PREFACE
A couple of words of warning are in order before you
dig deeper into this section.
The first, which should be obvious by now, is that I don't really know what I'm doing with
HTML. I'm hoping that will change with time, but there are no guarantees.
The second, which will become obvious soon, is that I'm trying to do multiple things with
this section which are at cross-purposes with each other. In fact, I recognize that part
of what I'm attempting is not really suitable for a web page at all.
On the one hand, I'm trying to build a mechanism to show anybody who is curious what it is
that I'm doing down on Little Cayman. For that purpose, this section contains a bunch of
pictures to show how the house is progressing. If nothing else, that gives my wife a
chance to see whether I'm spending my time building our dream house, out idly watching the
babes at the Beach Club, drinking myself under the bar at the Hungry Iguana, or maybe just
swimming with the fishes over on Blacktip Alley. But on the other hand, and more
seriously, I'm toying with the idea of trying to turn this whole adventure into book form.
Thus there's a whole lot of verbiage which is likely to unfold on these pages and which
will appear to fall out in disconnected clumps as it emerges. I do have a unifying theme
in mind, though, and it's a story told on multiple levels. The surface plane is, of
course, the struggle of trying to accomplish something concrete in the face of
never-ending adversity. Beneath that, though, lies consideration of a question a lot of
people in my generational cohort are or soon will be asking: "Is there life after my
career?" Phrased another way, must our whole sense of identity be summarized in our
answer to the conversation opener, "So what do you do?" Spending many months
alone on an isolated Caribbean island has given me time to think about these questions.
From this, you can see that the whole web project is totally experimental and probably
will never appear coherent. If it does ever start looking that way, I'm going to pull it
off the net immediately and slap a copyright notice on it. For now, though, what I find
most perplexing is how to build an interesting piece of non-fiction with substantial
character development and yet not expose myself to libel charges. It's hard to get the
project off the ground until I can find a strategy to solve that little riddle. In the
meantime, it's fun to experiment.
back to "The
House on Little Cayman"
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