iconoclast \Icon"oclast, n. 1. A breaker or destroyer of images or idols; a determined enemy of idol worship. 2. One who exposes or destroys shams; one who attacks cherished beliefs; a radical.

Pick one word to describe yourself.

What would it be?

Your role, your job? Mother? Geek?

Happy? Your state of mind?

Quiet? An adjective?

I am a Reader.

That is what I do very nearly every waking hour. I read. I read when I eat, I read myself to sleep, I read when I work. I get paid to read and write. I get paid for things I've read and learned.

Reading fascinates me. Reading has changed the very way human minds operate, but that's fodder for another post.

My mother taught me how to read long before I started school. That has proved to be the single most important factor in making me the man I am today.

I read on a seventh grade level in the first grade. The nuns accused me of cheating, and made me retake the test in the principal's office, while three of them watched.

The results were the same.

They couldn't believe it.

They took out a dictionary, and started asking me words at random. I knew the largest part of them.

In the second grade, I had to get thick glasses.

My mom would spank me when she'd come into the room late at night and find me reading under the covers with a flashlight.

“You're ruining your eyesight!” She was probably right.

In third grade, I maxed the test. I was reading at the college freshman level. Twelfth year, ninth month, on the Iowa Standard Reading Test.

They never tested me again.

I read anything, everything, just hand me words in a row, I didn't care.

I read a set of children's encyclopedias from A-Z, then read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. Webster's.

Again and again.

The Black Stallion, Connecticut Yankee, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the newspaper, Reader's Digest, Buick repair manuals, the Sears Catalog, the Bobbsey Twins, Field & Stream, Robinson Crusoe, everything I could get my hands on, to include the stag magazines my father hid under the mattress.

(Nothing too erotic, just Argosy and True)

I learned most of what I know today before I was fifteen.

Mom wouldn't let me read at the table, sometimes, so I'd read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle, on the sly, and try to figure out how to pronounce all those chemicals.

I spent my summers at the public library, with the family collie shepherding this little, bespectacled runt of a boy through downtown Kansas City. He'd wait on the steps for me to emerge hours later with a load of books to balance on his back, as we walked the half mile back home.

In school, I'd sit bored and read ahead in my history, science, and literature books, and have them all read after the first month or two of the school year. So I'd read them again, or daydream, or read paperbacks I'd smuggled from home.

I didn't like comics; they didn't last long enough. I read too fast.

Oh, I'd do other things, too. I had brothers; we roughhoused and played ball. I was on the swim team.

But by and large, most of my childhood was spent happily lost between the pages of a book.

I read a sci-fi book about a gigantic computer called the Final Encyclopedia. An artificial moonlet the size of Texas, it was constructed with all the wealth of the industrialized world, and was available only to the elite in the fields of science and academia. It contained all of human knowledge. I used to daydream of being able to sit there, to read and learn. I never thought that it would happen in my time.

But, of course, it has. We have the Internet. It didn't happen the way that author had envisioned it, but it is today a reality. The world of knowledge at your desk, for twenty bucks a month. This is the best of times.

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

In the sixth grade, now in Texas, they put us on those speed reading machines. There I discovered that you can only speak about 350 words a minute. The machine went up to around five or six hundred, I don't exactly recall, but I maxed it out, too.

It was about then that the torment began.

I can sum it up in three letters.

WTF?

All of human history, war, religious movements, jihads, revolution, art, life, death … What The Fuck?

What does it all mean?

What is our purpose?

What is a man supposed to do with his life?

Who started all this? WHY?

What is worthy of the doing? We spend only a few short years in this quickened state, before we get recycled back into Terra?

The questions still confound me today.

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