DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.