caveat emptor

Thing About Me Number Thirty

30. One of my favorite memories happened when I was eighteen and working in Paraguay. I was to be a guide for a work team from New York, the third group with whom I had worked. I had the routine down pretty well by then. In the morning before the evening they were to arrive, I called Pánfilo, a chófer I had used before, and asked him if he was up for a seven-day trip to Ayolas for 200,000 Guaraní (about $120 US at the time, if memory serves.) He agreed and showed up at the airport. There were thirty-five people in the group. Pánfilo and I loaded their luggage onto his bus while they bought junk from the colorfully dressed "Indians." They were spending the first night in Asuncion, so, after I met the group leader, we drove them to the hotel Paraguay in El Centro. Pánfilo and I unloaded their luggage and got it to the bellhops. I helped the group leader, who was Puerto Rican and spoke a little Spanish, connect with the hotel manager so he could arrange payment. Pánfilo dropped me off at the pension where I was staying and headed home. The next morning Pánfilo and I showed up at the hotel at 6:30 and, as the group straggled downstairs, loaded them back into the bus for the trip to Ayolas.

Now we get to the part that is a favorite memory of mine.

As I settled into the seat behind Pánfilo for the ride to Ayolas, I introduced myself to one of the young ladies from the New York group. "Oh," she said in surprise, "You're American?"

"Yes, I'm from Texas."

"Oh," she replied, "I thought you were a local."

And there you have it.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Here Comes the Sun. It's Alright.

NOTE: I'm not quitting the "100 Things About Me" project, I'm just taking a sabbatical. I will finish even if it kills me (and you.) Today, however, I just want to write something. Anything. Anything except "Thing About Me Number Thirty."

The clouds today are grey, cottony, low and fast. The treetops wave at them as they pass. It makes me wonder what's happening on the other side. What are we not supposed to see? The airplane pilots know these secrets, but they are sworn to secrecy. Their job is to make us look at the Grand Canyon on the right side of the plane so we won't see what's happening on the left. It's okay, though. I love secrets, especially the ones that I don't know.

The other day I was wondering about the rays of sunlight that break dramatically through the clouds. They come straight down just below the sun and spread out from there. The ones on the left are slanted down and to the left. The ones on the right are slanted down and to the right. These angles seem to imply that the sun is inside the cloud, but it isn't. It's very, very, very far away. It's so far away, in fact, that all of the sun's rays should appear, I believe, to be going in the same direction. If you connected the "rays" of these rays back to their point of origin, it would be far too close. It would be just above the clouds. I wonder why? Maybe what we are seeing are not the direct rays of the sun but the rays reflected off of the clouds themselves. I don't know. It's not right, however, and I intend to complain to the proper authorities.

Maybe the sun is much closer than they claim. Maybe Copernicus was wrong.

Hello, friends. What are you thinking about today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Twenty-Nine

29. I've heard it said, "If you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Sometimes I see this principle, so to speak, at work broadly in humanity. Our strength as a species, I think, involves two advantages: our opposable thumbs and our ability to analyze observations and abstract concepts from their situational context. We can imagine. Watching a friend killed by a beast, for example, we can feel sadness at the loss of the loved one and imagine a world in which the friend is still alive, a world in which we rescued that friend, for example. We can experience, from those imaginings, a modicum of the relief and joy such a situation would create were it real. We can imagine things to be better (or worse) than they are. Sometimes I feel, however, that we over-apply this skill. We have abstracted ourselves out of contact with our physical context. We have created a dream world. We are always so surprised when the physical world, which we pretend is not there any more, asserts its relevance and presence to us.

Don't get me wrong. I am not prophesying doom nor am I chastising humanity for its sins. We are as we are, and we seem to be doing well. We have psychologists and meteorologists to help us remember and deal with the world outside our heads, to abstract it more accurately. Nevertheless, when I have to explain to bewildered children that humans started fishing because we needed food to survive, that we didn't always just hook and release in a cruel mockery of traditional survival, I wonder at our detachment from what it takes to live. We are broken animals, I think, but it's okay. One day the real world will blink away and we will fold into the blinding illumination of ideas and memories. One day the world will slip out from under our unopposable opposable thumb.

Until then I am comforted by thoughts, as I've probably told you before, like Mary Oliver's from her poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Hello, friends. Tell me what's happening.

Later. Love.

P. S. - I know the last few of these haven't been very "About Me," but I can't help it. I can only stay grounded for so long. I am, as I said yesterday, floating a little. I'll try to remain true to the spirit of the exercise, but I'm in no position to make guarantees, being not in control of things. Thanks for stopping by.

Thing About Me Number Twenty-Eight

28. I am floating just a little, a silly thing for a grown man to do. I have lost traction just a bit, and I do not always know where I am going. I do not always care, and that is dangerous. There is much at stake. In the end, I trust my self. So far I trust myself, but I am keeping my eyes open, just in case.

A week ago I went with my children, my son and two daughters, to camp on the Leon River in Central Texas. We arrived on Saturday morning to meet my father and my sister and her family who had been there since Friday afternoon. My father and my son erected the tents while I organized our food and supplies in the small, screened-in shelter. The shelter had electricity and was good for supplies, but wasn't good for sleeping because it was infested with little scorpions that came out at night. For the next twenty-four hours we cooked and ate and relaxed and fished. My daughters lavished attention on my baby nephew and fished a little. My youngest daughter caught the biggest fish of the weekend, a five pound freshwater drum. She threw it back. My son spent most of his time fishing with my father, his grandfather, a thing so mundane and yet, from my perspective, so surreal. My father disappeared when I was younger than any of my children are today, and was gone for decades. I've never fished with my father. I've never known him. Now, here he is. He's been off drugs for more than three years and he's teaching my son to fish with spincast reels and baitcast reels, night crawlers and shad. I cannot teach my son these things, because I have never learned them myself. It's surreal, and it leaves me floating a little. It sets me drifting downstream, my shoes digging little shallow trenches in the soft mud of the river bed, unable to find footing. "I wonder," I think to myself, "where this river goes." It doesn't seem bad, it seems good, so I go with it.

On Saturday I replaced our kitchen faucet, four hours cramped in the cabinet under the sink, four trips to the hardware store. This is not the kind of thing I commonly do, but it turned out okay. I'm not sure why I did it, but the urge came over me, so I went with it. Once my neck and back stop hurting, I'll be glad I did it.

I'm going to count this all as one thing about me. I'm not sure what you would call it.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Twenty-Seven (Twice)

27. Friday is always a slow blog day. If you judge your self-worth by your blog traffic - and you know you do - you probably feel like a big loser every Friday. And I know, I know, this is not a "thing about me." Seriously, though, do all of these things have to be about me? I mean, just because the name of the project is "100 Things About Me," does that necessitate that all one hundred things be about me? Does it? It does? Oh, okay. Fine. I'll do number twenty-seven again.

27. I have a friend named Florica, though everyone calls him Stefan. He's Romanian and he's a painter. He did the painting that's hanging over my mantle. It's a view of downtown Fort Worth from the old coffee shop where I met him (and lots of other people.) There is also a restaurant up the road, an Italian place called Nick's, in which Florica painted all the decor. There is some amazing artwork in there on the walls (literally painted onto the walls, not hanging on the walls,) and they've just closed down the place. I hate to think of someone else moving in there to open a steak house or a pancake joint or something and just taking a paint roller to the walls. I know that's what will happen. Some hired contractor will come in there and blast right over the artwork with Glidden semi-gloss. It's sad. I want to break in there and steal the walls. I really do.

Yes, this is sufficiently about me to count. I'm not doing it again.

Hello, friends. I'm sick of me. Tell me about you.

Later. Love.

Things About Me Numbers Twenty-One Through Twenty-Six

21. I strongly dislike allegory. I could write a clever allegory to express this point, but I won't because I hate allegory.

22. I am baffled by how dirty my glasses get. I never touch my glasses, and neither does anything else. So, how do they get so dirty? People who don't wear glasses must have really dirty eyes.

23. I am a bit claustrophobic. I cannot venture into tight spaces, like into the crawlspace under a pier-and-beam house, for example. I'm fine in elevators and small places, but I freak out in places where the walls actually touch my body on more than one side, even if there is little actual risk of becoming stuck. I have recurring nightmares about being with a tourist group exploring an old house or a ship or some other structure. As the crowd pushes behind me, we proceed up some stairs. The walls get closes and closer as we go, until I begin to feel stuck. I try to push back, but there are too many people pushing behind me. At that point my brain always wakes me up. If it didn't, I think I might totally lose it.

24. I loved the movie Pan's Labyrinth.

25. I hated the movie Signs. I thought the writing was just awful, awful, awful. I was wincing at how stupid and predictable the story was. <SPOILERS>An ex-baseball player. A habit of leaving glasses of water sitting around the house. A recurring auditory premonition of the words, "Swing away." An alien who is killed by water! It all fits together so perfectly.</SPOILERS> Strange. When the movie was over I found myself wondering if Shyamalan had ever actually met a real human before. I know some intelligent and literate people who liked the movie, so I often wonder if I missed something. I don't know. I really hated it.

26. I hate cooking in the microwave and I hate using power tools. I'm a bit of a Luddite, which is odd since I write software for a living. I've often said I would prefer, if it were possible, to whittle software from blocks of soft wood.

Hello, friends. Now it's your turn. Tell me something good.

Later. Love.

Things About Me Numbers Nineteen and Twenty

19. As was alluded to by toadman in an earlier comment, one of the things I've done in my life of which I am not proud is to attempt to win people into the fundamentalist, Pentecostal sect of the Christian religion by subjecting them to bad pantomime. I made two trips to Paraguay as a teen, a two-week trip with a my church youth group between my junior and senior years of high school, and six month trip alone immediately after high school graduation. During the second trip, I worked as a guide of sorts for groups from the United States. Some of those groups were like the small group I had been in the previous year, the group with which I had performed "clown ministry" (I am reminded of a friend who is fond of asking at random and inappropriate moments the question, "What the fuck is clown ministry?") Working as their guide, I got to be a spectator for the pantomime spectacle. I got to hear the Paraguayan men ask, "What the hell is wrong with you people? Do you think we are heathens? Why do you paint your faces like this? What are you trying to hide?" and so forth. It occurred to me then, "This is not a school play, where people are forced to pretend to enjoy bad theatre. This is the real life of these people. They don't want to see pantomime." It was eye-opening.

20. I am a good average chess player, but I am a terrible good chess player. Among average chess players, I am good. I suppose this makes me above average. Among good chess players, I am terrible. I suppose this makes me less than good. I have noticed, by observing and playing chess, that intelligence is not so much a factor as is experience. People who play a lot and pay attention while they play are good. It also takes a certain type of analytical thinking, but this does not always translate into useful intelligence for living. I will admit, however, that my opinion might be skewed by having played chess primarily with homeless guys.

Hello, friends. Ever done anything you would never do today? Please, share your shame.

Later. Love.

Things About Me Numbers Twelve Through Eighteen

12. I have a loathing of public restrooms that almost prevents me from using them altogether.

13. I love Saturday Night Live, even when it's not that good. It's become like a friend to me. I can overlook it's faults because I'm just glad it exists..

14. Some people can go days without washing their hair. If I don't wash my hair in the morning I look, by the afternoon, like I've been in a prisoner camp for six months. A dirty one.

15. I don't believe in magic, the paranormal nor the supernatural, though I would be willing to believe if I found compelling reason.

16. I don't believe that we will ever find any environment capable of sustaining quality human life outside of our own little atmosphere here on Earth. The rest of the universe is hostile. This is home. Let's take care of it.

17. I prefer soft features, cuteness and simple beauty to exotic sensuality. I believe, for example, that Jennifer Aniston is more beautiful than Angelina Jolie.

18. I am having serious doubts about making it all the way to 100.

Hello, friends. Tell me something about you.

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Eleven

11. I'm a good singer. Sometimes I'm surprisingly good (at least to me.) Growing up in a home with a hippie mom, attending a Pentecostal church with my grandparents and going to mostly African American elementary and middle schools, I was surrounded by and influenced by various musical styles. My real exposure to music, however, was at church.

At church I got to experience music and participate. Music at a Pentecostal church is not empty and distant, it's full and present. It interacts with all of your emotions, whipping you into a frenzy or pulling the fibres of your heart to the snapping point, and beyond. Is this healthy? Not always, but it's a great way to really learn about music and about what music means to the human soul.

Although surrounded by music, I was not trained in music as a child. I was never in band at school. I'm not sure why. I can't remember anyone ever asking me if I wanted to be in band or making the offer. I guess I just thought band was for other kids, not for me. It just passed me by. Before I got into singing, I got into rapping. (Go ahead and laugh. It's an appropriate response.) In high school I thought of myself as a rapper, but I would rather have been a singer, except that I had no idea that I could sing. I first became aware of myself as a singer when I was eighteen and in South America. Someone said, "Hey, you're a great singer," and I thought, "Really?" When I got back home, my church friend Drew, who was a musician (we had a lot of musical talent in our church,) heard me sing and was like, "Dude, you've got a great voice. When did that happen?" "In Paraguay," I said.

After that, singing was a big part of my life, but only through my church experience. In college I was in Christian youth bands. Then I was a music minister for a couple of churches in my twenties. I sang with groups and did solo performances and had a lot of fun. Now that I'm not a minister, and in fact am hardly involved in religion at all, I don't really have a context for musical expression. We attend a Methodist church semi-regularly, but I have no interest in the - to be brutally honest - soulless music they perform. I feel a little hypocritical singing church songs these days anyway, since I really don't believe what I'm singing. I'd like to find an outlet for singing outside of the church, but society doesn't make that very easy. I'm not young and cool and attractive. I'm just a portly, aging dude who likes to sing. So, I sing in the shower. I sing in the car. I even sing in the office a little. That's probably going to be the extent of my illustrious singing career.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Ten

10. Let's see. Something about me. Hmmm... It should be true, I suppose. Let's see. Something about me. The thing is... wait... It's just... It's...

They stock the work kitchen with oatmeal raisin cookies. Bastards. Can't they see my pants are tight? Sometimes, when I sit down, I feel as though I will burst. Moderation is a virtue. Damnable virtue. A cup of coffee, black, and writing at lunch. A small sandwich. A leaf of lettuce. A small bag of air and butterfly wings. I try to find satisfaction in a sense of wellness and not in indulgence, but it only works sometimes. Sometimes there are cookie wrappers in my waste basket. Oatmeal raisin. Bastards.

If I could make the world
  I'd have the best of intentions
 Only the best of intentions
     But how could I apologize for all the times
   I didn't think it through fully enough
And my distraction caused death or disease or famine
  Suffering and want
    Want for bread
      Want for water
 Want for love
  Want for meaning
      Want to be God?
     No thanks.
     No need.
     No time.
     No way.

Are there one hundred interesting things about me? I'm not sure. I can juggle a little.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Nine

9. I love to pull weeds, though I never do so these days. For me, there is something therapeutic about sitting in the grass, bending to look closely at all the roots and stems, putting my fingers into the dirt and pulling the weeds. I move very slowly, taking the time to find every weed, however small, and pull it up with all of its roots. As I work, my mind is free to think. Not only does the simple task of weeding not distract my mind, it actually seems to keep my senses occupied so that I'm not harassed by every random signal that comes my way. As I sit with the creepies and the crawlies, the little spiders and gnats and bugs and ants and moths and worms that crawl under and over and around me, I can just be an animal, doing what I have to do to survive.

Weeding for me is not a task, it's recreation. I never do it because there just isn't time to relax. There's too much to do all the time. For the last couple of years, my sensitive skin has kept me away from gardening. We pay someone to take care of the yard. I haven't seen Chuck, the Gnome that lives in my yard, in months. It's okay, though. He doesn't seem to notice the passage of time so much. Whenever I see him, we have the same easy rapport that we've always had. Sometime over the summer, on a cool morning, I'm going to spend a couple of hours in the yard. I think that would be good for me.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Eight

8. I have a strong and constantly reinforced conviction that public discourse has taken a turn for the worse in recent decades. It has been the practice of extremists and fundamentalists on all sides of all spectra for all time to, once they have established the narrow criteria for correctness and incorrectness, despair entirely of and abandon wholeheartedly anyone who falls outside the small bounds of the walls of righteousness they have erected. Women and men of more considerate and moderate natures have, in the past, understood the value of and need for cooperation and have realized intuitively that cooperation requires an embracing of those qualities in our opponents that we also share. We must find common ground. We must disagree without hatred. We must always remain open to the other point of view. We must be civil.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, expressed this sentiment beautifully and masterfully, and I believe his behavior in this should be judged as exemplary for us. Lest we are tempted to believe Lincoln's opponents were less dastardly and wicked than our own monsters, remember that he is addressing politicians and leaders who believed in and were willing to fight for slavery. For slavery. With that in mind, read his words.

I am loth [sic] to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Being a person typically bent toward liberal ideals, I am especially disappointed when I see rudeness, division and a general lack of civility become commonplace among those who claim to be liberal. We should not adopt the practices of extremists and fundamentalists. We should raise the bar, not lower it.

This is my strong and constantly reinforced conviction.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Thing About Me Number Seven

7. When I was a kid I lived in my imagination. Although I had friends at school and friends at church, I spent most of my time alone, daydreaming. When I was four and lived on the ranch in Sloughhouse, California, my mom tells me that I loved the television show Kung Fu with David Carradine. Under the dual influences of the show and my imagination I would sit in the yard for hours in the lotus position imagining that I could levitate. Also I would run from one side of the yard to the other, jumping and flailing in what I imagined to be perfectly executed karate kicks. "Heeeeyaa!" I would scream. When I got older I would wander around town, walking or riding my bike, with no particular place to go. I'd be gone for hours, all day, meandering around and daydreaming. There was one particular field that I visited a lot when I skipped school in the eighth grade. The name of the field was "Gabad el tich abati," which means "haven of many stones" in the language I invented while sitting there day after day. That's the kind of kid I was. I was a loner and a dreamer.

I still am that kind of kid.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

P. S. - Heather Anne was kind enough, like Bella before her, to award caveat emptor one of her five "Thinking Blog Awards." In the near future, when I get back to the morning ritual which I have eschewed for the next two weeks in order to help my wife get through her grueling, two-week, mini-semester of Business Law II, I'll post a proper response and dispatch the meme before the meme-killing curse befalls me. Thanks, Heather Anne. It's fun to be noticed. Thanks to all of you for stopping by.

Thing About Me Number Six

6. I like animals, I just don't like living with them. I have been known to stop and rescue turtles crossing the street. Once I ruined the kids' Styrofoam kick board by trying to redirect - against his will - an alligator snapping turtle from a busy street to a nearby creek. He took a good chunk out of the kick board. Evil-looking though he was, I know that, in his tiny mind, he was just defending himself against a giant, crazy animal that was attacking him with a kick board. I also have an odd sympathy for animals, a fact that is often a bummer for my kids. I like toads and frogs, for example, but I don't think you should mess with them. Just leave them alone and enjoy watching them. Don't pick them up. Can you imagine how terrifying that must be for them? Certainly do not take them home. They already have a home somewhere, with a froggie wife and some little froggie children and numerous froggie responsibilities. What will become of the family if you just snatch up the frog and force it to live in a large glass box for a couple of weeks until it dies because you have no idea how to care for a kidnapped frog? It's not a toy, it's a living thing. Leave it alone. That's what I say.

Living with animals, however, is not, in my opinion, fun. They're gross. They stink. They have no idea what things cost. They have no concept of plumbing nor of housekeeping. They just want to exercise their natural functions all over your habitat. They're fun to cuddle with, but that's about it. Beyond that, they're a pain in the neck.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

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.

Juxtaposer

Imagine the beast, strong and perilous. No gentle giant this man, a notorious killer. Anger is his demeanor. Violence is his expression. He is mortal danger, make no mistake. It is best to leave him alone. No, that is not enough. It is best to run. Run away. His malevolence is active.

Now imagine the innocent, a tiny child, good natured and naive, unsuspecting and curious. He is too far away to stop; he cannot hear your warning. You watch in horror as, smiling, he engages the beast. The beast has not heard his approach; he is startled, caught unaware, and springs, from habit, to a fighting stance. Seeing the innocent smile, his twisted snarl of surprise settles into a blank, unblinking stare. The threat is palpable, but the innocent is unaware.

It is the power of juxtaposition, of contrast, that gives strong pathos to the kindness of a beast. If the beast abides the innocent, allows him to stay unharmed, allows him to leave unharmed, this elicits a visceral emotional reaction unattainable for normal human interactions. This perception of strong kindness is not necessarily accurate. A mother caring for a child every day is more valuable than a beast allowing an innocent to live, but it is common. It is expected.

Value cannot be measured by emotional response. Artistic beauty is not the measure of value. We play games with words, create strong tension to illustrate strong notions. The most valuable things, however, are often unstoried, unsaid, unwritten.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

P.S. - Hey! Guess who started a blog? My lovely wife, Susan, can now be found at soozeecue. (There's a link to her at the top right, under "Our Links.") Go by and see her. She's much more personable than I am. Thanks for stopping by.