Publisher's Point Of View
Robert Allan Hooftallen

I've done a lot of really foolish things in my life.

That's about the extent of what I've figured out since June when I turned 35 and the hours, days, weeks and months of self-analysis- the obsession with what I do, why I do it and what it means to people around me- began.

It's a most annoying state if only because my brain is marching at double and triple time as I recite my thoughts silently, try to predict how they will be received, reword if necessary and finally emancipate them.

What a profound approach: thinking before speaking. I suppose I should be delighted that I can do both rather well. They are lost arts.

I can't decide whether my self-examination is aimed at some discovery or if I am merely trying to avoid saying and doing things that will fall short of my intent, deliver a fool's message or, worse, tear down another.

Perhaps grace is getting the edge on my ego, that thing in me that has been the main ingredient in many of my accomplishments and that which has been responsible for most of my wickedness.

All of the years of my life have been kind to me, particularly my childhood years. But, the more I think about my childhood, the more I feel like I was shorted.

Even though our family did our share of traveling, my normal, daily environment, attending a micro-high school and living in what was essentially a ghost town, shaped my reality.

And despite its wholesome, know-your-neighbor goodness, and the comfort in its cradled safety, it was an enemy of human ambition and drive to improve oneself. Being a product of the state's

smallest public school district most certainly has its advantages, but we maximize our potential by competing with our peers. And personal achievement is skewed measured against the abilities of so few.

In that environment, only the extremely gifted and extremely disciplined will get the best of themselves, if even they can. Because the metaphorical "bar" is set on several fronts and peer review and comparison is right up there among the most important of them.

The lack of a more diversified and talented group of peers and about a hundred other circumstances and happenstances in the 1970s and 1980s twisted how I weighed myself against the world. It's proving to be difficult work convincing myself that I am far from being where I ought to be intellectually and even further from being whole.