Thursday, August 17, 2023

A Brief Autobiographical Sketch

Although I assume that very few are interested in hearing background information about the author of this site's posts, let me give a few details for those handful. Since I'll leave out the "juiciest" part (my witnessing of what seemed like paranormal phenomena, which I tell elsewhere), this little autobiographical sketch will be quite dull. 

I grew up in the Washington D. C. area, one of a family of ten. My father had a job that utilized his Master's degree in foreign affairs, one involving lots of interaction with foreign visitors. In my teenage years I became extremely interested in philosophical topics, and thought up some philosophical theory that I thought was brilliant, although I now look back on it as folly. Luckily I was smart enough to keep my dumb teenage philosophical thoughts to myself. 

After a year of college, an extended period of unemployment and a year spent on a failed business, I got  a job as a night watchman security guard, one that I held through most of my twenties. I took the job because it gave me tons of time to work on various literary projects. Throughout this time I was working on various literary projects that were mostly unsuccessful, although I did have one important success that resulted in substantial readership. In the middle of this period, I managed to earn three years of college credits through self-study, and ended up with a bachelor's degree, earning almost two years of credits in philosophy and the natural sciences. I scored at the 97th percentile in the three-hour GRE test for philosophy. 

In my early thirties I realized my literary efforts were producing only meager financial success, and I decided to prepare myself for a new career, choosing computer programming. This turned out to be a good choice, and I ended up working as a software developer over a period of about 25 years, often for Fortune 500 companies such as investment banks. I was high up in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but luckily escaped its destruction on that day. 

In 1993 I got married, and I still live with my wife of 30 years. The last seven years of the nineties was a great period for me, which included the birth of my twin daughters.  I am still very close to my daughters, who are now successful professionals. Since 2013 my time has been spent mainly on blogging, writing for the sites here, here and here.  A lifelong nondrinker, I have had no experiences with mind-altering or mood-altering substances, but have had some astonishing luck in photographing the anomalous, as you can see here, here and here. My proudest accomplishment in life is not anything I have written or programmed, but my success in raising two wonderful daughters who are my greatest blessing in life. 

I have no skeletons in my closet, and have never been involved in any kind of scandal. If you ever read anything to the contrary, you should disbelieve it. For centuries people reporting paranormal phenomena have been subject to libels and slander by people trying to discredit reports of paranormal phenomena; and I would not be surprised to be the target of such defamation at some time in the future. I have also heard that nowadays people are churning out fake stories about people, in an automated AI-assisted fashion, to help get page views for pages that generate revenue from advertising. Even some people who are not famous are complaining about being victimized by such "click mining" profiteers. 

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