Remembering Who I Am

I am still coming to grips with who I Am. After five decades of playing the role of Steve McAllister, I’m still trying to understand my character’s motivation and what he’s really striving for. Yet I’m also not completely convinced that I’m actually Steve McAllister either.

Steve McAllister came into existence on August 4, 1971 as the second child of Craig and Laurie McAllister. Although they toyed with the notion of calling him “Sean”, something told them that the person they were bringing into the world would more greatly benefit from a name like “Steve” for the particular journey he would be traversing. So they printed it on the birth certificate as “Steven Robert McAllister” (the middle name a nod to Laurie’s father), and the government created a corporation to represent the new citizen called STEVEN ROBERT MCALLISTER.

However, that’s not actually the beginning of my story. That’s just the beginning of the character I’m currently playing and the corporation I was given control of for the time being. Nevertheless, just like everybody else, I am actually eternal, and the beginning of my story happens over and over again in every moment I experience.

Even the mass of bone and flesh that many would consider to be Steve McAllister isn’t the infant that was born back in ’71. Twelve days before Richard Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard, a 7 pound 11 ounce newborn was named Steve. And just like money isn’t what it used to be, now, the person people refer to as Steve has accumulated another 150 pounds (or so) of substance, and there’s no real way to know how much of that 7 pounds and 11 ounces of original material even remains.

The entity known as Steve McAllister is comprised of about 70% (or so) of water and 30% of other bits that will fairly quickly deteriorate and become soil when that water ceases to flow. The water that identifies as Steve today is different than the water that was there when he made his planetary debut, and even different from the water that was there just last week. He’s drunk a lot of fluids since then, peed a lot of them out, and because he primarily lives in Florida, a good many drops of that moisture escaped as sweat and headed to the beach.

That water currently identifying as Steve has been on this planet for a pretty long while, and it has identified as a lot of different characters along the way. There have been times that the water has identified as other humans throughout history, sometimes it has come to find…