It depends on your definition of real. The question could be trying to see whether there is a true singular being within the local entity known as Sol Smith. Or whether or not there even is the local entity. Maybe it’s asking if everything you see of me is a performance? Or if Sol Smith has always been a figment of our imaginations? Am I a manifestation of the collective need for a Sol Smith or am I merely just a random blip in a large continuum of blips. I’d like to think that me saying I’d like to think is enough. That was a Descartes reference.

I have an affinity for playing charming weirdos with a dark underbelly. Treating these three characteristics as dials I can spin up and down in intensity, I have endless room to play and find more and more and more and more.

Unfortunately if we’re being realistic I’m not going to update this— probably ever— so this will be a very rigid description of how I’m doing. I am doing quite wonderfully! I’m reading more; Spring is giving me a reason to climb out of my hobbit hole and interact with people and the world again. Everything is really falling into its right place, and it’s hard to fathom times when I thought life was awful. It might even be poetic that while the world is in massive tumult and duress my garden is in most wonderful bloom.

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

If you think I’m wise enough to give advice you must see something in me I don’t, or your 30 years early. Come back when I have a mustache that can drag on the floor.

If you insist on advice it would be to be true to your word and to do everything in your power to drag dreams into reality.

No.