[€uroMeinke]

Once upon a time – because after all this is one of those timeless stories, that is the place in time doesn’t really matter as this is a story is really just an archetype – an experience we all encounter at some point in our lives either in ourselves or through a loved one. So time is irrelevant to some extent though it is still manifestly important to us mortal beings whose clocks are always ticking, whose time is always running out, so once upon a time really is just a placeholder, a sometime in your life so to speak.

So once upon a time there was a man – of course, he needn’t really be a man. In fact the story would probably hit better demographics if it were about women since they outnumber men by some marginal amount that increases over time. Some time. Once upon a time. But in this instance, the story is of a man – if for no other reason than the writer of this story is a man, and to claim otherwise would distract from the tale.

Not that this is an autobiographical tale, though certainly the writer will be drawing from his personal experiences, that is, experiences he has had himself as well as those he may have observed in others.

Once upon a time, there was a man who discovered he was mortal – that is he discovered that his once upon a time was a very specific time, his very specific time – it might have been 3:50 PM on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, 2006, or it could have been moments before, this time and this discovery.

And the man was filled with fear. Not a fear of death, rather a fear of not living. For he noticed the specificity of time, not just once upon a time, he saw that he was finite, that the moment, 3:50 PM on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, 2006 was now forever gone to him, wasted away in some embarrassing intellectual exercise, a contemplation yielding nothing. How many moments had he left? How many specific instances? 3:50 PM on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, 2006 was already gone to him, passed into memory, unchangeable, wasted, or worse yet even forgotten - if not commemorated in this passage.

So in his fear he was paralyzed, unable to move forward - too busy watching the time as it passed, trapped in an endless moment of denial, trying to prolong each moment, to capture its significance – for this is one of those universal experiences, the passage of time, one coming face to face with one’s mortality, that one will eventually pass from existence and vitality into memory – if not somehow captured and preserved somewhere. In time.

So he turned to his computer and began to type, ”Once upon a time…”