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An Introduction to the Ringmaster: 

I can’t remain too long in any consistent first person, otherwise you’ll end up believing that I’m really me, and then I’ll be pinned inanimately to the page and unable to shape-shift as any living creature must if it hopes to avoid the tarpits.

Consider Me the ringmaster for what follows. I am part of the performance, just another circus freak, not the kind of Self you’d bring home to meet your mother.

Let’s dare to suggest I’m not even a living thing so much as a material swelling of words, thoughts, ideas, pictures, emotions, the chaotic surface waves left by the spirit of life as it hovered over the keyboard for a moment before passing on to better things. After all, the screen or page you’re reading is not itself alive. Nor is this picture of “me” that hovers over the page momentarily.

Or say instead that this picture of “Me” is a mnemonic shell that formed where life once placed its fleeting and immaterial finger. I am the fossil of something more lively that passed this way.

Or maybe I’m the detritus of memory, a junk-encrusted tumbleweed of ideas of myself, a messy and clanging assemblage of cans and can’t-do’s, recoils, crossed-wires and lost marbles. This would explain why I’m such a noisy sonofabitch.Read More »