Bloggy Fiction-- Chapter 1 (more to come!)

Greetings dear reader,

Thank you for reading this book. It means more to me than you could possibly know.

So that you can understand this better, I would like to share some things with you, before we really get started. Firstly, I feel that I should tell you what my therapist said is the reason that I wrote this book:

Because I want you to like me.

I am going to share with you some thoughts about what the meaning of this book is, but you should probably keep that one thing in mind, that I want you to like me. It hadn't actualy occurred to me that way until my thereapist told me so, but more and more, I suspect that she might be right!

Secondly, dear reader, I have to admit that in this book, I will pretend to be many different things, a sociologist, a biologist, a physicist, a musician, magician, scholar and author. I also pretend to be technically saavy. I should warn you in advance that I am none of these things. Because this book is so important to me, I feel that I need to be honest with you up front, I am nothing more than a high-school custodian at my own alma matter- a job which I enjoy, but which I've often had problems feeling pride in. But, I'm still young, i'm still young....

And yes, this novel is largely autobiographical, in a strange way, and you're invited to live almost all of the interesting things that have ever happened to me, and love all of the people that I have loved, vicariously through my characters.

And so I must also admit that in this way I pretend that I am handsome, charming and well-read, at least much more so than in real life. Perhaps if I could hold back the blush, I'd say that these characters look from the outside the way I look on the inside.

Why am I being so honest? A few months ago, I found by accident a private blog that a high-school classmate keeps as an online journal. I'm fairly confident that she has no idea that the blog is public and that other people can read it. She writes things that no person would ever write publicly-- for example, about her relationship with her new husband and why she has already been unfaithful only a month after her wedding. In other words, she is completely open, and I am completely addicted to this guilty little pleasure. If you're lucky, I may even share a few of her posts with you.

And so reader, because I want you to like me, I am willing to make this little Faustian bargain: I too will try to be completely open, you naughty little voyeur, you.

But you should also know this, though I may indulge in a little private blog reading, I otherwise seem to care very little about people. My therapist tells me this is because I see other people as mindless automotons. This is true. When I look at people, I'm prone to imagining that I can see exactly what they looked like at every other point in the whole of their lives-- when their lovers left them, when they masterbate, deficate, urinate and pontificate-- I see it all right now. And when I consider their actions I can't separate their most recent action from the fabric of their entire life. And if I went back in time and changed just one little thing, I can see that they would be a completely different person. So I care about the ideas that motivate people, The things that wound them up in the first place, that make them bounce around so commically in this plinko board of life.

So this may be less a novel than a history. It is the story about forces much larger than a single person, battling eachother for global domination like two giant monsters hand-trapping over Tokyo. It is a story about the conflict between people and these forces. But I don't want to give away the end too early....

And then again, as I think about the words of my Therapist, it's a story about you liking me. Yes, this may very well be a story about me, and my relationship to a world that I don't understand. Oh and if that's true, then this is a mystery too! But I wouldn't want to give too much of that away just yet either....