Douglas Debelak

I would much prefer to have my biography written by someone else and, therefore, presented objectively in the third person. But, until I can afford to hire a publicist or persuade a friend, whom I trust to be honest, preferably more honest than myself, we are both stuck with me and my clearly subjective and highly biased effort. Given this, I believe the most authentic approach is to own up and proceed in the first person.

I don’t remember being born, nor do I trust what appear to be my earliest childhood memories, nor, at times, even memories from events that took place only moments ago. So, I can only conclude that what I am about to present will be as fictional as anything else I’ve written. Then again, hasn’t everything ever written been filtered through one’s imagination, if only to seek out the words and phrases to express best what we believe to be true? Or hope we can convince you to believe it is true.

Not my first memory, of that I am fairly certain, perhaps not a memory at all, but a clear recollection nonetheless, was the subject of sex seeming to be such a taboo topic in our household that I became so fixated on learning what was behind such a whispered about behind closed doors, dark, secret, sin-ridden mystery that its eventual discovery alone would surely send me directly to hell. I’m not sure I’ve ever escaped that sense of forbiddenness, nor, clearly, even at my advanced age, the fixation.

Another event I don’t remember, but according to my mother, I must have been a natural-born storyteller even as a child, since I persuaded the rest of my kindergarten class that I could tell a better story than the teacher. I apologize for not remembering whether I ever told the story I promised, let alone recall what that might have been. I suspect I intended to make it up, since that is what I do.

The teacher, being new and flustered by such a brazen challenge to her authority, told my mother that she didn’t know how to handle such behavior. To her horror, being strongly opposed to corporal punishment, she witnessed my mother promptly demonstrate what she called “butt shock therapy.” Whatever the teacher’s beliefs, I bet that I never disrupted her class again, whether or not I believed I had a better story to tell.

I repeated first grade, thanks to my inability to pay attention in school, whether from boredom or having more interesting stories floating through my imagination than those I promised my kindergarten classmates. Even though I was a year older than my classmates, I remained smaller than most and wore glasses, making me a natural target for bullies. Add having a mouth that, as I was to discover, would have been far more clever had I learned to keep it shut, since, together with being smaller and wearing glasses, it was not a good combination for navigating grade school unscathed, with the unsurprising consequence of regularly suffering one of my classmates’ version of “butt shock therapy.”

Like other bored-to-death, imaginative children, I spent more time daydreaming than paying attention in class. However, for some unknown reason, while not deluding myself about my undersized prospects in professional sports, I also read an entire set of encyclopedias, cover to cover, front to back, in alphabetical order, as well as many of the other books in our home. The Old Man and the Sea half a dozen times before I was twelve, and I can’t begin to calculate how many other titles, but a decent enough swathe through the classics, that, despite my best efforts to make no effort, I didn’t emerge from grade school utterly illiterate and uneducated; a fact which also didn’t go unnoticed by my mother or other adults in my life, who continued to remind me how if I’d only apply myself, I could be anything I wanted to be. More on that later.

Fast forward through junior and senior high school; to keep this brief, I graduated, if barely. After which, with a red-flag combination of poor grades and high standardized test scores, I was unsurprisingly rejected by nearly every college to which I applied, until finally receiving the acceptance letter from the state school across the state line, where, no disparagement intended, to an excellent school, most of my fellow underachieving classmates had also enrolled.

Growing up being raised in the church, I chose Religious Studies as a major with the notion of becoming a Presbyterian pastor; a prospect that apparently left me no more inspired than I’d ever been, since, like my fellow underachieving classmates, I might as well have majored in beer drinking off campus and playing cards in the student union. After a lackluster year and a half, I dropped out, met a girl, found a factory job, and got married.

The End.

Or not quite, since one afternoon, idly observing an older co-worker staring vacuously into space, I had the epiphany: If I didn’t do something dramatically different, I was staring down my vacuous self in another forty-odd years. The prospect of which I found far more boring than school had ever been. So, I re-enrolled at the state school across the state line, where most of my underachieving former classmates had also dropped out, perhaps had their own epiphanies, or at least showed up to class enough to earn diplomas.

Intent on studying with a vengence, a class in philosophy, with a marvelous professor, led me to question every belief I had previously held, and to switch my major from religion to philosophy, where questions, at least then, were encouraged rather than branded as a lack of faith or heresy. I went on to earn a degree in philosophy, graduating with honors, and I was accepted into Northwestern University’s PhD program in Philosophy.

First, arriving in Evanston, IL, I discovered ‘Great Expectations,’ at the time, one of the country’s premier philosophy bookstores, where finding the extensive list of philosophy titles that I’d subconsciously compiled on the shelves led to a stark, great-expectation-altering realization that if I sat and began reading, never eating or taking a bathroom break again, I couldn’t read all th books on my list in my lifetime. So, if nothing else, during my brief stay at the graduate program focusing on Phenomenology and Existentialism, I did learn the definition of ‘finitude.’

Second, perhaps all I’d ever wanted was to discuss philosophical ideas with other intelligent people, whom, in this instance, I found, to my disappointment, did not care to share theirs, for fear of some nefarious fellow student or professor pilfering them before they had an opportunity to publish. And here I’d thought the whole purpose of grad school was examining such ideas to determine whether any had merit. And what were those ten percent, fortunate enough to earn their PhD, then find employment in their field, going to do with a classroom full of students anxious to discuss ideas? Talk about a den of potential thieves.

In retrospect, I suppose, if I’d had the patience to endure, I might have enjoyed a den of thieves anxious to discuss whatever ideas I cared to share. And if any found a few worth stealing, go with my blessing. Wasn’t that the point?

I returned home, disillusioned and ashamed of my failure, and after suffering a period of depression, I decided to try writing, which seemed a logical alternative for speculative thinking, sharing ideas, and asking, “What if…?” Learning that I was to become a father, this proved short-lived. After several twists and turns, a son then daughter, I decided, supporting my family writing software - which I’d taught myself (there was a dare involved) developing an application for running my childrens’ YMCA swimmeets - made more sense than working behind a recreation room desk a the ‘Y,’ or, according to my step-father, waisting my degree in Philosophy, contemplating my navel, awaiting inspiration to write the great American novel.

Skip ahead several decades, having an improbable and unexpectedly successful career as a software engineer, when asked about retirement, I insisted I wasn’t retiring; only spending my time doing something else when I finally found myself with such a luxury. I’d always promised myself I would return to writing. By then, the resonant voice of Joan Osborne singing the words of Eric Bazilian, “What if God was one of us?” along with those from my mother and former teachers, that “if only you would apply yourself, you can be whatever you want to be,” had a long time to percolate, resulting in my writing the autobiography of God, or the Creator, as He prefers.

I’ve now written four books, five counting the extraction of the core narrative of the first three books of The Ghostwriter Series, those being: The Involuntary Ghostwriter, The Ghostwriter’s Wife, and The Ghostwriter’s Legacy. The Words – An Autobiography represents the work, ghostwritten by the first book’s secondary character, Jonathon Fry, and intended to be a companion volume to a fourth book in the series, The Ghostwriter’s Words, a millennium in the future, in which The Words has become a holy book.

Besides an eighteen-month residency in Germany and a few such stints in Chicago and the New York City area, I have lived my entire life in western Pennsylvania. I currently live with my wife in a beautiful Victorian-era home in a wonderful historic neighborhood on the Northside of Pittsburgh (Once Allegheny City), where it has been my habit to head out to our front porch in the evening with a bottle of wine to incite parties and encourage discussions of “What if…? Which, sadly, in the current political climate, have the potential to become far more heated of late, and it is safer to drink in silence, while wondering, if only to myself, “What if…?”