Post #1. Feb. 27, 2019

Every life begins as clean as the wind, and ends up smeared top to bottom with permanent, sticky, filthy, error-soaked brown stinking mud. Mine did, too.

I was born to a mother who really wanted me and to a father who, says Mother, didn't care at all.

They conceived me on Thanksgiving night, both of them drunk. At my grandmother's palatial home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On Lynn Avenue.

I was born in Wake Forest Baptist Hospital and brought home to a rental house which strangely had an address that matched my day of birth: 822 Rosemary Lane. I kind of love that Rosemary Lane part. It was 60 years before my mother was informed that the address matched my birth date.

I was badly matched to my mother, and to my eventual brother. They are exactly alike: robotic utilitarians, money lovers, practical, unemotional, and not a creative atom anywhere in their DNA.

I, on the other hand, am extremely creative, emotional, lively, dramatic, tending toward melancholy, but was able to master my left brain. I know that, because in a top 10 Law School, which offered me a FULL 3-year scholarship to attend, when they saw the score on my entrance exam, I got the highest A in every single class, during my last 2 years. Once. that is, I figured out what Law School was all about. On the LSAT entrance exam, I got a perfect score on one section (a very rare thing to happen). The section was about applying rules to facts.

By contrast, my mother got an MS in social work at an unheard-of dinky Catholic college, and my brother majored in business and sold a lot of weed for his income, until he got into selling mobile homes.

My father might have been more like me. He worked in Human Resources at the largest newspaper in Miami, Florida. But in his free time, he played the trumpet, drew cartoons, went deep-sea fishing with his friend Alvah Chapman, and was a photographer and car collector. Moody, too. On THAT point, we were twins.

But he died when I was only 13, and he was 44. Medical malpractice. A drunk anesthesiologist (yes, actually drunk at 8:30 a.m., which came out in court during the lawsuit that we won) turned off my dad's breathing and put the oxygen tube into his stomach instead of into his lungs. The monitor had not been turned on--a deadly accident. And the only other witness was a nurse--her first operation--and she testified in court that she saw him turn blue but "didn't think it was her place to say anything."

From this milieu, I came forth.