When a baby is born it doesn't know who it is.  Or what it is, or even that it is.  It will have to wait, until it figures out a few things about the world and about other people and about itself before it can finally know the answer.  I think that takes a long time for a lot of people, though some figure things out sooner than others, like me.  It can become an odyssey full of twists and turns, red herrings, missed opportunities, villains and heroes, but ultimately events so unexpected yet so significant that it seems I should be able to halt the world's turning and establish, right then and there, at that very, very moment, that I AM.  Yet those moments have come and gone enough. If I have learned nothing else about myself during this journey from heaven to hell and back again, I do know that I am equally ineffective at making the world stop and take notice of my life as I am at making sense of my life myself. 

 "I am, I said."  Neil Diamond said that in a bad pop song years ago. 

"I am I said. 

"To no one there

" And no one heard at all,"

and in the next line he took a dive because he would have to find a phrase that had six distinct beats and ended with a rhyme for "there" because that's the way Neil Diamond defines himself as a song writer.  And that's another thing -- while Neil Diamond and his many devoted fans may have chosen to define him that way, is that really who he is?  Is that all he is?  Can any one of us be reduced to a single word or phrase or title? 

And how this ended up being about Neil Diamond is beyond me.  I can't stand that stuff.