Only Child

People who know me assume I am an only child, since I never talk about my old family, or as some call it, my birth family. (The 'old' family is in contrast to my 'new' family - that is, my current family, which is to say, my wife and kids. I first mentioned my old family here.)



In fact, I have a sister Marilyn, who is seven years older than me, a brother Tom, who is five years older than me, and a brother Tim, who is about two years younger than me. My mother passed away and my father remarried a woman I have never met.



The only person I talk to is my brother Tom. It's not so much that I dislike the other people in my family as that it is really hard to talk to them since the basis of their world is that evil is an illusion and I don't share that view. How can you have a conversation with people that don't believe that anything bad ever really happens?



I have piles of cousins, but I never see them.



I first discovered that my Dad had remarried when I received mail from a woman named Susan who said she was cleaning out some old things and came across some pictures of me as a kid.



I wrote to my brother Tom: "Who the hell is Susan?"



The answer: Dad's new wife. Wow.



I learned that my grandmother on my father's side had passed away when I was talking to my sister. This was a long time ago. We were chatting and she said, "Oh, by the way, Grandma died." I had to ask - why didn't Mom or Dad tell me? "Oh, they were busy getting ready for a trip to Hawaii."



So, you can tell, it's not too surprising that I don't talk to these people. I can talk to Tom, because he believes in physical reality, so we have a basis for conversation.



Speaking of which, my brother Tom, like me, is a very early on blogger. When both of us started writing online there was no such thing called a blog, but going by the current definition ("a web site with dated entries"), we both have been doing it for close to ten years I think.



My brother's is in a very original format. Part of it takes the form of an online trading forum where people trade futures in things like ego, denial, greed, humor, paranoia, and what not. There is another section where he posts longer essays (with dates, which makes them blog entries).



Tom's site is called Salmon Jack and here it is. It's Java based, so you need a Java runtime system installed.





© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.