tested for the next eighteen or more years by a bouncing baby boy.� Though impossible to confirm, I believe my mother had a secret crush on the singer, Andy Williams, and so I was named Andrew.� (Though an unusual name at the time, either millions of other young women were also smitten with Mr. Williams, or a best-selling baby-naming bible pronounced "Andrew" as the best choice for potential doctors and lawyers, for in the years since, "Andy" has nearly supplanted "John" as the most common name for that species of misbehaving buck-toothed brat commonly found in groceries, shopping malls, and flying coach.)� Though my long-term memories were as yet unable to form, little Andy enjoyed his existence, as the family photo album can attest: Andy sleeps in places now considered dangerous or detrimental to children's health, Andy wears first birthday cake in his ear, Kosmo the cat glares hungrily at Andy while the parents are distracted by the blinding flash,� Andy plays with toys now considered dangerous or detrimental to children's health, Andy (wearing Oshkosh B'Gosh overalls) takes flying leap into wet pile of leaves in street, Andy, sitting much too close, stares blankly at ancient television while eating M&M's with Red Dye No. 5, and so on.� They are the usual seventies childhood pictures, often faded to pink--truly I can see childhood through rose-colored glasses.� I would wonder how any of us survived, if not for having seen my parents' own childhood pictures and toys.� Poor, poor dears; now I know why they are the way they are.
As for the years which I can actually remember, I should say my life was quite average, though with no older siblings to abuse me first, I was unprepared for the abuse I received at the hands of other children.� The little monsters were ever ready to take advantage of naivet� wherever they found it, and apparently I had a never-ending wellspring of it.� I can recall being made to say things I didn't understand, and being punched and/or being made to cry.� But I can also recall riding my bicycle endlessly, swimming all summer long, blissfully playing with cats, losing myself in stories, watching old movies, eating Spaghetti-O's, and picking on my little sister.
Ah, my sister.� It would be foolish of me to pretend to understand the logic of my parents' choices, and even more foolish to ask about them, since humans in general never really remember or admit to remembering what was going on in their minds at key points in their lives, probably because they are too ashamed to admit to having been distracted by a shiny object, or to having fallen asleep in their junior high "health" class.� That said, I believe the relative ease with which I was endured acted as a lure to my parents, for my mother has often told me I was such a nice little baby.� While I am sure this is only relatively speaking, and my twenty-four hour maintenance could not have been easy, I also have no reason to doubt my mother, for if she had felt I was unnecessarily petulant as an infant, I would most certainly be hearing about it now.� In any case, my parents must have been sufficiently un-horrified by the idea of another little Andy roaming the house to have been willing to take their chances with another child.� Sadly, having been "educated" in rural schools of the fifties and sixties, they apparently did not understand the genetic crapshoot that marks the beginning of life, with enough staggering unpredictability to put off even the most compulsive of gamblers.� Suffice it to say that when I was five years old, my parents, as if to say "What the hell, we're already stuck with one, why not make it a pair," went away to the hospital and brought back a baby with the appearance and temperament of a demon.� To be sure, she grew nicely and is now a sweetheart of a sister who lies and tells me she doesn't remember me picking on her and being more of an obstacle than the wise older brother she would have preferred, but I still think of her as being red-faced and screaming.� And though I am often wracked with guilt over not getting along well with her until we were practically adults, we did have our moments as children, and I am acquainted with elderly siblings who never did learn to get along.� Thus far in life, my chief consolation (and people do need to be consoled for living) seems to be that things could always have been worse.
We live in the age of the atom, and in the years of my childhood, things were a little different than they had been for my parents.� Carl Sagan and friends did their level best to educate us and make sure we understood that the Civil Defense propaganda that my parents had endured as children, which had the effect of scaring those very children it was meant to reassure, was in fact a bunch of misbegotten hokum.� Even a "minor" nuclear war would cause a mass extinction.� Doomsday scenarios were popular in science fiction and comics, and poor little Andy's head was filled with nightmares of mushroom clouds.� (People often complement children who are deemed to be thoughtful or imaginative, and while I do believe they are right in doing so, I'm not certain they understand the potential of a child who can imagine a million ways in which his life might end each and every day.)� To make matters worse, an obviously senile (why is it a boy of nine years could tell, but no one of voting age could?) President kept rattling his saber--enough nuclear weaponry to vaporize the oceans and fuse the Earth's surface into glass--even in the face of a Soviet Union already trying pathetically to enlighten itself and stick its own war mongers into cold storage.� There was the old Gipper making threats and trying to get a rise out of the kinds of temperamental people who really should be left in peace.� I won't profess to have known more than I really did at the time; I was a child and often just parroted what I heard on television or elsewhere.� But I do know this: Ronald Reagan scared me.� However the same or different this may have been from my parents' childhood is hard to say, but I can assure you it was similar in at least one way.� One moment I would fear for the fate of humanity, the next I would splash water at my best friend, build a snow fort with my sister, or gobble some dots with my Atari.� Life goes on.
My Teens: The Dorkular Years--(this portion deleted due to sheer embarrassment.)
We now enter the Dark Ages of my life, the early adulthood that is notable only because it precedes my own personal Renaissance.� Its details are of course important to me personally, but I won't bother you with most of them.� Being the bookish sort of person has led me to many bookstores over the years (both of the fashionable variety, the crumbling variety, and the fashionably crumbling variety) and I couldn't help but notice there seems to be a running competition to see who in the world has suffered the most.� While perhaps perfectly understandable to want to write such a poisonous volume of gossip and wretched despair, why oh why would anyone want to read such a thing?� Unfortunately those lovely bookstores are overflowing with such doorstops, and I won't add to the problem.� Besides, if suffering is a competition...well...that's just not something I respond well to. �
Imagine yourself in a foot race, with one other opponent.� You're leading slightly, or perhaps more likely, you're behind.� In any case, many people respond in outwardly healthy ways to such a situation, trying that much harder to win the race, or to at least make it close. �They may be a nervous wreck inside, but at least to observers there is a healthy outcome.� If I were to run such a race, at some point I would likely knock my opponent over, kick him while he's down, place my foot in a strangling position on his neck, and dare him to try and finish the race.� Indeed, I do not participate in competitions of any sort because this is exactly the ugly sort of behavior I deplore in other people, and heaven knows I don't want to be other people.� There are many things I can use to motivate myself: a sense of satisfaction for a job well done, seeing my name on the cover of a (non-memoir) book for which I am the author, being able to eat for one more week, etc.� Since competition is not a motivating factor for me, I will stay out of this one and spare you the gory ugliness of my own personal brand of suffering.� Many of this Earth's creatures have had it far worse than I.� Besides, those poor memoir writers have suffered enough without me crushing their collective larynx. �
My Dark Ages can be summed up as such: either I did not know what kinds of things I needed to do to survive, or I did but feared them.� My head effectively placed up my rectum, I then made lousy choices, compounded by other people's nasty reaction to said choices, and things were looking very bleak to poor, inexperienced Andy.� How did I get out of it?� By making an effort to read, to think critically, to carefully start patching up relationships, to take classes, and to write just for the sake of writing.� In short, to do all the things I should have been doing in my teen years.� Why didn't I do these things before?� Blame hormones; I do.� My memories tell the story: one moment I was teaching myself typing, computer programming, and algebra, the next all I can remember is obsessing over girls and playing with myself.� You be the judge.
And so, my Renaissance is on, and it feels mostly good, but is not without its own foibles.� As a tiny and insignificant portion of the world's population can attest, being intelligent and educated doesn't necessarily make life easier.� It's definitely worth living, but just how to go about it?� How do I better myself without hurting other people?� How do I better other people without hurting myself?� Would she and I be better off with or without each other?� What sort of socks should I wear?� What will people think of them?� Does it matter what they think?� And so on.� Often I find myself paralyzed by choices, which to an outside observer probably looks precisely like my former self just standing, passively waiting for someone else to do something.� Still I wear "fat slob chic," only now it's because I've first thought carefully about it.� And still I'm capable of making poor decisions, or more precisely, failing to make timely decisions due to excessive worrying over seemingly insignificant or unlikely consequences. �
A renaissance is a revival of lost things, and among my lost things were Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, and Carl Sagan.� What do a poet who writes about lonely Martians, a comedy writer who destroys the Earth over and over again, and a scientist driven to inspire people to look up, down, and all around have in common?� Goodness, I haven't time to explain it here, other than I had been affected profoundly by all three in my younger years and then neglected them and everyone else when the hormonal hammer smashed my brain to pulp.� In re-reading them as an adult I discovered what it was that had affected me, and from there I spread my readings far and wide, writing about all of them, doing all the mental push-ups I had neglected for so long.� In short, I am very little different from young Andy, the primary difference being that now I am able to spill out unending self-analyzing, self-aggrandizing words to prove said point.�
For example, I now know that I was right all along in refusing to believe in gods or spirits or an afterlife.� To be sure, there were many times when my child's brain wanted to embrace such ideas, but it would never be long before the skeptic in me came upon hard evidence to the contrary.� In my Renaissance I've dug much deeper into the sciences, particularly chemistry and the scientific method itself, as well into story-telling.� Now when I look upon the world, I see two camps of people.� There are those who make up stories and then try to scare others into believing and legitimizing said stories. These dolts are the ones who persecuted scientists throughout history and would still believe the Earth is flat (and the center of the universe) if left to themselves.�� And there are those who investigate the world around us and open up their research for others to pick apart and find flaw with, in an effort to grow beyond one person's ideas into a collective understanding of life, the universe, and everything.� These folks are perfectly capable of having addle-brained ideas, the main difference being that they do not murder or brainwash their critics; they put their theories forward to be tested and proved or disproved by anyone who wishes to do so.� It can be a trying and painful process, but the end result is truly the expansion of our knowledge. �
Some people would rather keep their head up their keister and remain in the Dark Ages (though they seem to have no problem living it up with the toasters, bicycles, and life-saving dialysis given to us by so-called heretics.)� Most certainly I am not one to keep my head buried when I know there's something going on around me.� I would much rather worry about the state of the world (and perhaps even do something about it) than not worry about it and spend all my energy hating and scolding those who do worry.� Currently the occupant of the White House is Dictator Dubya (don't blame me; I didn't vote for him, and I'm not sure anyone actually did) and this seems to be his philosophy, to try to shush and shame the world into obeisance, like some pious elderly Sunday school teacher from hell.� This kind of thinking leads people to try and force their beliefs onto others, something I find revolting.� This is not because I don't share their beliefs, but because I believe people need to discover things for themselves.� We can put forth everything we know for people to peruse and investigate, but ultimately everyone will have to decide for themselves, and in my case, the more anyone tries to force me to believe something, the less inclined I am to believe it.
In my current state of enlightenment (at least I hope that's how I will see it when in the future I look back to this time) I have come to see myself as a bull in a china shop.� It is with great ease that I can bumble about and break delicate things, and so it is that I take great care in my relationships and my writings to not chip, crack, or otherwise damage anyone if I can help it.� To do no harm is one of my goals in life now, and sadly it often results in my seeming to withdraw from people.� Perhaps I'm giving myself too much credit, but I've seen people hurt by things I said that were meant to help, and I've seen people hurt by my very presence.� My existence is now a mad cross between that of a monk and a feral cat.� Too, I myself can be fragile, and it is for this reason you will find no real details in this little biographical blurb.� There are simply too many gossips and identity thieves in the world for me to be making moist morsels of the lives of myself, my friends, and my family. �
It should come as no surprise then that I most enjoy writing fiction, a form that requires no real-life details, no specifics of any kind that could hurt anyone.� Fiction allows for the art of myth-making in an arena where people are not likely to start forming a cult and worshipping their newfound gods.� (For Pete's sake, if any of you have read my stories and are thinking of doing such a thing...well...bad dog! �Bad, bad dog!� I'm much too self-conscious to be able to endure followers, you see.)� No hard and fast opinions must be thrust upon the reader, and everything can presented in a dramatized way that will only lead people to think for themselves, not to slavishly follow someone else's perhaps questionable logic.� Anyway, these things really should be true in fiction, and it's what I continually strive for.� Fiction is simultaneously mental exercise and an escape from the mundane.� Fiction can improve life and it is in that way that I hope to affect the world for the better.� As an added bonus, I like the idea of using my enormous, clumsy hands to craft something that could be considered art.� Me, an artist!
And there you have it; I've told you everything there is to know about me, without really telling you anything at all.� It's not impossible to get hold of me, so by all means if you feel like writing or talking, please do so.� Just know that in my current state of being, I do not dispense dating or marital advice, or stock tips.� Cheerio!
All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.