I remember very little of my early childhood, when I was known as Sherlock Shakespeare. But my few memories from that brief period of my childhood are crystal clear. Ours was the first family in our tiny English village to have both an automobile and a television. By the time I was recruited into the new English standing army in 1660, my uncle had acquired bayonets, hand grenades, and sacrificial children—the latter who carried into battle weapons of self-immolation. Flame-throwers capable of broadcasting sizzling streams of flammable aggression came soon thereafter. One of those devices was stored in the attic of the house we built after losing our original home to arson—that fire, we learned later, was set by the fire brigade. Oh, those were brutal times, they were. Had we not fought tooth and nail to protect our homesteads, we would have been made homeless…and then butchered. As it was, several of us were severely injured during face-to-face confrontations. Most of the men between the ages of 16 and 26 lost at least one limb in battle; some survived with only one leg or part of one arm remaining. My memories of childhood and young adulthood end with those gruesome recollections. Beyond those ugly early periods of my life, my recollections commence again with vague memories of cell phones and 900-foot tsunamis. The recent spate of publication of autobiographical fiction works (e.g., novels, poems, diaries, textbooks, and survival cookbooks) is, of course, top of mind, inasmuch as they have been produced only recently. The first such published work was completed and offered for lease only two months ago. At 6 million pages in length, the book was necessarily published in series format.
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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York…~ William Shakespeare/Richard, Duke of Gloucester ~
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I could go on for days like this, but my knees won’t permit it. Nor will my elbows. Nor my fingers. And, if the messages I’ve been receiving from my brain are legitimate (and they are), and the attitudes oozing out of my head are reliable (which I cannot verify), I will go on record as an honorable man with nothing worth hiding and nothing worth telling. Where is the value in emptiness? Why do blank pages leave so much to the imagination? Black fades to grey and grey fades to cream and cream fades to white. Predictions hide beneath their messages. Honesty and nudity have nothing to hide but regret and shame. But in a world in which truth is not a weapon, nor does embarrassment fracture peace, fear is just an artificial intruder.
