This trilogy is a memoir about real events and real characters with fictitious names to protect the guilty. When I first wrote Book 1: The Odyssey, it became apparent that the reader would not understand the back-story that led to Michael's odyssey, after the sad dissolution of his marriage of thirty years, so I wrote a prequel called Book 2: The Ivory Tower, which detailed the ongoing events at Charity University during the Odyssey; then I wrote an earlier prequel, Book 3: The Birth of the Minotaur, which explained the events in Michael's life that lead up to the launching of his odyssey.This is Book 1: The Odyssey, of the Naked Minotaur Trilogy. The Naked Minotaur is my erotic alter ego who helped me focus my feelings-to cry, then laugh, to love, and to prevail in my passage through the perilous waters of mid-life. Being middle-aged was hard-the realization that my youthful virility and apparent immortality had abandoned me, leaving behind the traumatic symbols of man's frailty: unachievable goals, graying baldness, prostate problems, perceived impotency...well you get the picture.Mary Renault portrayed the Minotaur as the grown son of King Minos of Crete, who donned a bull mask during palace rituals and was caught up in the puppetry of a decaying court that ruled the Minoan people through the politics of fear and intrigue. I too wear a mask-it is the only true glimpse of my inner emotions that I allow anyone to see.My knees shiver forlornly against the chill. Kicked out of my marriage of thirty years for my failures, I am about to embark on a ten-year odyssey-scared about the new adventures, the pleasures and delights, the hardships and the calamities that will surely befall me, as I try to prevail through the perilous waters of midlife. Rhonda's sumptuous, feline body is imprisoned within the soft, moonlit edges of the shadowy bars...God, I need her now! We were two ageless lovers on Crete's southern shore-wily old Odysseus and his abducted, young-thighed Angelika.She is gone from my life forever, poor Jana-I had no love to give her.Tears of sadness well up in my eyes-my memorable love affair with Astrid in Crete still glows sadly in my mind. Could I have lived in two alternate universes at the same time and space-one in which I loved Laurel, and the other in which I loved Lillian and was hired by LIGO? That seems too bizarre to have happened, but quantum physics is very weird.Maybe the Minotaur is just a misunderstood victim of the judgment of mythology-what if his mask were removed and his true desires and loves were laid naked?This is my story.