Categories: Uncategorized

Let me introduce myself.

I’m sitting in a somewhat local coffee shop, having had to take the day off from work for various reasons I’ll explain later. Before I post anything interesting on this blog I figured I’d take a moment to explain its purpose.

Most blogs have and will continue to be written by twenty-something year old dreamers. The type who struggle to make ends meet with a real job, or the luxury of having been born to parents who actually saved a little of their income towards the future and didn’t burden their kids with that. Those kids, the burdened, typically strive for stable, practical careers like accounting, engineering, teaching, etc. The types of jobs that range from the interesting to the boring, from well paid to not-so-well, but stability rules trumps all for them. I was one of those kids. But I was such a knucklehead in my teens I didn’t have grandiose dreams of success. I spent my teenage years working towards nothing of value. Sometime during middle school I turned from a fairly bright prospect into a mess. I made it out of bed on time and to school maybe once or twice per week. . At the time I thought I was just unbearably lazy. I now know it was depression.

Back then, in Philadelphia’s public school system, at least in the schools I attended, the teachers mostly were nice people who didn’t give a shit or were as bright as a bag of hammers. Something tells me nothing has changed, but hopefully they have. I suspect now they have truant officers who would not have allowed me to go weeks without appearing before they contacted my parents, but back then they didn’t. The goal of the schools back then was to matriculate students whenever possible. Fortunately for them, I consistently scored high on all standardized tests. Apparently that, along with a lot of teachers who didn’t want to not see me again the following year, equated to a string of D’s for grades that allowed me to get by and, eventually, graduate high school by the skin of my teeth.

I went on to somehow string along a pretty nice career, well paid and fruitful. That career is a bit tenuous at the moment, which I really want to write about as I expect it will help me process things and make better decisions for the future.

I plan on writing a lot more about my upbringing, my parents, my neighborhood, my depression, my schools and classmates, my time in the Navy, my career, etc. In fact, the real purpose of this blog is for me to begin writing my memoirs. As I write this, I’m about to turn fifty years old. For most of my life I did not expect to make it to fifty. I want to document how I got to this point. Please indulge me as I reflect on my past, present, and future. Perhaps most importantly to me, this blog will perhaps provide insight to my kids as to who their father was, why he did the things he did, the successes and failures.