Preface

This book isn’t here to sell you anything.

It exists because I’ve learned something simple and slightly unsettling: the older you get, the more your life starts to look like evidence. Not evidence in the courtroom sense—though I can’t deny that instinct—but evidence in the human sense. Exhibits of who you are. Clues. Repeated themes. Moments that seemed ordinary when they happened, but later turned out to be load-bearing.

These are my core memories: scenes I can still feel in my ribs. Some are big and obvious—grief, triumph, awe. Some are small, almost stupidly small—the kind of moment you’d never think to write down, except it refuses to leave you. When you line them up and step back, you can see a person forming. Not a perfect person. Not even a consistent person. Just… the person who showed up.

Most of what’s in here is real. But I’m also leaving a little space for the universe to be stranger than we pretend. Because aliens exist, don’t they? Or if they don’t, they should.

I’m writing this as a reference guide. I’m doing this in case context ever matters. In case one day someone wonders why I react a certain way, why I choose the hard road when an easier one is right there, why certain things—music, memory, justice, loyalty, laughter—hit me like they’re sacred.

Maybe it will never be needed.

Maybe it will.

Maybe my kids will read it someday and recognize something in themselves—some inherited wiring, some shared soundtrack, some odd little spark they thought only they carried. If this book gives them even a single moment of, Oh… that’s where that comes from, then it did its job.

This is a first edition in the truest sense: a living draft. Right now it’s a WordPress blog because that’s the most honest format for what it is—unfinished, editable, shareable, still becoming. A workbench, not a museum. Some chapters will sharpen over time. Others will stay rough on purpose, because that’s how memory is: jagged around the edges, vivid in the middle, full of strange omissions.

And if you’re reading this, you’re one of the few.

Either I invited you, or you figured it out. (Both are flattering.)

So welcome. Take what you need from these pages. Ignore what you don’t. And if you see yourself in any of it—good. That’s the point!