In the beginning...

The Universe and everything in it...

That shall be the subject matter of my blog so as you can see I'm going for the niche end of things.

My name is Alex Keys and the profile doesn't allow me to say too much about myself so for anyone willing to indulge me this is part of my story and why I'm starting this particular blog.

We probably have far more in common than you might imagine. I was the first born child of extremely poor parents living in the roughest part of town, oh yes, let those violins play. My father was a violent criminal who spent less than two years of the first sixteen of my life out of prison. The only time I saw him was on visits to various maximum security facilities where we shared visiting rooms with other notorious and infamous figures from the criminal world. My mother was an immigrant from Ireland who fled the industrial school system there, she had me when she was seventeen. During her pregnancy with me she had pre-eclampsia and blood poisoning; I was delivered with the umbilcus wrapped around my neck having turned blue and unable to breathe. The medics thought that I would suffer irreperable brain damage and I spent the first few weeks of my life in an HDU.

As a child I experienced sustained physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse. None of this dampened my spirit, I didn't like it but I just thought it was normal and what everyone had to go through. I became quite difficult to manage and found myself involved in gang nonsense and silly turf rivalries. I suppose the wake up call for me came when I was getting involved in knife fights and watched a man die in front of me.

At that moment it became clear to me, I lived in a large industrial city, that the place I lived in was a huge monster that devoured human beings, sucked the life force from them and then, when they were spent, cast them aside. I realised that there had to be a deeper significance and meaning to our existence, an underlying purpose to our being than become the fodder for this entity but at that moment I simply could not see it. I realised, however, that to stay where I was and to carry on as I was doing probably meant I was courting an early and violent death.

I watched someone die and saw his family become frantic and distraught as the life force ebbed away from him despite their genuine efforts to will him to live. I resolved there and then to try and make sense of the catalogue of enigmas I found myself browsing through.

That's a starting point for this blog, for me that was a starting point for an ongoing odyssey whose path has been the most profound learning experience that I could never have imaged all those decades ago. I want this blog to be the springboard into an evolving journey with companions along the way whose interests and experiences have brought them to a similar place. A philosopher is one who loves wisdom and within that paradigm I would hope that this might become a philosphical exploration into an unknown continent that these technologies are providing access to.

I've just re-read this post and it sounds a bit quasi-religious, but it's not meant to be, there's certainly no hidden dogmatic agenda going on here. We shall see where the thing takes us.