One way to try and distinguish the things that I write, both for myself and others -- will be to follow the separate pathways of memoir and current history. Things happening now are of course most immediate and demand a kind of constant scrutiny -- but things that have happened "a long, long, long time ago" are noted and noteworthy for the impact they have had on the full life of a person.
My past is filled with mistakes amid many strong decisions -- the mistakes I am sure outnumber the successes, but I have learned to live with both. When one is a realist, a fatalist, a little bit of a skeptic, and a constant searcher for truth -- one has to accept the occasional road not taken, or even the road chosen badly. I have underestimated people and overestimated them -- but now hindsight yields the truth that neither is a true mistake, but merely a failure to note the clear-eyed obvious fact: that people are unpredictable but they are still always "people." I love and have loved the people I have been around, interacted with, palled around with, been friends with, made love to... I love them all -- even though at times they failed me, and more often have been failed by me. At times I have not "read" them correctly and have overextended my connection with them -- though I can honestly say I have never consciously "used" others once I knew their true thinking about me. I can even declare honestly that at times I too have been "read" incorrectly.
The above is true in all situations: friend to friend, colleague to colleague, buyer to seller, man to woman, sibling to sibling, child to parent. The only tiny mote of praise I can make about myself -- is that I honored people so much that I never tried to use them beyond the level they were using me.
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