Prologue
I’ve always known that I was different. Oddly enough, though, that feeling never became solid until I grew up and moved away from home. I mean, one tends to think, as one is growing up, that the way one lives is, more or less, the way that those around you live. It never occurred to me that living in a bus, or heating solely with a wood stove, was odd by current social standards until I was plunged headfirst into the grown-up world.
I also had not previously realized how sheltered my existence had been. Now, living in a school bus in the advanced age that was the 1990’s could arguably be called “not sheltered”. But there were many things that I had never really grasped until moving away from home.
There are things that I still do not grasp, eight years after my marriage moved me across the country and into a whole new circle of activities and faces. At times I look around me and think, "Well, how did I get here? And what am I supposed to be doing?" They tell me that these things are part of growing older; that one will walk into a room and forget what one is doing there, or what they were looking for. But this seems to apply to my entire life.
It is thus that I preface this, the first bit of an ongoing project; I can only say that I present the contents with much humor, but little regret or apology. This is, after all, no manifesto, no call to arms to change the way that we live. This is just a collection of thoughts that have occurred to me as I have discovered the world and the people in it, and I hope that you will have as much fun reading about it as I have had living it. And Dad, this is your fault. The book, I mean.