caveat emptor

Thing About Me Number Five

5. I have a love/hate relationship with the ocean. I love looking at it from a distance. I am fascinated with the life therein. I can remember, as a child, watching with breathless amazement the work of early oceanographers like Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Steve Zissou. I remember the calm, sage scholarship of Jacques' French-accented narration. He would calmly comment as members of his team jumped into the water and were immediately eaten by sharks and octopuses (octopi?) "Notice how zee flailing of Gerard's arms whips zee enraged tiger sharks into a frenzy. Soon zee blood will attract even more of zeese majestic creatures."

As much as I love the ocean "in theory," however, I don't enjoy the ocean "in person." I don't enjoy, for example, being in the ocean. I don't enjoy feeling the salt of the ocean mix with sand of the beach and form a thin, briny concrete exoskeleton over my skin. Once, when I was a teen, I swam into the tentacles of a Portuguese Man O' War off the beach at South Padre Island, Texas. I could tell he was Portuguese because he had a tattoo that said, "Todo Bem!" Man O' War just float along. They cannot attack you with their tentacles; you have to be stupid enough to swim into them. When you're pretty far out from the beach, though, and you look over and see the little, inflated sandwich baggie of a Man O' War, and then you see the tentacles just under the surface coming straight at you, and then you feel them INJECTING BURNING POISON INTO YOUR NECK, the sensation is similar to that of being attacked by a monstrous Kraken from the dark depths of Hell.

So, I don't go into the ocean. I just watch from afar, surfing from the safety of my favorite TV-watching chair (Just to clarify: the chair doesn't watch TV, I watch TV while sitting in the chair.)

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

P. S. - I hate this drawring. That's why you won't see it in my public collection of sketches. It doesn't live there. It lives with all the other rejected sketches in The Archipelago of Bad Perspective. The face on this one came out too flat. I'm not just talking about a flat affect, which would actually be appropriate for this picture, but an actual flatness. The tip of the nose is too close to the back of the head. But, I decided that it was at least as good as yesterday's landscape. So, here it is. Thanks for stopping by.

Thing About Me Number Four

4. My earliest memory is of a strange, dream-like experience. When I was four we lived for a couple of years in a mobile home on the grounds of a cattle ranch/walnut orchard near Sloughhouse, California (which is in the Consumnes River Valley near Sacramento.) My father, who still lived with us at that point, was a hired hand. His job was to prune the walnut trees, to pick the walnuts and to take them to the walnut shelling plant ¹. It was a cool job, because he got to drive around a "cherry picker." I work in software development, and I never, ever, ever get to drive a cherry picker.

But, I digress. On to the strange "dream." (I may have told you guys about this dream before. I'm practicing to be an old man. When I'm an old man, I plan to tell the same story every five minutes. I haven't picked the story yet, but I can promise you this: it will certainly not be interesting enough to justify telling it every five minutes.)

I was lying in bed with my eyes closed. For whatever four-year-old reason, I was imagining getting into a car. I reached out to pull the door closed, and I heard - actually heard - a car door close. "What the hell?" I thought. (I probably actually thought whatever kids think when adults think, "What the Hell?" I have no idea what the hell that might be.) So, I opened my eyes. It was not nighttime. It was a bright, sunny day. I was not lying in bed, I was sitting in the back seat of a car. The car was driving very, very slowly along a dirt road that led to the top of the hill. I could not see what was over the hill. I could only see bright, sunny, blue sky past the crest of the grassy hill. Although I was in the back seat, I was alone in the car. The car was driving up the hill, but there was no one at the wheel. I saw all of this for only an instant, but it burned into my brain. I can still see it clearly today. After an instant, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again a few seconds later, it was nighttime and I was back in my bed.

If you ever want to see me really, really, really freak out, just sneak me, while I'm sleeping, into the back seat of a car on a dirt road on a grassy hill on a sunny day. When I wake up, I can promise you this, I will lose it. Totally.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

¹ Once I went with my Dad to the walnut shelling plant. There was a raised platform from which you could look down into the shelling mechanism. There were, of course, protective rails all around the platform and all around the concrete staircase that led up to the platform. According to the story, I decided to swing on the staircase rail (and not, fortunately, the rail over the shelling machine.) I slipped. I fell. I broke my arm. I remember none of this, but I've heard the story a million times.

Thing About Me Number Three

3. When I was a teen, I enjoyed the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game for several years, although I've probably only actually played the game for a grand total of four or five hours in my entire life. I did not enjoy playing the game, I enjoyed buying and reading all the books. I enjoyed drawing detailed maps of imaginary countries and mazes and dungeons and caves. I enjoyed creating the story lines for elaborate adventures. Actually playing the game? Not so much. My cousin Phil and I would set up the game to play (he was always the Dungeon Master,) but we'd get about five minutes into the game and fall into a long philosophical discussion between my character and the first non-player character (NPC) he encountered. I don't think we really wanted to play D&D, I think we wanted to have long philosophical discussions.

Later on, when I was in the eleventh grade, my ever-increasing religious zeal got the better of me and I destroyed all the Dungeons & Dragons books I owned. I also destroyed the notebooks full of maps and stories I had created. I'm not a person who believes in regret, because I think the stages we go through are important steps in becoming the people we are, but I sure wish I had those notebooks back.

Well, so far I'm accomplishing one thing about me each day. I have ninety-seven things to go. At the rate of one a day, it will take a long time. I'm not sure what the actual mathematical formula is to calculate the total number of days it will take to post ninety-seven things at the rate of one a day, but it seems like it might take weeks. I should try to accelerate this somehow.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Two

2. I like to drawr faces. I've done a few drawings of other things in my life, but I'm obsessed with faces. There's an old proverb that says, "The face is the window to the heart." Wait? Does anyone say that? Now that I see it written down, I'm doubting that anyone ever said that. I think I just made it up. Maybe people say, "The face is the mailbox of the id." Is that right? "The face is the breakfast nook of the spirit."

Well, regardless, I say, "The face is the front of the head."

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number One

My schedule is off today. Specifically, I am skipping my morning writing time to get the kids off to school because Susan, my wife, has finals this week. Then, next week, Susan starts an intense, two-week, mini-semester in which she will be completing her Business Law II course. For the next three weeks, therefore, my writing time will be limited. Proper (or perhaps I should say "typical") Caveat Emptor posts during the next three weeks will, therefore, be somewhere between infrequent and nonexistent. I apologize to the many, many people for whom my writing is the only thing keeping them from plunging, headlong, into the abyss.

I will not eschew posting altogether. I cannot get into the writing zone of my brain in my home where so many other things pertain to me (in the coffee shop I can write because, although there is noise and activity, it does not pertain to me.)I can, however, work on a little project I've been kicking around. I'm going to write one of those lists of "100 Things About Me." I can easily do this with one brain tied behind my back. So, with no further ado, here goes the first bit.

1. My parents were hippies, which simply means that they were silly, freedom-loving (in a shallow sense) kids who happened to be in their teens and early twenties during a decade in history in which being those sorts of people made you hippies. There were also, of course, all sorts of aesthetic and stylistic habits and preferences that came with the territory. They weren't activists, though. They weren't hippie environmentalists or war protesters. They were just kids. They dropped out. They got married. They lived in a van. My sister was born when my mom was 17. I was born when my mom was 18. I was born in a town in which I never lived, Stephenville, Texas. We were just passing through. We were poor. I had long, blond hair. Hippies.

I'll have to do more than one of these a day or it will take many, many days (approximately one hundred.) But, this is all for which I have time today.

Hello, friend. Peace.

Later. Love.