I should first explain how I decided upon my title. And that means I need to explain a little about myself. I am fond of multiple entendres and, if you read “into” the title, there are obviously two of them there. The “last” could refer to a final fork in the road, or it could mean the one you just went down.  Since you never know if the fork you are going down is the last one you will ever go down, I am going to be discussing mainly the various forks I have gone down in my life.

    I intend to go through them chronologically (although I occasionally will have to go back and forth in time since some of the forks may merge into each other), but I will skip ahead a bit for now to 2015 when I went down a particular “fork.” I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but I wound up having surgery and then an adverse reaction to the medicine given to me before, during, and after the surgery and how I had to seek some therapy. Which I am still undergoing.

    When I am with my therapist, we talk about what has gone on in my life, and I find myself using two terms frequently. One is a “double-edged sword,” which I will probably be using a lot in here. The other is “fork in the road." She and I have discussed numerous choices I have made, and paths I have gone down, depending on the choice I made. Sometimes, when I have brought up a choice we already mentioned before, I would say something like, "Yeah, well, when I went down that last fork." And so the phrase "last fork in the road" became kind of a "thing".

    I want to go off on a little tangent here, which is actually kind of like a “mini fork” (yeah, I tend to enclose things in quotes. Picture me now using “air quotes.” Oops, I did it again). I remember watching the movie Terminator, where computers from the future decide to send a robot, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, back in time to kill the mother of the leader of the resistance, thereby eliminating him from ever being born.

    We’ve seen other variances on this, like going back and killing Hitler when he was a baby and preventing World War II. Changing history is something lots of people dream about. Since one of the earliest formative events that happened in my lifetime was the assassination of JFK, were I given a chance to go back, I would want to go to Dealey Plaza and see if I could prevent that. Anyway, I digress.

    So Arnold went back to kill Sarah Connor. Her son John then sent back his lieutenant Kyle Reese to stop Arnold. I have spent most of my professional career as a computer programmer. So the thought that computers in the future came up with the idea to get rid of John Connor before he was ever born to prevent the insurrection that was going on was intriguing. Of course, the fact that sending Arnold back was responsible for sending Kyle Reese back, which was then indirectly responsible for John Connor being born, was pretty ironic. I also happen to be very fond of irony, so it is little surprise that I count Terminator among my favorite movies. Sorry, I digressed again.

    So… getting back, Kyle Reese tries to explain what is going on to Sarah, and he talks about “one possible future,” saying he doesn’t know the tech stuff. And we have finally arrived at my point.

    When I am speaking with my therapist, I talk about times in my life when I had a choice to make, and I think about what “possible future” might have occurred had I made a different choice, hence going down a different fork in the road of my life. Obviously, I can only surmise, as all the forks in the road I have taken so far have brought me to where I am now.

    Therefore, this little enterprise, if I ever get to finish it, will be about me and the forks I have taken. And where they have taken me, which is at this point in front of my PC writing this. There will be some events and some people who were a part of my life that I may not include. Although some of it will be autobiographical, this is not really meant to be a story of all the events in my life. I will be focusing mainly on events that required a choice, and the effects of those choices on my life.

    As I have previously said, I do not intend to use any names at all. There were some people and events in my past that I care about deeply who were influential, both positive and negative, that may not get mentioned.

    Now, if I were ever actually to get this thing printed, what would motivate anyone to want to buy it? Are there any lessons in it for anyone? There is a saying about forks that came out of the mouth of someone who played baseball for the Yankees (some of you probably already know where I'm going).

    In the immortal words of Lawrence "Yogi" Berra, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it". So, if you want to read a story about someone who took a lot of forks, this is for you.

    Note: As I have been going over in my mind the list of forks/chapters, it looks like there will be many of them. And a lot of them will probably be short. Added together, hopefully, they will combine to make a full-bodied story.