A Plausible Story of

My Life So Far

Having been conceived upon an exceptionally fateful Aegean night nine moons and ten drunken evenings earlier,

 

Born upon an epoch-making (hitherto not adequately appreciated) date way back in 1943,

 

Of Col. Mehmet Ali İzbul of İstanbul, where Ottoman Sultans, too, had been born for full six hundred years, and of Pakize Hn. of Selanik, Kemal Atatürk's birthplace (do I need to stress the point...)

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As a brother to Hikmet, later a high bureaucrat and unbelievably noncrooked in a country where the contrary appears to be the norm, and to Nuran deceased young  giving birth to the twins Serdar and Dilek...

 

Mis- and even diseducated up until almost seventeen in schools which made no sense -- by downright incompetent teachers who made even less sense -- the choices and voices of whom I have since erased from my memory in return. (Neither the schools nor their teachers were to blame, not having had the historical chance.)

 

Intellectually void, save for a good grounding in Aristotelian self-smugness,

 

And emotionally misshapen and misdeveloped owing to a worldview acquired through belonging to street gangs of young presumptuous toughs,

 

...aided by the undeniable help of the Hollywood weepies of the 'fifties;

 

Having quite accidentally won a government grant to study abroad (proving that grants are delivered by the blind goddess of justice into the wrong hands), I studied, against my previous magnificent background (referred to above), things like English literature, American poetry and social anthropology in Manchester's  Owen's;

 

Disliked and seldom deigned and feigned an appearance in the classes, ever-loving and over-loving the merry nights; grew my hair, smoked and drank a lot and learnt next to nothing. But somehow even managed to get a Master's in American poetry and a Ph.D. in linguistics in the meantime,

 

Got back to my home country, did my military service (by conscription, naturally)...

 

Neither I nor the Turkish Army have quite recovered to this day from its shock. The experience served me wrong and served them right!

 

Did no less than fourteen years of teaching at Hacettepe University in Ankara, though I had less than little to teach  to begin with. During that long period, I got married and divorced a couple of times. Getting married was always full of romance and full of boredom. Getting a divorce was always full of pain and full of the sweet excitement of a renewal of life.

 

Life in fact was always full of this or that, though nothing was being really fulfilled.

 

With one exception: My first son, my beloved Ali, was born.

 

Then I turned thirty-five and discovered what an ignoramus I'd been all through. Then I studied hard. Studied anthropological linguistics, culture theory, biological evolution, physical and cultural relativity, even got involved in esoteric subjects like molecular communication, semiotics and semiology, or the probability of  extraterrestrial intelligence (having given up all hope for the terrestrial kind)...

 

Having become a competent, loving and compassionate teacher and an associate professor in anthropology, I resigned from my position at the university, public service and citizenship at one go -- at the age of 39.

 

Let's say, for reasons of my own.

 

The fact that following the 1980 coup the name of our Department had to be converted from "social anthropology" (suspected of surreptitiously signifying "socialistic" anthropology) to just plain "anthropology" was only a modest contribution in a lot-more composite picture.

 

Settled in İzmir, a relatively quiet town of only three and a half million people on the Aegean, forsaking  my native İstanbul, now clotted and congested with about twelve millions mostly newcomers of all sorts.

 

It  was wonderful to be out on the sea, fishing and drinking, greeting the rising sun with the first swig of the day...

 

And it was mortifying to be doing private coaching to earn a living in between the fishing trips, (it certainly called for more boozing in between the lessons).

 

My second son, my beloved Güneş ("the sun") was born.

 

By the age of forty, I had discovered that people are capable of telling monstrous lies.

 

At about forty-five, I discovered that most people do so most of the time.

 

At fifty, I discovered that I was no exception...

 

Have published eleven books (five of them translations), about thirty-five serious papers, and a very large amount of political thrash and rubbish.

 

Some forty years earlier I had bravely set forth to open up all the wonderful vistas the whole wide world held for me -- except for "this, that and the other" as they would go against my twenty-year-old's sense of morality. By the time I was fifty, however, I'd bitten off and chewed them "this and that" too, having no respect left for any kind of human morality...

 

Incredibly, I found myself -- for a while -- making a living running a small gifts and toys store, although the number of the times in my life I ever gave someone a present or got interested in a toy-thing must be less than the number of virgins left on the Mars.

 

In the nineteen-ninetees, in the early and wonderfully amateuristic days of the Internet I was a sex webmaster; made a lot of money in the States and lost it all in the İMKB -- what a shock for a shrewd investor like myself !!...

 

[But, who ever has heard of the third-largest bank of a respectable country suffer a %75 loss overnight in its shares -- then take it back doubly after the owners have a tet-a-tet with the PM?? Oh, sure, "What bliss it is to he who can say 'I am a Turk'...

 

Currently, married, living in a three-room apartment flat in İzmir; wife running a fairly posh ladies underwear shop (she still adamantly refuses to let go of me). My younger son's reading economics -- Allah willing!! My elder son has a good job now in Ankara, having done a degree in international relations.

 

I'm running a website on the Internet called "Practical English for Turks" (no pun intended -- a factual statement!!) and selling my ESL set of seven books which goes by the same enticing name...

 

I've come to understand that humans are made of some pliable substance that sooner the better take the shape of the solitary confinement they find themselves in.

 

I still have some inclination left in me to prove how inconceivably intelligent by nature, how incomparably knowledgeable in all sciences, and how compassionately philanthropic in my human relations I am -- prove it to no less than the whole planet Earth through the www!

 

But somehow, all I seem to have accomplished is to demonstrate how gloriously efficient I have been in creating real-life dramas.

 

Or rather, to demonstrate that I once had the potential, but it was never given the chance to surface itself, having sunk in an endless ocean of self-indulgent lifelong debauchery!

 

And so I -- alone -- now seem to hearken to my own sarcastic scream: "This man must be listened to!"

 

And, so seem to be everyone else, too.