Yes, I read old editions of the Boidem, though as I've often confessed, I'll read just about anything. This time, of course, I had a good excuse: I wanted to see whether or not I was being consistent in my examination of this topic. And this brought me to my column from May 2004 - Mother Night on the web.

Obviously the fourth edition of the Boidem wasn't the only one that dealt with questions of identify. Those presented themselves numerous times throughout these columns. In that May 2004 column I even noted that two years earlier, instead of making a list of the times I dealt with issues of identity I should simply link to the main Boidem page. Having now reread that Mother Night column, however, I can honestly write that it's one of my favorites, and perhaps one of the best. Too many of the outside links in that column have turned to linkrot, but there's still enough there to get a good picture of the give and take between being and pretending. Vonnegut made his point well before the web, but our online experience has done a good job of sharpening it.