The Versatile Blogger Award: Wanton Turtles Frolic

The Versatile Blogger Award

or

Wanton Turtles Frolic

I am not a versatile blogger.  There, that is the first thing you need to know about me, so I am accepting this award on false pretenses.  I am a guy who is more familiar with the past tense, or when studying Latin, the pluperfect tense, than I am with pretense.  I will just say I have been ping-ponging my way around the country for a few weeks now, and I have seen what  a “versatile” blog resembles, and I/mine ain’t it.  

The second thing you need to know about me is that I completed a series of seven visits to a therapist, located a half hour from my rural home, a year ago September.  Each visit was fifty minutes, and the psychologist rode out of town on her white horse, the day after my seventh and final visit, leaving me all of the reading that she had xeroxed for me, and that I had been examining.   Not until the following March was I prepared to complete the assimilation process, by writing a moderately short narrative of my therapeutic journey.  By chronicling my experience, I opened a door back to when I was ten years old, and actually determined what it was that caused me to begin having panic attacks. That led to the recognition of self-talk, and allowed me to get a handle on my anxiety issues. [No fear of a diatribe against parents/family-if you take a peak at any of the “Fellowship Street” stuff, you will find nothing but warm and fuzzy.  That’s me, and no, it’s not mold, except maybe on the brain.]

Whew.  Got that out of the way.  I drive the people in my immediate world crazy, because I am so exuberant.  I can’t help it.  However, you are hearing this for the first time.  Sarah, over at “My Life in Contradictions” used the same word as I did, tunnel, when describing a mental condition.  You are trapped within, but can still see out.  You can’t get out, only dream about it.  

The third thing you need to know about me is that I eschew the use of exclamation points.  I prefer to let my words do the exclaiming. That doesn’t mean I never use them, but when I do, you will know that my world has just been rocked.  I welcome their use by others; I am not an e.p. snob.  For me the occasion must warrant it.  

The fourth thing is that writing the narrative, Six Days a Week, unlocked the wordhoard within my mind, and out spewed 250,000 words within the framework of Military Madness, something I had been writing inside my head for thirty-seven years.  I sat down in March and when I was done in May, I had all of these words stacked up in an insidiously evil laptop computer, that did mean and spiteful things to me, until JT said wtf, and bought me a MAC Book Pro.  Now I have two female knights in shining armor, Dr. Jill, and JT.  btw, wtf stands for, “Wanton turtles frolic.”

The fifth thing is that when I was a kid, not so very long ago, I hated to be the last person awake in our house, when the last light was turned off.  With three older brothers, and the parents and lots of little ‘uns, there was little chance of that, normally.  That, however, did not prevent me from stressing out over it, thereby honing skills that would control my life until last year. 

The sixth thing is that  my Virgoan personality actually derives a secret sense of joy, when the floors are are spotless, the place is looking great and the dust has been put at bay until the next pickup truck comes hurtling along Bell Springs Road, sending the resultant cloud of dust down in our direction, unmindful that our homestead is a dust-free zone.  I figured that if Berkeley could vote to be nuclear-free, then so could we.  Vote to be dust-free, I mean, though we are also nuclear-free.  And electricity-free, also, but that’s a blog that is yearning to be written, so...  

The seventh thing is that I sing out loud at any time of the day.   I sing to the dogs. I sing to the blue jays.  I sing to the skunks.  Luckily, they don’t sing back.

The following seven things were the ones that I originally jotted down, before I saw JT’s blog, and wrote the ones above.  

* That’s the first one; I am insecure about all matters technologic.

* Until I went into the army, everything revolved around the number 7.

* Being dead doesn’t scare me one iota. Arrgg!  But the dying part?

* As a child, I was petrified of bulldogs; now one sleeps with Ann and me.

*  My first wife, with whom I parted amicably in ’79, has cancer; it hurts.


*  I sent out hand-made Christmas cards this year; I haven’t sent any since ’85.

*  The English language has a finite number of rules, and I know them.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes.  I used to tell my dog-owning, deer-hunting students, that when I stopped making mistakes, someone should shoot me and put me out of my misery.  Not make mistakes?  Only if you’re not human.  I used to pay them school currency to spot errors of mine, even if it was as inconsequential as forgetting to write up today’s date on the white-board.  People who perch on pedestals, end up on the floor.  I'll get there on my own, fast enough.