Chapter 1

Some people are thought of as "Old souls." That's bullshit. They aren't old souls; they are just bitter pragmatists.

Me? I'm old. Shoot ... I've been on this fucking rock, excuse me- "wondrous planet" for nigh on one thousand six hundred and thirty something years. I'm not certain because in my village they didn't have higher math. By higher math I mean we didn't have anyone who could count to more than 20 (21 if you were a male). They counted on their appendages and anything over that was called "many."

Before you call bullshit or "shenanigans" or "sionnachuighm" just hear me out. I'm no vampire, werewolf, druid, wizard, elf, angel, demon or whatever the hell else people are calling those things these days. I don't have a long sword and I don't run around cutting people's heads off. To be brutally honest (hah! What else is there?) I don't know what the hell is going on. All I know is that I haven't died and I haven't been successful in my suicide attempts so I just keep on living. And, I shit you not, it is the biggest hassle you can imagine. I can still get hungry, horny, confused, and need a place to live. And the mechanics of some of those things these days are just a royal pain in the ass. Life was certainly easier when you just dug a hole and crapped in the woods. Dirtier? Yeah, but much easier, too.

I was born in Gaul, which is part of current day France. At the time we spoke Gaulish, though that's not what we called it. We were Celts and spent all of our free time fighting the Romans. Once they pretty much won everyone started speaking Latin and things got all the way fucked up. I hated latin. I hated the fucking Romans, too. Nobody was happier than I was when Attila scared the shit out of them by trying to sack the place. That it fell 30 years after he died was no accident. He broke what was left of the last of its will. It was a dark day when he died. He had balls. Fucking Romans. I shit on their graves...

To keep things simple and moving along quickly I'll use words you can understand. Not only would it kill the narrative flow to keep on switching back and forth between "English" and whatever language I was speaking at the time you wouldn't appreciate how much effort it takes for me to remember those details. So fuck it: English it is.

Where was I? Oh yeah ... Gaul.

Wait wait wait. One more thing before I get back to Gaul. I'm planning on dying soon. Praying for it, more likely. I'm tired of being here and I'm optimistic that I'll figure out a way to do it. I'm tired of seeing the same stupid shit done again and again and again. Tired of the testosterone running through the veins of today's "rulers." And I figure that I'm probably the oldest dude around and that if I am ever successful in knocking myself off that someone may have an interest in knowing my story. Not because my ego is so huge that I think that I have something to say ... but because history needs a metaphorical counterweight. You've heard the statement "Winners write the history books?" Well, that is one of the top seven truest things I've ever heard. Through this story I aim to be that counterweight.

And I want to set the record straight as best I can. I lived it. I was there so all y'all can ignore my story at your peril.

This is sort of my Reddit "Ask me anything" even though nobody's asked me shit in at least 75 years. And thank god for that, too.

Gaul. A shitty place by anyone's standards. Literally. We didn't have indoor plumbing. We fought with iron age tools, got our asses kicked by the rest of the Celts, worshipped Sucellus (he was THE MAN!) and were basically nomads in what is today's wine region. Our wine was for shit, too. We knew what it was and what it did to people. Hell, my family worked the vineyards that were owned by the Romans. But we really didn't know shit about the stuff compared to today.

You see- it's not that people were stupid. I make it look that way because of plumbing, weapons, mathematics and the like. The truth is that we were ignorant and uneducated. There were no schools. Writing was something done by VERY few people. It wasn't like we were the hillbillies back in Appalachia today who are scared of outsiders. EVERYBODY was like us. If you wanted to count to more than twenty (or twenty one) you got another guy to stand next to the first guy and kept on counting appendages. I am surprised that we didn't have a base 20 number system.

You think that the divide today between the 1% and the 99% is a big deal? Shit. We'd have literally KILLED for that allocation of resources. Try 99.99% vs the 0.01%. That's what, 9,999 to one? Sounds about right to me. Even the Roman centurions that were there to keep us in line were treated like dogs. And they fucking LOVED the idea because being treated like a dog was a shitload better than being treated like the rest of us.

Gaul. I lived there. It sucked. What else can I say? We were poor by everybody else's standards. My family weren't the political elite; we ended up being farmers. We weren't even land owners; we were tenant farmers. What was it like? The historians have it mostly right. People were born and if they were lucky they lived past age two. If they were really lucky they got married (not a big production like the Christian ones and definitely not as good a party). If they were even luckier they died by the time they were 35. After that you were pretty much toothless and useless. In a world without a social safety net meant you were hungry, cold, tired, and a wolf's dinner.

Me? I lost my virginity when I was 13 to our neighbor's daughter. We got caught fucking after she turned up pregnant and it was either marry her or take the Gaulish equivalent of a shillelagh to my head and balls. It wasn't that I brought shame on their family so much as the life expectancy of a single mother in those times was even lower than it was for married mothers. Celtic dads being what they were (they all loved their daughters just like today), they tried to make sure that their daughters had half a chance at making it to 35. Marriage wasn't a big deal like it is today. A druid came by and whacked us on the head with a branch and we were married. It's been so long that I have a hard time remembering her name. Let's call her Jenny. Compared to the rest of the women I've had over the last sixteen hundred and thirty some odd years she wasn't anything special in bed. Maybe it was because it was new to her. Maybe it was because I had no idea what I was doing in bed. Either way the sex was just "OK" when compared to some of the other women I've been with.

Celtic married life was pretty good considering we didn't own any land and we got kicked out of our homes every so often (see below). Jenny and I fucked wherever and whenever we could. It wasn't like there was anything else to do at night. Or in the morning. Or while the wine was growing. Work, eat, sleep, shit, fuck. Yessireebob, that was pretty much what we did. Jenny and I eventually got pretty good at inserting peg A into slot B. We didn't do anything crazy when we were screwing. Sure, the Kama Sutra had been written by then but it hadn't made it over the various mountain ranges to central Gaul by then. So we were pretty vanilla. We tried anal sex once, but that was only because I missed. She damn near took my head off. So the operative word in that sentence is "Once."

Since neither of our families had anything of value it wasn't what we would now call an arranged marriage. We just built a hut further down the valley. We didn't really have many possessions.

We fought some, too. Jenny and I didn't fight. I mean us, the Celtic Gauls. Or Gallic Celts. I never could figure that one out.

So we fought. Again- other than farming and fucking there ain't much to do. I'd call it the three "F"s but we didn't speak English at the time and in the Gallic tongue those three words together sound like a cat clearing its throat while constipated. The fighting was mostly intramural stuff; we didn't win a lot when we went up against the varsity of other tribes. Winning meant having to take over other people's lands. And that just meant the bigger motherfucker down the river a ways noticed you and came up to take all your shit because there was NO fucking way that you'd win against them. And losing against them meant losing all your shit, your women, and anything else they wanted.

First rule I ever learned: There's always someone bigger and meaner out there. Fight them or not; it's your choice.

So we (as a family and village) chose not to fight them. We could fight and lose some women and be slaves or we could say "fuck it; go ahead and take the vineyards- we don't even own them", move downstream on the river a few miles and start again. Fewer casualties that way, too. There weren't a lot of people like there are today and there was a shitload of land around that was just forest.

What about kings and government to maintain law and order, you ask? Hah! We were Celts. The Romans were starting their decline and didn't mess with us much so we didn't mess with them, other than the fighting. They were there, yeah, and we had to pay taxes but when you don't have a pot to piss in the idea of giving up half the pot was an abstract one. The only group we didn't fuck with was the druids. Well, them and the Picts, but I learned that later. The druids? Those motherfuckers were mean. I can't say that I was all that sad when they died out. It's like being sorry that the guys who bullied you in high school got brain cancer in their mid twenties. Nope; not sorry at all. Am I petty? You bet. But after they've taken a few of your kids for human sacrifice you stop worrying about things like being petty or holding grudges.

Oh, it wasn't all THAT bad. Kids got born every fall, it seems. They'd pop out right around harvest time year after year. Like rocks coming up in a farmer's field in New England (Where do you think they got the rocks to make all of the stone walls?). We knew how and why it occurred. And, to be honest, childbirth has gotten SO much better for the women over the years. Biting a stick while a druid thwacks mistletoe on your forehead as the contractions come isn't much fun, apparently. But we kept fucking during the winter and the kids kept coming out during the harvest. Most of them didn't live anyway so it's not like there were a lot of mouths to feed.

That reminds me that all of you people today are just plain softies when it comes to human life. I blame Jesus, to be honest. All that crap about "every life is sacred. Every child is a joy." Scrooge had it right when he said "Bah! Humbug!"

I'm setting that story straight right here, right now. Human life is just like every other life whether it is a rhinoceros, elephant, frog, bobcat, or mouse. We are born, we eat, we shit, we fuck, and we die. I like having kids around but I am not a slave to them. My parents weren't my slave so why should I be my kids' slave? Y'all are just stupid like that. You've got one short life on this piece of dirt and you are wasting it at your kid's soccer games? In 20 years they'll remember that you went to a few of them but they won't remember all of the time you gave up so that they could kick a ball into a net. Give me 3rd century parenting any day: "Here's what you need to do to live. Don't fuck up or make me look bad."