I am going to do something that is so wrong, I can’t believe I’m even contemplating doing it.  There is no law that I know of that is against doing this, but it runs against the grain of logic and decency.

I am going to speculate about a man’s life.  I do not know this man.  I’ve never met him and I have absolutely no clue about his inner life.  But, I’m going to speculate about it anyway.

I need to make a point, and I have to use him to do so.

Let me repeat, I have never met this man, don’t know his name, kind of job he has, anything about his home life, marriage, upbringing, education, religious beliefs or the kind of dessert he likes after eating the kind of meal he loves (which I have no idea about).

So, lacking real information, I am forced to provide my own.  I always say: never let the facts interfere with a good story.

Let’s think about this guy’s life for a minute.  He looks fairly healthy.  He wears cool sunglasses so he is clearly aware of the value of UV protection of his retina.  He is dressed less than casual, he is not wearing a shirt.  His lip is pierced and I notice that nearly all exposed skin from his neck down is heavily tattooed.  These days, that’s not such a big whoop, but I’m an old guy.  My out-dated concept of sporting a tattoo is rife with innuendoes.  When I was young, the only people you heard about who sported tattoos were sailors and guys who walked across the floors of Texas bars, holding the skinny end of a pool cue and about two minutes away from beating some poor fellow to a bloody mess and leaving him in the floor like the killing room of an Omaha cattle processing plant.

This fellow sitting in front of me may well have done just that, in another time of his life.  Perhaps he put a needle in his arm at a cheap motel in Kansas City?  Maybe he had spent more than one night in the ‘tank’, drying out from a week-long binge drinking trip with a pal he just met in a bar in Toledo who sold Bibles, house to house.  Possibly he existed for years on a diet of peanut butter and saltines, or Dinty Moore Beef Stew?   Or, when he felt like having a gourmet meal, he would empty and slice an entire can of Spam and make a sandwich with Wonder Bread.  Maybe he went to a clinic for shots of penicillin because of a misspent weekend with a hooker from Key West. Maybe he did all these things.  Maybe he did none of them.  Maybe he ate granola and yogurt and passed on the desert of dried dates.

Perhaps he flossed every night.

So, what’s my point in inventing a possible life of unsavory actions for a guy I never saw before?

The answer is in the eyes of his daughter.  That’s the miracle of life.  That is Nature functioning and firing on all six cylinders.  What ever this guy did with his life, at the moment of conception and during the next nine months, Nature forgave him his sins and biology worked its magic.  The result is this little being of perfection that was being lovingly held in his artistic arms.

I am aways in awe of how the human body can repair, restart and move on after suffering through neglect and abuse.

Really, though.  This guy probably lived a good honest and true life.

I wouldn’t know this, however.  I never met the man.