Surely, that is what our government is doing, isn’t it?

Do your own math.

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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
   -James Thurber

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In some village in La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall, there dwelt not so long ago a gentleman of the type wont to keep an unused lance, an old shield, a greyhound for racing, and a skinny old horse.
   -Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, opening to Don Quixote de la Mancha

Three years ago today I started Random Fate. Originally, I wanted the weblog to be a way to tell my family and friends about my life in France during my expatriate assignment there, but when my departure was delayed for over a year, Random Fate evolved into something else.

Why is it so easy for me to recall the date I started?

Because one of my first posts was this:

Shit.

I just heard on NPR that the Space Shuttle Columbia has broken up upon re-entry.

Shit.

Being the idealist, an aspiring yet washed out before day-one non-astronaut because of astigmatism in the days before LASIK person that I am, how could I forget that day?

In the days since, much has happened in my life.

I’ve been asked to guest post on at least four different weblogs (that I can remember at the moment…).

Over a year later than the original date, I moved to France and lived in Grenoble for a year and seven months.

I grasped French well enough to function even with folks who spoke French only, no English.

I made friends born on another continent, friends that I need to make the time to keep in touch with, despite the demands upon my schedule I now have.

I learned things I never expected to learn, and did not gain understanding of many things I hoped to comprehend better.

I traveled to London, Paris, Avignon, Tuscany (including Florence and Sienna along with many small towns), Helsinki, Prague, Leuven, Brugge, Lucerne, Lyon, and many other places even more unfamiliar to most Americans.

I took photos, posted them and shared my stories both online and with my family, fortunately, because I didn’t realize the joy my father got from my experiences until almost too late.

I returned early and very quickly to the United States, but despite the speed almost too late to see my Dad before he succumbed to that curse of biology that apparently defies a simple cure, cancer.

I spent a vigil on Christmas night of 2005, watching the life leave my father’s body, hours after his brain had died, a day after he had said to me from his bed in the Intensive Care Unit the last time I saw him awake, “I’m sorry you’re not having much of a Christmas this year.” Fortunately, those were not the last words he said to me.

The list above does not include many changes and events too personal to reveal here, even if I could find the words to do them justice in the description.

I have lived out of a suitcase for over two months now, sleeping in 5 different beds in three different cities on two different continents, struggling to bring my cat back from France and keeping him healthy and happy.

I have used money as if it were inconsequential, first spending to try to improve the lot of my Dad not knowing he was only days from death, next spending trying to ease the pain of those who lost as much or more than I did when my father died, then spending just trying to live in some reasonable fashion, spending required because I have not yet returned to my house, my home.

I have incessantly dreamed in my restless sleep for weeks, likely because I do not feel I have been at a place I can call home for months, dreams sad and dreams frightening, visions in the dark of night that I had hoped were long vanquished after my struggles in life, but return yet again to haunt in a time of pain.

And I have spent to keep this weblog up, despite paying for a redesign that was never delivered, paying for bandwidth and hosting costs even though my readership could best be described as “minimal” even when being generous, rewarded with rocks thrown by those who cannot see beyond the view of their own distorted lenses over their minds’ eyes.

This does not even begin to account for the most precious of things we spend so prodigiously despite its value and scarcity, time, the hours used for simple maintenance and for writing things that merely result in pelting from the unthinking peanut gallery who can comprehend things in terms no more graded than pure black and white, a simplistic, digital mindset so at odds with the complex world we now face; notwithstanding the amazing ways we now have of educating ourselves, ignorance still overwhelms understanding.

Three years.

One thousand ninety-six days (accounting for that leap year in there).

Somewhere in the neighborhood of over 2000 posts (the old BlogSpot posts are lost permanently, along with many posts from the first MovableType incarnation).

The majority of posts not demanding agreement, just a plea for people to think instead of simply react.

A Sisyphean task, I know, but as a writer who had experienced things far more profound than any in my life once wrote, “And so it goes…”

There is always more to the story, and more to the simple-minded conclusions and constructs we use to impose logic and order upon an illogical and disorderly universe.

Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer. The lamentations of Sancho and the niece and housekeeper are omitted here, as well as the new epitaphs upon his tomb; Samson Carrasco, however, put the following lines:

A doughty gentleman lies here;
A stranger all his life to fear;
Nor in his death could Death prevail,
In that last hour, to make him quail.
He for the world but little cared;
And at his feats the world was scared;
A crazy man his life he passed,
But in his senses died at last.

—-
Hark, I espy another giant for me to contest with!

It is surely no windmill, despite your protestations!

Charge!!!!
.
.
.

So… there it is.

—

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