Introduction:

I am not a hoarder.  Yet like many geriatrics, I have accumulated more than my share of junk. Also, like many of this age, I have been beset by nightmares of my children sorting through that junk in my permanent absence.

Upon retirement in early 2015, I began to clean up. Much of my junk was paper: materials from decades of teaching as well as reams of personal notes. I started off ruthlessly––but when I came to my old journals–– at the open recycling bin, I wavered.  

Probably like most old English teachers, I once imagined that my diaries could be raw material for short stories or novels. In my early forties, I was disabused of that conceit. That was after the last SAE (self-addressed envelope) sent forth was returned along with the novel within which too much vanity had been invested.

In sober post-facto reassessment, I had no doubt that my attempted work of fiction was shit. But after wound-licking–– that no longer mattered. The truth remained that I had lived in interesting places at interesting times and had known interesting people. Over the decades, I had kept a record of that history. Some of that might be useful to some future grandchild for a family history project. A sliver of it might even be worthy of a wider audience.

Why bother with the artifice of fiction? That was the question I asked myself in February 2015 at the edge of the recycling bin. Thereupon, I gave the old notebooks a temporary reprieve.

Slowly, I burrowed into that musty midden. There was much ordure to be unpleasantly sifted through for usable nuggets. Yet after a few years of diligent worming, I dredged up several ‘coprolites’… Initially, the most promising material was in notes and sketches from sojourns in Africa (1977-1988). Later in digging through latter-day journals in the digital format, I found more nuggets worthy of burnishing–– even sharing outside of print form. But where and how?

In mid-2019, I discovered WordPress.  My site began to take shape in early 2020…

Under twenty-six thematic categories, I have posted a series of essays/vignettes in PDF format. All these pieces are in the genre of creative non-fiction––entirely faithful to personal history. I do use the ethnographic convention of shielding the potentially identifiable with fictitious names or initials. Some of my portrayals may be a little harsh–– but none are as severe as depictions of my own foibles…

I have no naivete about the preponderance of writers over readers on WordPress.com. Yet I take some consolation in a cosmic analogy:

The unimaginable vastness of our galaxy makes alien life on at least one exoplanet herein a near certainty.  Similarly, given the billions of daily internet browsings–– every month, a few random searchers will probably land on this site. Among those, a tiny subset may be of curious readers. For such a random discoverer, this site could be like a distant exoplanet whose faint chemical signature shows the possibility of non-terrestrial life….

I can not deny some pride in my hoard of little nuggets. Old fingers have worked diligently in readying them for display. Should any be held for a moment in another mind, turned over and be found to modestly gleam–– I will be delighted…

Anonymously Yours,

FWT (‘lefthook51’)

A note on the format:

The thematic postings often comprise two pages: an introductory page followed by a second page with PDF files of essays/vignettes on the same theme. Some themes have both the introduction and the PDF files on a single page.

By clicking the emojis at the bottom of every page, a potential reader can move chronologically through the postings.

Update:

Having posted more than one hundred and fifty vignettes/essays (A-Z) under thematic categories, I have exhausted the raw material from my old notes. Henceforward, I will be posting single essays on new topics under a new format. 

Not all these posts will be ‘sardonic’. However, in acknowledging the gradual dominance of that tone in my geriatric voice, I have adopted sardonic.ca for my new site name.

A final point to emphasize: there is no plagiarism here. A few stock/open-source images appear along with my own photos–– but none clearly identified as “licensable” are used. Further, I have no intention to monetize (even if that were possible) any of this content. The desire is only to freely share.

Meanwhile, I take consolation that few carbon emissions have been squandered or trees sacrificed in this late-life pitch for a little audience…

– 2024 April, FWT (‘lefthook51’)

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