The things I've written reveal who I am.
I'm a complex person but I believe I could be understood
by someone wise enough, if someone cared enough.
My secrets are revealed here but you must read it all.
If you read just parts of it, you might get the wrong impression.

(We live in a time when people tend to read just a bit of something,
jump to conclusions, and then cling to those conclusions, though
if they'd taken the time to read the whole story, the conclusions
they'd have reached would have been quite different.)

Everything I've posted here is a piece of the puzzle.🧩
You won't see a clear picture until you've put it all together.
There are links everywhere to lead you down the rabbit hole.
(It pays to watch the videos and read my reviews.)

🎭 No hay máscara. Solamente un enigma.❓
What is the difference between a mask and a riddle?
A mask 🎭 is intended simply to conceal.
A riddle ❓, to selectively reveal.
(Much is revealed to those who are truly interested
and able to understand.◀)


Some Biographical Background: (The Story of My Life)

I was born in Boone Iowa in August 1957.
I became interested in music in the late 1960s. I was a big Beatles fan.
I started attending Boone Jr. Sr. High School in September 1969.
I started dating Sue in early 1974. We met at the First Baptist Church of Boone.

My first band was Danny and The Moondogs in early 1975.
We were the Sha Na Na of Boone Iowa during the fifties craze of the mid-1970s.
We dressed in fifties garb, sang to pre-recorded music, and performed comedy skits at church dinner parties.
I wrote my first song, a silly ditty called “I’m Gonna Be A Farmer”, while I was still in high school.
And I was briefly in a band called Oasis II that played two shows in our church basement in the summer of '75.

I graduated from Boone High in May 1975 and left for the army in September.
At the beginning of 1976 I was stationed at Fort McPherson in Atlanta Georgia, where I was a computer operator.
I married Sue in September 1977 and she joined me in Atlanta for the last year of my enlistment.
I got out of the army in October 1978 and got a job in Des Moines Iowa.
While living in Des Moines I was a drummer in bands called Moonshadow and Eclipse with former members of
Danny and The Moondogs. Neither of these bands had any gigs during the time I was with them.

We moved to Sioux Falls South Dakota in June 1982 when I got a job working for Citicorp.
Our son Adam was born in Des Moines in 1980, and our daughter Rachel was born in Sioux Falls in 1983.
During our years in Sioux Falls we were active at Trinity Baptist Church.
I was a deacon and the manager of our church softball team. Sue was our church secretary.
I was also in another fifties nostalgia group called The Lucky Tigers that sang at church parties.
While working for Citicorp I worked my way up to being a mainframe systems programmer.
I also took piano lessons, while my wife and children became black belts in Tae Kwon Do.
I played one of my own compositions, "Sorta Pop Rag", at my second piano recital.

We moved to Omaha Nebraska in July 1996 where I got a job with PKS Information Services.
I started working for First Data Resources in January 1999.
While working for FDR in 2003, I had an important role in building a data center in Shanghai China.
(I installed the operating system and other system software.)
I returned to Shanghai in late 2007 to implement a major software upgrade.

I converted from Christianity to atheism and secular humanism in 1999.
Around the time of my conversion I became interested in studying philosophy.
I got involved in MSN discussion groups in 2001. My first group was a philosophy group called "Meaning Of Life".
I spent a lot of my time there discussing philosophy and religion. I sometimes referred to it as “Mark’s Other Life”.
I was also involved in other philosophy groups, and in music, classic film, and poetry and creative writing groups.
It was during this period that I started writing lots of songs and poems.
In my early days in philosophy groups my favorite topic was the question of the existence of God. Later, it was
the nature of ethics. Still later it was the secret of happiness and how to deal with the problem of wanting.
(It was dealing with the problem of wanting that eventually led me to Buddhism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism.)
Nowadays I think and write a lot about INNER CONFLICTS and the problem of NOSTALGIA.
In 2006 I started my own (multi-purpose but mostly philosophy) group called “Lives of Quiet Desperation”.
While I was there I had a thread called "A place for poetry" where each day I posted a few of my favorite poems.
I was sporadically active there until MSN Groups closed down in 2009.

In the early 2000s, both of our children were married and we started having grandchildren.
And Sue got a horse, so horseback riding became her primary hobby.

Go to "Things I've Written - Part 2" for "More of The Story".


My AuthorsDen website appears on the surface to be
just another collection of poems and short stories,
but those few who take the time to look
may discover it's really a NON-LINEAR BOOK! (ReAd My BoOk)

📘 The Story of My Life
My AuthorsDen website began as a simple collection of my songs, poems, short stories, and essays,
but I've gradually transformed it into a NON-LINEAR BOOK which is a combination of autobiography
and commentary on human nature. Influenced by William Faulkner's "The Sound And The Fury" and
"Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I decided to try to create something new and make my story
both non-chronological (like "The Sound And The Fury") and non-linear (unlike typical physical books).
I did this by making each of my songs, poems, stories, etc. a chapter of my story, and connecting them
by making each chapter contain links to several other chapters (giving the reader multiple choices),
so if you follow the links from chapter to chapter, you will find there are numerous paths from the
beginning to the end of the story. (Some paths and chapters are easier to find than others.) Though
there are many paths, there is a definite beginning to my story (my AuthorsDen front page) and a
definite ending. You would probably recognize the end if you found it, but whether you understood it
or not could depend on which path you took and how well you understood the various chapters along
the way. (My commentaries in the review sections of my pages are an important part of the story.
They explain a lot. The videos at the bottom of the pages are often helpful as well.)

Unfortunately, so far, I have been unable to persuade anyone to read it.😞

"The title of my book is 'Gestures In The Dark', which comes from a letter written by an exiled
Roman poet named Ovid. It indicates that I often write only for my own benefit, knowing that it is
unlikely that anyone else will ever read it. My main characters are 🧙🏻Roger T. Slug who represents
my Stoic side influenced by my Ego, and 🤡Bozo The Magic Weasel who represents my Romantic
side influenced by my Id. You may think of them more simply as my mind and my emotions, which
are often in conflict. As a result, you might notice contrary positions throughout my writing, since I
write from those different points of view. The primary messages of my book include: 'lives of quiet
desperation' (Thoreau), 'the conflict between the beggar on his wooden crutch and the pretty
woman in her darkened door' (Cohen), and 'how the heart wavers from the desire for pleasure
to the desire to die' (Dickinson)."
Mark A. Sebring (L'Homme Solitaire)