About Me

About me?  What about me?  I’m a rather complicated person…to say the least!  I exist, but I don’t exist (figure that one out!).  I’m one single person, yet I’m two different people.  I have a life, a family, and kids – even grandkids and great grandkids around me, yet I’m totally alone.  I am…yet I am not.  Which is all so sad.  But that’s the way it needs to be.

So as you can see, I am me, but I am not me – which tells you nothing.  Basically, Karen is my secret identity.  My alter ego.  Is she my true self?  Yes and no.  Maybe, maybe not.  In truth, I don’t know.  I guess, due to circumstances, mostly not.  But there is one fact I am sure of, whoever she is, she is irrevocably an integral part of me – forever.  Karen may only exist in my mind, but no matter how hard I could ever try, she is a piece of me that I couldn’t remove, even surgically.  So the two of us coexist within the same sad, old, aging body. 

There was a time in my life long ago, when Karen got to exist on a slightly higher plane…at least within the confines of my closed and shuttered up home.  But she existed there often…much to the delight of both of me.  Those days are long past now, and Karen is forced to recede further and further away from reality.  And yet, as I’ve said, she will forever be there.  My welcome other half. 

These days, there is little Karen can do, except to write.  But I have to admit, I think she writes rather well.  So I try to give her all the expression time I can.  Time that she hungrily laps up and tries her best to fill with words and ideas that seem to spring out of nowhere.  I must say, her ideas certainly surprise me.  I have no idea where she gets them from.  And she has this nasty habit of hiding her ideas from me and then springing them at me in the middle of her writing when I least expect it!  Surprise!  Shock!  Where did that come from?  She does that a lot!  I wonder what kind of playful imp she would be if she owned our body instead of the other me.

Here is an odd thing, one among many.  Karen is forced to see the world through my eyes, and in return, I see things not only through my eyes, but through hers as well.  You know how there are always two sides to a story?  Well she not only helps remind me of that, she literally helps me to see and try to feel every situation from more than one point of view.  The result is actually rather astounding.  I can literally understand things so much better…and yet I am all too often helpless to offer better suggestions than I can.  The world is simply a complicated place…much like me.

Though Karen sometimes writes somewhat cruel things in her stories, she herself is certainly not cruel.  She is kind, loving, and understanding.  But in being forced to see the world through my eyes, she is all too aware of what the human soul and the human animal is all too capable of doing…and has done for thousands of years…and probably will continue to do for another thousand or two.  So all too often some of those little bits get thrown into her stories.  But hey, what’s a story without problems, bad guys, or conflicts?

Man is what man is, and woman is what woman is.  So where does that leave me?  Man and woman in the same body.  It can certainly be frustrating.  But I’ve reached the ripe old age now where there is little I can or am willing to do about it.  So I smile as much as I can and enjoy as much as I can.  I could just do with a lot less of the problems I am constantly buried under day after day after day.  There are so many times when I’d like to scream that just once in my life I’d like something to go right!  But I do the best I can.  As do we all. 

So that’s what I’m all about…I guess.  That’s about it.  That’s all I have to say…about me.