WHOLE CLOTH: If anyone you know seems like a character on this site, it’s because we’re all basically alike. A.B./B.W./L.L.D.
I.S. CALLS OUT AB/BW/LLD IN THE GUESTBOOK!

Up Front:
November 2008
    I am the author of everything on this site except unclaimed guestbook entries. Originally, I didn’t put myself forward on the site, because it isn’t about me, it’s about my work. I intended the work to be short chapters, as an exercise to help school myself from writing long, long pieces. It was only middlingly successful.
    I created the characters of A.Blinken and Granny Wise early as voices for me to express different perspectives. The "rants" are the closest to my true voice, though if I had to say "this character is me" it wouldn’t be Aaron Blinken, but Andy Dass I’m closest to. 
    The location is not so much fictional, as nonspecific. The people and their concerns are common to many rural places I have lived and worked.
    I created the other voices too. It is up to you to decide if I inhabited Norma Hamble or the ugly, ugly man. If you are satisfied that the person put forward is represented by the voice I gave them, then I’m successful as a writer.
    But, as has come out in the guestbook, I’m also a sociologist, by nature and by education. These pieces are intended to be ethnographies or ways of being.
   Like any ethnographies, these are intended to give you a sense of each person’s life, but like any good sociologist I hope I’ve also given you a way, in each piece, to examine your own life, and the lives of those around you. If I allowed you to momentarily experience another person’s way of being, and to illustrate the common features of humanness, I’ve succeeded as a sociologist.
    At heart is my own desire to be more tolerant of others, and to help society be more tolerant. I hope that, somewhere in the reading of ugly ugly man, for example, you felt some empathy, or at least sympathy for him. If so, I’ve done my small part to "heal the world" and perhaps taken a step closer to justifying the long and wonderful life I’ve been given.
    If you’ve been a long time reader, thank you so much. I hope you don’t feel that I’ve intended to deceive you; I have always stated clearly that the site is "whole cloth". I simply didn’t feel the need to be in the work, and I wanted you to have your own relationship with the characters, to allow you to suspend belief if you chose to consider them real people.
    If you’re a new reader, I hope you’ll read as much of the work as interests you.
    If you find something on the site entertaining, I’ve succeeded as a supplier of content, which is perhaps the only measure you care about!
lld

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