Who Am I...

 

I am not a story-teller. I suppose, though, when I think back about all that has happened, I do have a story that should be told. So, I’ll try. The story I am going to try to tell is how I, right now today, am an old man with long gray hair and beard living off-grid and reclusive in a rainforest high up in the Cascade mountains… and wearing a custom-tailored double-breasted imported Italian wool Canali suit, a handmade Bertocelli cotton Oxford white button-down shirt accessorized with the requisite Montblanc pen in the left breast pocket, and a hand-painted silk Jerry Garcia tie. I wear the expensive designer suits with over-sized shoulder pads and pleated slacks from the 90’s tucked into rubber snow boots for two reasons. The main reason is because when I was a player in the early days of Silicon Valley, I spent a seven-figure fortune on my accumulated wardrobe so I may as well wear it. The mountains where I live are cold and snowy most of the time, and wet. Fine wool clothing is warm and dry. Plus, when you hand-wash a wool suit in cold spring water it softens and becomes real comfortable over time. The second reason I wear the suits, not every day but routinely, is to keep the very few and far between neighbors I have up in these mountains always guessing about me. Folks up here tend to give a guy wearing a fancy suit and tie while felling a large dead hemlock plenty of shun, especially when unfashionably accessorized with a S&W .357 sidearm.

 

There’s a famous quote, or maybe it's not so famous anymore, about how life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. I don’t know if it was Mark Twain or Allen Saunders who said it first, but I do know it wasn’t John Lennon and that it describes my life pretty well up till now. 

I never made plans to become an eccentric mountain man in odd apparel hiding from past demons where they hate it the most -- the snow and ice. Outside my window right now looks like the frozen palace scene from the "Dr. Zhivago" movie. 

 

My plan when I was a boy, back when my grandmother’s black maid would cook me breakfast every morning, was to take over my grandfather’s horse and cattle company when he passed on and live simply and happily ever after with my childhood sweetheart raising horses and cattle ultimately passing the company on to my grandson.

 

I don’t have a grandson. Or the horse and cattle company. Somehow, the horses became Harley-Davidsons just before the whole thing slipped away and I wound up ascended into the upper echelons of the secret Luciferian Circle in Silicon Valley believing that about the time I reached the age I am now our kind, those in the Circle, would rule the world, conquer God, and live forever.

 

All I have now are the suits and a story to tell…