With this I am adding myself to those who launch their thoughts in a universe that no one will ever know fully.

I remember seeing on a bookstore shelf a large paperback volume about the size of a telephone book (which, in itself, has nearly vanished from our lives) that listed all the websites on the Internet and had small, capsule summaries of each sites content and purpose. I don’t know how many editions of this book were printed. It was certainly obsolete within a few years. The Internet had grown so fast and so widely that no one and no thing, not even the search engine with the funny name, would ever comprehend it.

Oh, we can approach it. We can design algorithms that give us some information. But, like the 20th Century quantum physicists gazing into the innards of an atom, we are getting, at best, a probability: a likely story.

And, as is the case with most likely stories, the truth of the tale isn’t as important as its ability to make someone pay attention.

So, to those who have read so far, permit me to introduce myself.

I am a writer who, growing up, envied those who were older, because I assumed that they either solved the problems that were flustering me, or had developed that thick skin, suave attitude and blithe certainty that made living in a modern (now post-modern) world easier.

Many of my novels have characters who are older and wiser than the hero, who is naive, trusting, occasionally shy and stubbornly persevering in ways these older folks are not. Sometimes the older character, a parental figure, cannot communicate easily what the hero may need to solve the problem of the book. In one novel, Street Money, the hero’s father was dead, and the hero (or heroine) came to terms with his passing by understanding, accepting and reenacting her father’s profession. She also has the help of an older, mentor figure, a marginalized character cursed by a problem that can’t be solved.

I wrote that book when I was a bit older than my heroine. Now I’m close to the age of Shepherd Ladderback, the obituary writer who was so easily and eagerly ignored by almost all the staff of the fictional tabloid newpaper in Street Money and the subsequent books in that series.

In many ways, I have become the person I used to envy. My work has been published in ways that have brought me a small income, some attention, mostly good reviews and many adventures. I am married to my high school sweetheart, whom I dearly love. I am at a point in my life when I may write only what should be written, or what must be written.

Must blogs be written? I’m not sure about that. I’ve been told by people who write and read blogs that these  are vital for achieving an audience or community of readers.

As a reader, I never wanted to be part of a community. When I was a teenager, I had the chutzpah to call up some writers I admired on the telephone. Harlan Ellison. Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl talked to me for a while. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I met a young Dean Koontz at a science fiction convention. Lester Del Rey and Keith Laumer let me visit them. Keith, who became ill, let me “apprentice” myself to him, in exchange for helping him keep house and run errands.

I was hoping that some of their olderness would help me become the writer I wanted to be. Of all the writers I met then, and later as both an author, a journalist and teacher, I wanted to be like Keith, who lived alone in a beautiful house that he designed, on a Florida lake. He wrote about two to three hours every day. He read history voraciously and ate well. He didn’t care about how much money he spent–he flew first class when traveled, always bought brand name groceries and impulsively bought a convertible Cadillac that ended up in his lake (a story I will tell later).

Keith’s greatest difficult was his illness, a stroke that rendered most of his left side useless. He could walk with a brace and drive one handed. The stroke also blew out the part of his brain that dampened his anger. He would become quickly enraged at so many things: people who didn’t respond to him immediately, myself (when I didn’t do exactly as he wished) and, lastly, book editors, magazine editors and literary agents.

I learned eventually that there was a troublesome, problematic side to Keith’s seemingly idyllic lifestyle. He was divorced from his wife, and somewhat estranged from his son and daughters. But I always thought that, if I ever “made it,” I’d want to make it as he did.

I live in a house in a suburban sprawl that has a nice view of trees, and a deck where I can sit and, on some days, not hear the sounds of the machines that cool houses, mow lawns, blow leaves, sell ice cream in the summer (I wish the truck would play a different tune)  and fly people to far-off lands from the nearby airport.

I walk the dog to a pond that, as with most bodies of water around here, has a found in its center that pushes up a floodlit fan of water. The neighborhood is good, safe and friendly.

Unlike Keith, I don’t live alone. My wife and I are very much in love. We help each other and trust each other.

I don’t spend money as lavishly as Keith did, but I have enough to take care of small things, buy roses every week for my wife), travel (“economy” only!) a little and pay for birthday and holiday gifts for sons Brandon and Stephen. Having taught writing and history for many years as an adjunct, I moderate a thriving writers group whose members have gone on to win awards and have books published.

I haven’t had as many books published as Keith. Nor do I have the fame and admiration he achieved, within the science fiction community. I have moments when I wonder how things may have turned out if…things turned out differently.

I’m wise enough to know you can’t “be” another person. At best you can appreciate what you have, not as a thing achieved, but as a temporary place that will never be the same. Kindness and civility matter more than style and display. It’s nice to share your life with someone you love. The view from you window is ALWAYS good, even if you have days that are so dark you can barely see, or times when you don’t notice.

If I never wrote another word after this blog, I would want my last one to be “gratitude.”

Having blogged exactly once, I see two errors in the text that eluded me when I was proofreading my work. I haven’t figured out yet how to go back into the text and change those errors. I’m sure there’s a way, but I’m more interested in what these errors may be.

At first glance they are problems with composition, the dreaded spelling-grammar-punctuation-usage flaw that plagues anyone in an English class. These same troubles plague the teachers that must correct them, as I learned when I taught English, literature and writing.

The pesky manners of English composition are about as easy to learn as the multiplication tables. You memorize “rules” (which I would rather call customs) and then you apply them repeatedly until they sink in. This becomes problematic when you reach memory fatigue, as I did when, for reasons I’ll never remember, I stopped learning the tables past 11. This slowed down my ability to calculate and contributed to my envy of “math people” who can look at a splattering of numbers and instantly know the answer. Those with a similar attitude should listen to Jimmy Buffet’s hilarious song, “Math Sucks.”

Fortunately I have been saved by the calculator, which is not the same as the grammar and spell checkers in word processors because grammar and spelling are customs, rather than rules. The language is changing all the time, and the changes rarely please the fussy grammarians who memorized above 11 and become so righteously indignant when someone messes up who and whom.

I know. I used to be one. I used to get mad at people who used “kind of” and “sort of” instead of “almost” or “rather.” I’d stomp on literary discussions in college by fixing the hapless student with the steely gaze of the unquestionably correct, and say, “what KIND are you talking about?” Worse, I’d say “to sort is to arrange in an orderly fashion. A sort is an arrangement. To what sort of arrangement are you referring?”

Be assured: I’ve changed my ways, for many reasons. A significant one arose after I studied the origins of the English language, both as a hobby and as an occasional teacher of etymology (the study of word origins, which should not be confused with entomology, the study of insects). I discovered that in the 17th century, English middle class anxiety to distinguish the properly (that is, expensively) educated from the rabble led to a desire to nail down proper speech, writing, spelling and punctuation. The pioneer grammarians decided that English should resemble Latin, whose grammatical structure is based to a great extent on word endings.

Sadly, the English in use at the time (which is nearly identical to what we speak and write today) was only one-third Latin, and most of the Latin words were terms that had been either derived from French (William the Conqueror came from Normandy, and French was the official language of the English Court until the High Middle Ages), or invented in the expanding disciplines of science, medicine, religion and the law. Latin was used conversationally at universities. It was Europe’s international language of diplomacy.

The other third of English was Germanic, crossing the English channel with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes. These languages derived meaning not so much from word endings as the order in which words were used in a statement.

The other third of English is “everything else.” This includes place names from other languages (Michigan, Seattle), the names of food items  (coffee), words for new creatures that may become automobiles (Mustang), words that sound like what they mean (puff), acronyms (snafu), and words we event because we don’t know the correct term, we don’t like the correct term, or we have a better and more appealing one.

As you may imagine, the German and Latin parts of English have not gotten along well. Though they are used interchangeably, “same,” which derives from the German, and “equal,” from the Latin via Norman French, are neither similar, nor are they equivalent (one can find most of the major problems of American democracy in the contradictory interpretations of these words: we like to be believe that all human beings are “created” equal, but, as individuals, we are unique, and therefore, cannot and should not be the same as everyone else).

In wanting to make English more like Latin, the 17th Century grammarians created a more problems than they solved. Yes, they did systematize  much of what was written and those who have followed this system have achieved greatness. William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill–the list is gloriously long.

But didn’t Winston Churchill say that a preposition was a terrible thing to end a sentence with?

And why did Shakespeare infamously overload his adverbs when he had Marc Antony (that wily rabble-rouser) characterize Brutus’s stabbing of Julius Caesar as “the most unkindest cut of all”?

Please don’t tell me that in order to make great art you must learn the rules to break them. As someone who has learned the rules, I can tell you about many great artists who were in too much of a hurry to memorize and and repeat. have left us so much fabulous art precisely because they didn’t learn the rules. Academics like to dismiss these artists as “naive” or “unschooled” but, for every musician who knows theory, there are a dozen more who can’t even read a staff, who just picked up an instrument because they loved it and have filled the world with joyous noise.

I believe that we should still teach English grammar, spelling, punctuation and usage, not as rules, but as manners: historically or socially derived customs that are indulged to achieve a desired end.

This said, I proofread my first blog entry, thought it was as good as I could make it, and I didn’t see the errors.

I’m just getting old and don’t see what I may have when I was a young man in a hurry? As I recall, in my youth, I saw less errors and relied greatly on editors.

Is it the odd flickering of a digital screen that somehow makes things look perfect, even when they’re not?

Is it what Christopher Cook Gilmore (a charismatic character who was far more fun than the books he wrote at the New Jersey shore) smugly aid likened his work to a rug weaving. “The weavers put in flaws because only God can make something perfect.”

What about James Joyce, who said errors were “volitional” and, for an artist as great as he was, they led to “portals of wisdom.”

Or can I just throw up my hands and say, “I goofed.”