THE OTHER OTHER BIOGRAPHY

It all started with a toothache.

Actually a headache, but I had a low-level virus that also gave me a little sensitivity at the gum line which, in my sensitive state, felt exaggeratedly dangerous. The line "I am an animal in pain" was largely a self-directed joke, a bit of sarcasm to make myself feel better through self-flaggelation. It was also an indirect dig at another author, whose anme I have forgotten, who once began a short story-- and I'm paraphrasing here, since it's been a long time ago and my memory of it is patchy-- "My name is John Jacob Jingle-Heimer Schmidt. I exist in time." (The name is the part I'm ot clear on.) It was a pretty good story, dealing mainly with the contrast between religious faith and the basic faith that we all display in the daily act of existence, the notion being that if we were able to doubt our daily faith with the vigor we allow ourselves to doubt our religious faith with, we would probably cease to exist. (Some years after, I caught one of those strange return-the-arts-to-our-kids things where they turned the short story into a short film no kid would ever watch. After the initial hokiness-- there are some things a disembodied narrator cannon say without a degree of hokiness, and "I exist in time" is one of them-- I rather enjoyed it, despite realizing that there were large parts of the story that were essentially skimmed to keep the film to it's 22 minute running time.)

After that, the story became an excercise in regret, a litany of small dissatisfaction: my wife and I were living in a ground-floor apartment in a suburb of Atlanta. We were not going to gallery openings or gallery crawls, something I had derived some satisfaction from during my college years. Although we did have a dog-- who does in fact chase squirrels but not rabbits-- we didn't have a lawn. And I was not an architect.

Not that I really wanted to be. I had visited that in college, as I had a fair number of friends and revelers in the College of Architecture, and I knew that a large part of the trade dealt with small numbers and pesky details, and very little of it had to do with grand artistic sensibilities or originality. But I did envy the architects I talked to in plying my daily trade, for a number of reasons that didn't make a whole lot of logical sense. I have never been what you would call a joiner, but for whatever reason, I did envy my architect his membership in the brotherhood, however sketchy and uncomfortable that membership might be. (The sketchiness of that membership in that brotherhood would go on to become a major theme in the works.) The revisionism of the history of Honest Abe was something I had been exposed to earlier-- in high school, if I remember correctly-- by a history teacher who used the unspoken aspects of Lincoln's life and presidency as an oject lesson in the prism of history: emphasising a few key aspects of the man's temprament and personality. My teacher represented Mary Todd's misbehavior as predicated on Abe's disingenousness and miscreance. I softpedaled her wird behaivior-- or rather, had my architect do so-- because her weird behaviour was reeeeeeeally weird, and it would have detracted from the story. Or so I thought at the time. In the final analysis, I found it kind of amusing that our hero is distracting himself from his discomfort by reverse-engineering a history the facts of which he is not completely familiar with.

There's probably something hugely deep and profound and disturbing that this first story has to say about my personality, but I'll leave that for someone else to work out.