I feel the need to open these stories by informing you that I, perhaps regretfully, have neither been to jail nor spent my youth in a Victorian asylum.

I wasn’t beaten by my parents with a belt or a wooden spoon. Or anything else. There was no beating.

I never ran with a street gang, never wrote any bad words on a bathroom stall and never drew a penis on anything.

I’ve never stolen money from my mom’s purse.

I am not an addict now and have never been a junkie, a drunk, a pothead or a tweaker.

I never grew up to be a serial killer, a needy actor thirst-posting on social media or a pouty-lipped rock star.

I never had to muster up any courage to tell my conservative parents (they aren’t very conservative) about some “alternative lifestyle choice” or secret aspect of my true self, my identity, my sexuality or my gender that might have challenged their faith. There wasn’t enough faith to challenge and my lifestyle choices are boring.

I’ve never had to overcome incredible odds to win a gold medal in anything.

I haven’t stormed a beach, slept in a trench or faced down a machine-gun nest.

I wasn’t abducted by aliens, as far as I can remember, and therefore I have never been probed. Not very far, anyway.

I don’t have any amazing new advice for you to lose weight without effort and I can’t tell you how to get those yellow stains out of the armpits of your white T-shirts.

So why would I bother writing all these words in all these stories over all these years?

I mean, what do I have to offer the world? And what could possibly have driven me to spend so much of my dwindling time on this planet writing all this down?

Well, you might want to read this because I have been blessed (cursed) with one of those brains that seems to hold onto any memory that left a mark and, lucky for me, I have a lot of marks because I have also been cursed (blessed) with extraordinary sensitivity. I’m not just talking about feelings either. I mean literally, my senses are all stuck on 11, so almost everything that comes into my brain is intense, overwhelming and loud and, therefore, I am forced to remember much of it.

That makes my life, by accident of birth, an excellent vehicle to take you, and/or people like you, on a journey through the reality of life as a G-1 Gen-X human being.

We probably don’t need to discuss why that’s so appealing, but we can, if you like. It’s kind of a thing.

If you are yourself Gen-X, you’ll enjoy these stories because they will remind you of your own lives, only worse (or better). You’ll smell the smells, feel the feelings and generally nod a lot and say things like “Yep” or “Oh no!”

If you’re from one of the other demographic cohorts out there, you might enjoy reading these stories to find out if your suspicions about Gen-Xers is correct and to help, find yourself on the handy chart at the end of this post, where I have included what the Internet tells me are the most common complaints about us (by cohort).

At this point, I want to thank you for reading this far and I hope you enjoy following these stories as much as I enjoyed living them in the first place. I hope too that you read these stories so often and so deeply that you begin to confuse your own memories with mine and you wind up asking your family about that time you cut your foot open in the swamp behind the strip club and had to run on a freshly oiled gravel road to get help. Of course, your family won’t remember any of that because it happened to me, but I remember it all very well and I hope you can take comfort in knowing that it happened exactly as you remember it. Maybe even worse.