On Handwriting (or: Mrs. Crazy Old Bird and The Mutant Claw)

I like to write.  Always have.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say, I have always liked to create with words.  When I was in third grade, I wrote a series of "horror" stories in an old notebook I found around the house and received accolades from my parents, grandparents and teachers for my creative efforts.  They were fairly tame accounts, as I recall.  One was about a large Loch Ness-type sea monster who lived in a local lake and frightened people out of swimming, fishing, or boating there.  No blood, no death.  Nothing like that at all.  Very Scooby-Doo-ish actually, which should be no surprise as I was addicted to that show at the time.  While far from contenders for the Pulitzer for short story writing, the stories were fun to write, and people seemed to like them.  I was hooked.

The trouble was, while I liked the creative aspect of writing, I hated the physical act of doing it.  For that matter, I still do.  If I can't type it, I don't want to do it.

You see, I developed this mutant way of holding a pen or pencil that no amount of correction by the nuns and other teachers at my parochial school could remedy.  (Corporal punishment was de facto banned there by the seventies.)  So, I essentially hold my writing utensils backwards, not unlike how some left-handers do, even though I am a righty.  Also, I hold it very tightly.  While I can hold my pen or pencil in the traditional way, my default is the "mutant claw" hold.  It's true to this day.  My handwriting is legible, but no thing of beauty, for sure.

THE MUTANT CLAW GRIP

My fourth grade teacher, a non-nun in her seventies whose picture is in the dictionary beside the definition of "old school", waged constant war with me about my handwriting grip.  We'll call her "Mrs. Crazy Old Bird" for now.  She was constantly coming to my desk and rearranging my fingers around the writing utensil, using a tone usually reserved for addressing mentally-challenged baboons.  Needless to say, I found this rather humiliating, especially since it was always done in full view of all my friends in class.  (This was just one of many conflicts I had with this lady, which could fill an entire book.  Maybe they will someday.  It was an epic battle of wills between she and I all year long, on a number of levels.)

Another of Mrs. Crazy Old Bird's favorite tricks was to literally sneak up behind me and pull the pen or pencil out of my hand while I was using it.  She maintained that if she couldn't grab it out of my hand, then I was holding to too tightly.  I became more than a little high-strung in her class, never knowing when this loon was going to swoop in and steal my pencil as I was about to make a great point in an essay about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff or something equally mesmerizing.  Back then, there was no room in the curriculum for writing anything even remotely of the student's own choosing.  Sometimes she would cause me to jump, she became so stealthy at it.  I think I developed a nervous twitch for a while.

I often would shake cramps out of my hand or stop to rest in the middle of an assignment because it hurt me so badly.  Mrs. Crazy Old Bird would smirk at me from behind her desk, as if to say "It's your own stupid fault, kid.  Just do as I say, and no more pain."  I loathed her at the time.

Much of school did not challenge me, and I often resorted to wisecracks and other distractions to keep myself sane throughout my school career.  It really reached a peak that year in fourth grade.  Heaven knows, Mrs. Crazy Old Bird had plenty of other things to complain about to my parents, but that grip always topped the list at every conference.  It was like her white whale.  Given the list of behaviors Mrs. Crazy Old Bird presented to them each time, my parents were mystified that it was my handwriting that vexed her most.  It was legible, if not letter-perfect, and I had taken to cursive that year as well as any other student.  Her tirades about how I held my writing utensils actually worked in my favor with my parents, since it made her seem a little kooky.  They must have thought that the other things on her laundry list about me were out of proportion as well.  For my part, I kept my grades top-notch in spite of it all though (except for penmanship, of course), and knew where to draw the line between being a wiseguy and being rude in the classroom, so my parents didn't get too worried about it all.

I believe that it was in fourth grade that my love of creative writing went into dormancy.  It didn't die, thankfully.  I was fortunate enough to have the same language arts teacher for the next four years.  She was a gifted young nun named Sister Mona whose instructional methods, I know now, were ahead of their time.  While she was not able to include much creative writing in the curriculum due to the restrictions placed on her, she was pretty understanding about my mutant claw pencil grip.  She also saw flashes of talent in the writing that I did do for her over those four years, and was gently encouraging.  I can't say that she caused me to take off as a writer, but she managed to keep the ember glowing inside of me.

In time, word processors became more prevalent, I learned to type quite well, and my writing ember sparked into a fire again.  I don't do it nearly as often as I'd like, but it's always there for me as an escape and a creative outlet.  This blog is one example of it.

POSTSCRIPT: The story of me and Mrs. Crazy Old Bird had kind of an interesting ending.  It turns out that my fourth grade year was her last before she retired.  She was genuinely elderly at the time, so I do not think it was me who pushed her over the edge to retiring.  Her husband died shortly after I started fifth grade, and she moved into a small apartment by herself within walking distance from our school.  One of the nuns would visit her at least once a week, and liked to bring along some of Mrs. Crazy Old Bird's former students to visit as well.  I was asked to go on several occasions.

It was during one of these visits that  Mrs. Crazy Old Bird, whose real name was Mrs. Upton, told me how much potential she saw in me, how strongly she felt about my abilities, and how she was hard on me because she genuinely wanted to see me succeed in the future.  I hadn't seen it that way before, but for some reason it made perfect sense to me now.  I could tell she meant what she was saying.  The ice melted between us, and we became friends.  I went along on the visits to see her a number of times in the first year or two after fourth grade, and saw her in an entirely new light.  She liked soap operas and her snaggle-toothed old cat, and loved being a teacher.  Her former students, even me, meant the world to her.  The frequency declined over the next couple of years, and she died shortly after I started high school.  To this day, whenever I am at the local cemetery, I stop by her grave and say a quick prayer.  We misunderstood each other, but she was looking out for what she saw as my best interests, and for that I am grateful.

Everybody Talks About The Weather...

As I type this, Hurricane Irene is churning its way in my general directions.  I find it difficult to get too intimidated by an entity that shares a name with my grandmother's sister.  The woman used to knit caps for her cats, for pete's sake.  Of course, the fact that I am 100 miles inland and nowhere near a major body of water also increases my hubris.

The media have been hyping this storm for nearly a week now, and I have to say, it's hard for me to take them seriously about it.  I do believe in my heart of hearts that they do genuinely want their viewers to be safe, but as a former media guy myself, I know the major part ratings play in everything they do.  With so many possible choices for information these days, media outlets are constantly trying to draw attention to themselves by whatever means possible.

I worked in radio news in the late 80s and early 90s.  Broadcast radio in those pre-internet days was still a pretty active player in the media game.  Among my responsibilities was to assemble stories from the various wire sources to which we subscribed into a five minute newscast.  There was no shortage of material from which to choose, but I learned early on that there was an unwritten rule to putting it all together: "There ought to be blood at least once in every newscast, and death if you can get it."  The reasoning behind it was that these stories grabbed the attention of listeners more and therefore made them more likely to become repeat listeners.

As a result, a car accident on the other side of the state with no local connection at all was more likely to make the newscast than an actual local story with a less "sexy" angle.  This rule wasn't hard and fast, mind you.  Sometimes there was no blood or death to be had, and once in a while there were enough impossible to ignore local stories to keep the gore at bay.  At the time, viewing it as a young adult on the inside and ground-floor of the business, it all seemed  perfectly appropriate.

Now fast-forward 20+ years.  Competition among media outlets has increased exponentially.  There are more elbows than ever being thrown in an effort to attract the attention of viewers.  And these media outlets are willing to stoop lower and lower to find things that will jack up ratings.

The other day, I had one of the cable news channels on, and this big voice came on stating in the most serious tone, "This is (Insert Name Here) Breaking News!".  This was of course accompanied by tense music and expensive-looking graphics.  Well, it got my attention.  I remember Reagan getting shot, the space shuttles going down, 9/11, and the rest of it, so I figured it was some pretty big deal.  The "breaking news"?  President Obama was about to give a speech on the economy.  Isn't it his JOB to give speeches and whatnot?  Doesn't he do it all the time?  How is THAT breaking news?  Nonetheless, it did get my attention.  And I was pissed off that it did.

So when the media outlets are urging us to take precautions because a storm is coming, I just can't help but wonder if they are crying "Wolf!"  When they present everything as being so urgent in order to grab attention, how can you tell when something really IS urgent?  I don't want to be like that character in every disaster movie who ignores the warnings he is given and then is washed out to sea in his split-level ranch.  At the same time, I don't want to be one who panics every time attention-hungry media types want to stir things up whether for real reasons or for ratings.

It does work though.  I have to admit, I've watched more of The Weather Channel this past week than in all the rest of the year put together.

There is another side to this as well.  When some Kardashian's wedding, for example, gets space in a newscast, that means something else, something less ratings-friendly but likely more important to everyday people, like people starving to death in east Africa, gets kicked to the curb.  Media bias, so frequently hollered about these days, is not just in the stories they choose to emphasize, but even more so in the ones they do not.

My point in all this, and I do have one, is that we all need to be savvy media consumers, now more than ever.  And, we need to be sure that our children are taught to be as well. It is vital that they can distinguish between real news, "fluff", parody, and infomercials, all of which blur together at times.

I'd type more, but my neighbor's Volvo just landed on my back deck, so I had better go to Costco and stock up on canned goods and candles in case the powe

Weenie War

I am a picky eater.  Very picky.  There are lots of foods I will not even try, and never have.  Most of them are meats or meat products.  Ham, deli meats, most sausages...they are just a few items on my no-no list.  But one food stands far above the rest.  It is my great adversary.  The Professor Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes.  The Robert E. Lee to my U.S. Grant.  The Wile E. Coyote to my Roadrunner. That great enemy of mine is: the hot dog.

People often do not believe me when I say that I have never eaten a hot dog in my life, but it is true. Not even once has a frankfurter touched my lips.  I haven't even been tempted to try one.  I don't know if it is the eerie similarity in shape and size to a certain part of the male anatomy, or the rumors that they are made of sheep intestines and stuffed with eyeballs, hooves, and various other rejected parts from the meat packing plant.  I would rather go hungry than eat a hot dog, and on occasion actually have.

My loathing of hot dogs somehow became a well-known quirk of mine when I was a kid.  When hot dogs were served, as they often are to groups of kids, I would turn up my nose.  Forget about trying one; I would not even touch one.  A child who would not eat a hot dog was thought an oddity by many adults, and for some  reason it became a notable characteristic of mine.  "The kid who won't eat hot dogs" they called me.  I didn't promote it, but apparently it was viewed as being so odd, and the strength of my resistance to even try one was so great, that people noticed.  The mothers of my friends were flabbergasted when they threw a birthday party and they had this one little creep who just would not eat what all the other guests were so happily scarfing down.  A friend's father once offered me $10 (a princely sum to a little kid), just to take one bite of a hot dog.  No way.  It didn't take long for word to get around that, if hot dogs were on the menu at a party to which I was invited, it was a good idea to have a PBJ on hand as a backup.

I remember one time in parochial school when I was about 7, I ordered school lunch instead of bringing my own as I usually did.  The menu said pizza for that day, and I was all about that.  Now our school did not have a kitchen or cafeteria.  The lunches were prepared by cooks at the public schools, placed in Styrofoam trays, and were delivered to us.  It was some kind of contract deal, I guess.

Anyhow, this particular day, I was especially hungry and looking forward to some pizza, which the school lunch people made especially well.  I went down the hall with my class and got my white tray, full of anticipation.  Walking back to my seat in the classroom where we always ate lunch, I noticed my friend Frenchie out of the corner of my eye at his desk.  On his Styrofoam tray was sitting a rather soggy hot dog and about a half dozen even soggier french fries, along with some shredded carrot & raisin mixture.  My heart sank.  I slid into my seat and opened the tray with dread.  Sure enough: hot dog.  The worst-case scenario had occurred.  Not only was it not pizza, it was something that I absolutely despised. My disappointment knew no bounds.

Now going without lunch when I was hungry was bad enough, but bear in mind, this was parochial school.  Wasting food while there were poor children starving in Africa was just not acceptable. The nuns required that we eat at least half of our lunches or else.  For them, only requiring that we eat half was considered lenient. And no, trading was not allowed.  They kept their eyes peeled for finicky kids like me who might try to break these rules.

There was no way I was going to even take one bite of this thing.  I was willing to go to the principal's office.  I was willing to serve detention.  I was willing to have my parents called.  Heck, they could have dragged me before the pope.  Eating this thing was just not going to happen.  Of course, if there was a way to avoid all of this drama, I was going to do it.

It required stealth.  Just ditching the whole weenie at once would arouse suspicion with Sister Ursula, who surveyed us with watchful eyes.  As much as it pained me to do so, I held my breath, thought of clear blue skies over a flowery meadow, and pulled a bite-sized portion of hot dog off when Sister Ursula was not looking, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it down the inkwell of my desk.  (The days of using ink in schools had long since passed, but we still had the old desks with the inkwell.)  I tried to time my tear-offs with the bites Frenchie was taking so as to add to the believability factor for the formidable nun watching over us.  The trouble was, I hated hot dogs so much that even handling them made me a bit queasy.

Maybe it was warm in the room that day.  Maybe I had a mild stomach bug of some sort.  Or maybe it was hot dog cooties.  Whatever it was, by the time I had clandestinely dispatched of the entire hot dog down the inkwell and into my desk, I was feeling pretty green around the gills.  Fortunately, my desk was within reach of the classroom wastebasket, because I felt that uncomfortable surge from down in my gut, and whatever was down there came back up.

Needless to say, this ruined lunch for many of my classmates that day.  For me, however, it meant a) I got to go home for the afternoon, even though I felt fine after vomiting, and b) I didn't have to eat that damn hot dog.  I did have to clean the hidden pieces out of my desk the next morning, but I was ready for it and did so quickly before class started, holding my breath and keeping my eyes closed.  No throwing up involved.  So, final score: Me = 1, Weenies = 0.

Some of the adults who knew me back then, as well as some of the kids who sat beside me wolfing down weenies all those years ago, are amused to no end to find out that at age 41, I still will not eat a hot dog. I don't get nauseous when I touch them now, but I still will not try them.  I will not eat them in a box.  I will not eat them with a fox.  I will not...well, you get the gist.  That stubborn kid who dug his heels in so deeply against eating hot dogs way back then is still digging in his heels many years later.  Better have a PBJ on hand if you are inviting me over for lunch.

Foot Patrol

When I was very young, my parents got brand new wall-to-wall carpeting in our house.  Immediately, a rule was put into place: no shoes in the house.  You put them on in the entryway when you left the house, and took them off there when you came in.  Pretty simple.

However, coming and going from the house is something one does a whole lot.  So, as a lifelong creature of habit, it became an ingrained thing for me.  Very ingrained.   Whenever I went into anyone’s house, I just assumed that shoes had to come off, even if I was not asked.  Thank goodness my parents were not nudists, or I would have developed habits that would have prevented my ever being invited anywhere.

To this very day, I cannot relax in my home or anyone else’s while wearing shoes.  It’s just one of my weird quirks. Around my house, I am either barefoot or in socks, depending on the time of year.  If I am a guest at your house and my shoes are still on, rest assured that I am not fully comfortable yet.  Either that or I am too drunk to undo my laces, but that would be rare. 

In a cruel twist of fate, my feet have developed a tendency toward getting cold easily as I have reached middle age.  Living in the frozen wasteland that I call home, my tootsies are chilly to some degree from September until May.  No biggie, though.  That’s why God invented socks, after all.

This leads me to the point of this tract.  Yes, I do actually have one.  Without fail, I can find something wet or horrible to step in whenever I am wandering around the house in socks.  A few drops on the bathroom floor near the sink?  Stepped directly in it.  Some snow tracked in from outside?  Right here!  Small spill of coffee near the kitchen counter?  Planted my foot right in it.  Cat horked up a hairball?  Found it!  It’s uncanny.

I maintain that if you dropped me into the center of the Sahara Desert from a helicopter in my stocking feet at the height of summer, I’d be fine, because I would inevitably find something wet with my feet within a few steps.

What’s most amazing is that there really aren’t that many things on the floor in my house in which to actually step.  I keep a pretty tidy place overall.  If there is a mess, I clean it up immediately.  Which makes it all the more irritating when one of the cats eats their dinner too quickly and yacks up a disgusting but innocuous little puddle of Friskies turkey-flavor that blends in perfectly with the color of the carpeting.  The ratio of yack-occupied floor to otherwise clean and traversable floor is pretty steep, and yet, I always, always, always seem to step in the nastiness before I see it.

I suppose there must be a silver lining in this somewhere.  Some kind of upside.  Maybe I could rent myself out to drought-stricken lands to find water with my stocking feet.  Make a few bucks.  I’ll have to develop a business plan around that.  Meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me, I have a load of socks in the washer that need to be moved to the dryer.

Fashion

Wait, wait!  Don’t stop reading this!

If you are anything like me (and God help you if you are), then your eyes glaze over when the topic of fashion comes up.  For me, it conjures up images of impossibly good-looking people with incredibly stern looks on their faces sauntering up and down a runway while wearing an outfit made of Froot Loops and Turtle Wax, or some such thing.  This is NOT about anything like that.

It’s about my own personal fashion, or lack thereof.

You see, I am not a real risk-taker with what I wear.  Pretty much, I am a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy.  In warm weather I might be a cargo shorts and t-shirt kind of guy, and in cold weather a jeans and sweatshirt kind of guy, but you get the picture.  It worked for me when I was 8 years old, and it works for me now at 41.

There are four reasons why I cling to this basic look: 

First, I like the way jeans and t-shirts look and feel.  They are comfortable, versatile, and appropriate almost any everyday activity, except maybe swimming the English Channel or performing brain surgery.  I have separate outfits for those.

Next, jeans and t-shirts are reasonably inexpensive.  I can be pretty rough on clothing and go through more than my fair share.  Hole in my $7 t-shirt?  No big loss.  Hole in my Ralph Lauren polo shirt?  I’m out $50.  Expensive clothing might be fine if I was rich, or a store mannequin, but for who I am, it’s not.

Third, jeans and t-shirts are not age-specific.  At 41, I am no kid anymore, but I don’t really feel like an old fuddy-duddy either.  Much of the clothing marketed for men these days assumes that you are either 19 or 91.  I don’t know exactly HOW a 41 year old guy is supposed to dress in today’s world, but I am fairly certain that jeans that hang to my knees or plaid “slacks” appropriate for shuffleboard are not going to cut it.

Lastly, jeans and t-shirts are easy to shop for.  Almost any store that sells clothing sells these items, and usually stocks a wide variety.  Shopping is second only to sharpening the blades of a moving lawnmower on my list of least favorite things to do.

I’ve run into trouble recently though.  It seems that t-shirt makers are changing the “cut” of t-shirts.  The short sleeves now seem to be shorter and are made to hug the biceps tightly.  I blame the meatheads on “Jersey Shore” for popularizing this trend of showing off one’s “guns”, a.k.a. upper arm muscles.  The trouble is, when looking at a t-shirt in a store, it is hard to tell if it has this musclehugger cut or not.  Yes, I could take it into the dressing room and try it on, but that would require asking for help from a sales person, and real guys don’t do that any more than they will stop to ask for directions or slather sunscreen on another guy.

So, I have a whole drawer full of these musclehugger t-shirts that I refuse to wear.  As to why I don’t just take them back to the store, see the preceding paragraph.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Why don’t you just wear them?”  The answer is simple.  I just don’t want to.  I hate they way they feel.  I hate the way they look.  I have no choice in what I have to wear at work, since medical scrubs are the standard for my line of work.  I do have a choice for what I wear in my own time, and I’m going wear things that look and feel good to me. 

It’s not that my “guns” are low caliber, mind you.  I don’t work out or anything, but the nature of my lifestyle is such that my arms are reasonably strong.  I just seems silly to me for a middle-aged guy in so-so shape to be walking around like he’s showing off something that, quite frankly, is not really show-offworthy.

I’ve found that there are still a few t-shirt makers who use the traditional cut on t-shirts, but there are strings attached.  For the ones I like, it seems their products are apparently made by blind lemurs with substandard IQs, since they shrink and stretch beyond practical wearability after just one laundering.  This is not helpful, though they make terrific rags for washing my chariot.  The others are t-shirts with pithy slogans such as “Born to Fish, Forced to Work” or images of monster trucks crushing Volvos.  That’s not a look I can pull off either.

So, if you see me on the street wearing a t-shirt stained in grease or full of holes, you don’t need to offer me a few bucks to get by.  I’m not broke or homeless.  I just can’t find a decent t-shirt anymore.

Heartbeat City Here We Come

I belong to an online music subscription service.  It’s the 21^st century successor to those record clubs that used to advertise in magazines back in the 70s and 80s.  Remember, “Choose 11 albums for just one penny”?  As a subscriber to this current service, I get outrageous discounts on MP3 downloads each month.  It’s a pretty sweet deal, especially for a big music fan like me.

Usually, I have no problem using up my subscription amount, which I have to do or risk losing it at month’s end.  Sometimes, though, there just isn’t anything major on my “must have” list.  This was one of those months.  So, I did what I typically do in such cases, and went back into the site’s archives, looking for albums I used to own on vinyl or cassette and never upgraded when CDs came along in the late 80s.

This time, I decided to download Heartbeat City by the Boston new wave/rock band The Cars.  Heartbeat City was THE album of the summer in 1984 for me and my pals.  There were pictures of a souped-up sports car and a pretty girl in tight clothing on the cover.  Lead singer Ric Ocasek always wore sunglasses, and the rumor among my friends was that it was to hide his eyes because he was high all the time (not true).  Bass player and singer Benjamin Orr wore skin-tight leather pants on the jacket insert, leading us to believe that he must be gay (also not true).  But that combination of perceived naughtiness and incredibly catchy and well-crafted tunes made Heartbeat City the ideal soundtrack for the summer between junior high and high school.  I bought it on vinyl the first day of summer vacation that year.  I immediately made a cassette copy, and it followed us on our Walkmans wherever we went all summer long.   We used the song titles and lyrical references as catch phrases all the time.

As I listened to it from start to finish for the first time in nearly 25 years, all kinds of things flooded back from that landmark summer of 1984.

The summer of 1984 was a transition period for me if there ever was one.  It was the summer between going to the parochial grade school which I had attended for 8 years, and attending public high school, which I would for the next four.  It was the last summer before I was old enough to drive.  It was the last summer before I was old enough to get a part-time job.  It was the first summer I had a “serious” girlfriend (or as serious as it could be at age 14).  Ultimately, it was the summer when I started stepping away from being a kid and toward becoming an adult.

I could write a whole series of articles about that summer, and maybe I just will, but for now, suffice it to say that The Cars’ Heartbeat City on my iPod takes me back to a time when bicycles were my primary mode of transportation, when friends meant everything, when kissing a girl was the height of risk-taking, and when having $5 in your pocket made you feel like a rich man.  I was old enough to go mostly where I wanted and make many of my own decisions.  That summer, Americans not much older than I was were dominating the Olympics in Los Angeles, Ronald Reagan was on TV making us feel good about America and ourselves as a means of getting re-elected, and it seemed like every day was sunny and hot but not uncomfortable.  Looking back, it was one of the high points in my life, though I didn’t realize it at the time.  It truly seemed there were limitless possibilities and nothing standing between you and them. 

Not long after that summer of 1984, the realities of getting older began to set in.  The girl I dated that summer broke up with me not long after high school started in the fall.  The complexities of a larger social scene in high school put walls between me and some old friends, while bringing new ones into my life.  I started to see things in people I had not seen before, both good and bad.  They probably started seeing the same in me.  With high school came the drive to excel in order to “get into a good college”.  There was the pressure to fit in, to look a certain way and do certain things.  I started working not one, but two part-time jobs.  I got my driver’s license and all the freedom and responsibility that came with it.

The last song on Heartbeat City is the title track.  It is a decidedly tentative-sounding song, and a seemingly odd choice to round out a collection of mostly upbeat tunes.  It is essentially about a girl who left town for an extended period and finally has returned.  The lyrics indicate that the singer didn’t see the girl’s absence coming, and is unsure of what to make of her return.  Trust seems to be lacking now, though he is still glad to see her.

Heartbeat City was my best friend Brian’s favorite song on the album.  His mother had just died of cancer that spring after a long battle.  She suffered for a long time, and was suffering no longer, so there was surely relief in that.  Still, he missed her a lot, though he didn’t talk about it much then.  The ambivalence of emotion in the song must have struck a chord with him at some level that didn’t hit me until much later.

When I listen to Heartbeat City now, it almost seems as if there was a message to the 14-year-old me back in that summer of 1984.   It was a message I didn’t see at the time and wish I had: “Enjoy what you have now, because change is inevitable and it is complicated.”

Indeed.  Summers are short.  Life is short.  Enjoy it.

The Return to Blogger

I am back to Blogger after an absence of almost seven years.  Frankly, I didn't have that much to say.  My old blog was basically a mess of self-indulgent garbage, interspersed with the occasional enlightened tract (usually the result of too much drinking).  So, not much has changed.

What HAS changed is the pervasiveness of blogging.  It seems like there is a blog for everyone and everything these days.  What has also changed is the ease of accessing other blogs.  On Blogger, for example, you can just click on the "Next Blog" link at the top and it takes you to (guess what?) the next blog.  I tried this link when I first got started on here again, and it took me to a reasonably insightful blog by a young woman working in mid-town Manhattan. Nice neighbor, I thought.  She probably has intelligent and thoughtful readers who may click over and view mine.  A few days later, I clicked on the "Next Blog" link to visit my neighbor blog, and found myself at a very dark and disturbing German shrine to 80s death metal.  I never knew you could do THAT with weinerschnitzel!  Once I scrubbed my eyes out with Ajax, I came to the realization that the "Next Blog" button takes you to a RANDOM blog, and not the same one each time.  There goes the neighborhood.

I thought it might be fun to click the "Next Blog" button a few times and jot down a few notes about what I find.  I've opened a new tab in my trusty Chrome browser, so off we go to explore the neighborhood as it is currently configured.

#1-Killer Bee 89.3.  Terrific.  A radio station playing "today's best music" (likely a very short playlist).  I worked in radio for eleven years starting when I was 15, and have continued to keep tabs on it ever since, so I know a thing or two about this.  Any station that far down the FM dial is either A) a public radio station, B) a public access station, C) a college station, or D) a pirate out of some guy's basement apartment.  My guess here is D).  It's not a blog so much as a site for a station that apparently no one listens to.  The construct of the site is not terrible, I have to admit.  The streaming feature indicates right now that there are two listeners.  In other words, the dj and me.  Given the hideous Katy Perry song cracking across my speakers right now, that number will very soon be down by one.  Let's move on, shall we?

#2-Welcome to Tabbed Browsing (Subtitled: This is a snail who wish to be somebody).  Ooooooookay.  Evidently, a very sad, homesick, gay fellow's blog.  I have absolutely nothing against the sad, the homesick, or the gay, or even the sad, homesick and gay. I do have something against melodramatic whining. I am trying to envision a circumstance that would make me want to visit regularly to read things such as the following, in the most recent post: "Been to here and there for a month plus now. Saw a lot and exposed to a kind of life that I never knew I could fit in few years back. But to tell the truth, my life is not bad. At least I am looking for every tomorrow to come. There might not be sunshine tomorrow but to know there are people around you to walk through it with you is enough. More than enough I shall say. And here I declare, 5 countries, one month, camera, start....now."  

Yeah. I am not making this up. I wish I was. Also, the blogger describes himself in his profile as "sporty". Unless you are a Mazda...who DOES that?

I think we are done here. One more visit.

#3-Alias Pail. An electronica musician. This is like shooting fish in a barrel for someone trying to write humorously. Let me just do a little direct copy and paste of this charming little blog, and it will do all the work for me.

"back from the blogworld deadlands. consulting with utanapishtim and hunting for the boxthorn, i came up empty handed. but serious: blog time has shrunk, the master distraction, the important piece of procrastination in a stacked pancake of delicious duties, this once weekly blog has become a petrified tree."

There's also a link to "favorite anime of the moment".  Oh, and here's the dude who writes it:

I wore that same outfit to church last Christmas!

I don't want to come across as nasty, close-minded, or intolerant, though, let's face it, we all have shades of that in our personalities, even if it is not politically-correct to let any of it to the surface in this day and age.  I am a huge free-speech advocate, and am proud to live in a place where people are able to publish whatever freaky stuff they want.  As a matter of fact, I'd encourage you to visit these neighbor blogs of mine, which is why I included links to them.  However, as someone with a background in literacy education, I'd offer this advice to anyone thinking of writing for their own blog.  CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE!  If you didn't care what other people think, you wouldn't be putting your blog on the Internet.

Oh, and one more thing...ditch the sound effects that play when someone logs on to your page.  I hate that.