Real life is pretty boring, most parts of it at least. Fiction is an artificial construction of things that seem a little bit like real life, but put together in much more interesting ways.

I didn’t get to participate much in real life; i became disabled pretty early on (age 21) and didn’t get to work much of a real job. I did get to finish my undergraduate degree, appropriately enough in English.

So i love the way that you can use language to create a world — an interesting world — fairly unconnected to reality. I don’t actually like real people much anymore; i prefer fiction.

And it turns out that i didn’t miss much, not working. I was never going to be well-off; i probably would have struggled like most people, no matter what i did — regardless of my aptitude. The American Dream seems officially dead, to me. So i’ll just spin out the next twenty-five or thirty years as peacefully as i can (and hopefully find things to enjoy, probably mostly fictional).