Identity

If one word could describe any biography it would be Identity. It is the key to whom any one person is. It is what everyone seeks every living day, often without giving it thought. A quick check in the mirror in the morning to ensure you exist. That you look as you want when you brush your hair. The reaction you get on entering the local store or your place of employment or a the local bar. They becomes a radar on whose waves we bounce our sensations and our psyche’s determination of their meaning and of itself.

My book is about me but it is as much about those I have bounced off and those those who have bounced off me in my life. The more intimate the bounce in shared experiences the more formative of the psyche’s behaviour and understanding of self. It is why in the prologue to my book I quote writer John le Carré on his relationships with women. “They are not a dark part of my life. They are an integral to it and inseparable”.

The same is true for me. My book is as much about them and others, female and male, with whom I have worked or played as it is about me, as without them I would not have acquired the feelings and knowledge of my identity that I have. It could be said that it is ungentlemanly or unfair to publicly write about or discuss other peoples’ lives, especially women, without their permission, but this is in effect what the mass media does every day for a living, as it is what people want to know. They want to know about other people so as to reflect themselves against them and the views and appearances. What hairstyle, what dress sense, what they may say. Do they agree with your own, or offer a different view worth consideration?

It is all about identity and so that I have included many people in my book whom have come from wholly different backgrounds and races is perhaps the most important part of it. Why was I attracted to them? Why were they attracted to me? What were our motivations? Some have been clever, some beautiful in looks or nature, and yet some these addicts. Some grifters, some con-men, some hustlers, some tarts. But tarts can have hearts and I have enjoyed meeting all sorts of people in my life regardless of class or race. It is all too easy to criticize others but those in glass houses should not throw stones. Survival is the ultimate necessity in life and not everyone is blessed with knowledge or talent to obtain a good life without the use of artifice. You may disagree but artifice is used every day. Lipstick, eye liner, hair gel, hair style, the clothes you choose to wear. They are all part of forming an identity needed to survive. Whether by making friends, getting a job, or getting laid.

Each of the people in my book could be and in effect are individual case studies in humanity, and I hope the readers of my book can give the time to reflect on them. I have not tried to make moral judgements on them. I have just described what I saw in their behaviour. They are real people. They are not fictional. The readers of my book can make their own judgement. I did not add “the Ego and the Id” to its Mr Internet TV title for no reason. Those in book are part of the reason and the reason for writing a book about them and myself.