Snippet: Theme and Other Insidious Obsessions.

It's not immediately apparent what it is that I'll be spending the rest of my life writing about. Isn't that a terrible sentence? I can't help thinking about it, how terrible that sentence is, and how, at the end of my life as a writer, I may read that sentence--this one, too--and think about how terrible it was. But to return to the point. "He only has one story to tell." Haven't you heard that about a writer before? Haven't you heard that from a writer before? "I may only have one story to tell, but by God, you keep buying it."

What is the one story that I have to tell? Is there anything around which my mind spirals, a black hole (religion, perhaps, or family?) around which I now orbit at a distance, slowly approaching the horizon from which I will never escape?

Oh, yes.

Wyoming.

I was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on May first, 1974, and my family had returned to South Dakota by the spring of 1976. We lived in Wyoming for less than two years. Why? My father was in the Air Force at the time. He served at Fort Cheyenne. Or so he claims. How far is Fort Cheyenne from Roswell, New Mexico? Perhaps Roswell is a front.

And the alien space ships are in a bunker underneath Fort Cheyenne instead.

I always knew I was adopted.