Once Upon a Time

When I was a kid, I used to take things apart to see how they worked. It wasn't until later in life that I learned to pay attention to how the things came apart so that I could put them back together again. It was a lesson learned the hard way. Just like the lesson I learned about reading instructions. I'm not sure when I started reading instructions. It was probably about the same time that I realized that no one I knew was going to explain to me how anything worked. By anything, I mean everything. By everything I mean cars, clocks, airplanes, plants, people, mathematics, language, spelling, history, philosophy, sex, human relations, personal hygiene, nutrition, plumbing, heating, electronics, carpentry and telephone etiquette. Lucky for me, the Boy Scouts of American came along and taught me a bit about personal hygiene, cooking, camping, tying knots, American history, canoeing, leadership, human relations and wilderness survival. Almost everything else I know, I learned by trial and error or by reading instructions.

It's a damned shame that we have to come into this life and learn everything the hard way. By "the hard way" I mean the hard and painful way. The first time you try to stand up and walk across the room, you fall on your butt. If you're a male of the species, the first time you try to talk seriously to a female of the species, you mess it up and nearly perish from embarrassment, or at least, most of us do. And that's another thing for which I've never been given a satisfactory explanation. Are female and male humans actually the same species? I'm not too sure about it. There are unexplained fundamental differences between males and females, and not just the obvious ones either, that, to this day, very often leave me wondering.

The problem is, you see, there is no instruction manual issued to us at birth. Why is that? You would think, after thousands of years and uncountable libraries' worth of writings, that someone would have written up a simple, easily understood operator's manual for human life. Oh sure, we've got shelves and shelves of philosophy and religion to read, but those subjects require years of study to be comprehensible. We've got medical books, cookbooks, encyclopedias, textbooks, and novels. But where is the simple fifty-page operators manual for being a human being? Where is the book entitled "Welcome to Earth, Human. (An operators manual for living.)" with a glossary of commonly used words and a index so that you can quickly find what you need to know?

If you think I going to write one for you, you'd better think again. What I would like to do, though, is to share with you a bit of what I've learned about life and how it works, or, at least, how it works for me. I don't claim to be any shining example of human virtue, or the best mankind has to offer, nothing like that at all. I'm just the guy next door who might lend you a wrench, or help you patch your tire, or give you a hand loading your old couch into your pickup, or take care of your cat while you're on vacation. Maybe you'll find something useful in my stories, or something amusing. I'm hoping you'll find some of both, but we'll see how it goes as we roll long here.