The term “unreliable narrator” refers to a narrator in a fictional work whose credibility has been seriously compromised; a character who, for whatever reason, is passing on plainly false or delusional information to the audience. Authors use this sort of window into their stories for all sorts of reasons, often as a way of setting the story up for a big twist ending, or to force the audience for the work to “reconsider their point of view and experience of the story”.

I like to think that we are all, in some way, unreliable narrators of our own lives. Human beings are remarkably adept at fooling ourselves. Our memories are easily colored and re-written by experience; often the things we *believe* are the inerrant truth based on our experiences are really subject to interpretation from a different perspective. We live in our heads as the main characters in our individual stories, though we’re also characters of varying importance in everyone else’s stories as well; and we’re not always cast as the heroic protagonists we like to think of ourselves as. The stuff written down in this particular digital archive is, subject to all the usual rules of unreliability, the way things sit from my perspective.

Please consider the previous qualifying prose while reading the following biographical sketch:

Chuck Parker is a forty-something geek with tendencies toward hipsterism and curmudgeondom. He’s managed to carve out a career niche in public sector information systems management in Mid-Atlantic suburbia in order to support his wife, children, and pets, though honestly has no real idea what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s politically liberal (in contrast to many of his neighbors), and enjoys piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, peace and quiet with his thoughts, gatherings of like-minded geeks, reading, music (listening, writing, performing, collecting, etc), playing games with complicated rulesets, hiking and biking the wilderness, drinking craft beer, collecting comics memorabilia, occasionally creating things, and abusing the <strike> HTML tag for cheap humorous effect.

This blog is pretty much a clearinghouse for thoughts on all those sorts of things, plus the occasional silly image macro joke, book and/or record review, social history lesson, and very rarely, deep philosophical musings.