Trying to Stop being Clever

Forty some years of remaining expressionless has helped keep that youthful look within reach. Those worry lines are starting to show up though. And the grey hair is somewhat of a giveaway. No, I'm not going bald, my forehead's always been this big. My nosehairs grow incredibly fast. I mentioned in a previous post that the most embarrassing thing I could think of about myself was the tattoo on my forearm . But I'm owning that. Besides, I thought of something possibly worse. I was a bed-wetter. Looking back on it now, it would be nice to be able to blame it on the undiagnosed epilepsy. But I'm pretty sure I know better. I don't know exactly why it happened, but it made sleepovers very difficult.  When I was probably 11 years old I regularly slept on a damp, urine-soaked mattress that I didn't even change the sheets on. I didn't take showers in the morning. I just went to school smelling like pee. I didn't know it, but some of the other...

A tale of pure fiction. No similarity to any actual persons, living or dead, is intended or implied. Any that is perceived is coincidence. "Wow, she looks terrible." "Eh, I guess so. She just looks older." "-" "I noticed she changed her last name on her Facebook account. I wonder if she got divorced. Doesn't every parent on Facebook just plaster their timeline with photos of their kids? I don't think she has them anymore." "She's kind of pathetic, how she's touching all over every guy she talks to." "Not me." "She better not." "Oh, and she knows it. She knows you're the scariest, most bad-ass bitch of a jealous wife there is. And that's got to be hard. She knows that, for years, decades even, I was into her. She blew me off and 'friend-zoned' me the whole time. Now here she is, separated, probably had her kids taken away, and here I am, happily married and killing it wit...

I just had a realization that people see me as some sort of spastic because I'm rocking all the time. I've always known that i rock, like shift my weight back & forth. I rock when I'm sitting. I find my center of gravity and I shift to make sure I have control of it. I can lose my balance and fall if I stand totally still for too long. I didn't realize how much of a character trait it was. I realized because my best friend told me, in a no-holds-barred "tell me the truth about myself" moment, he said the thing his friends thought was the weirdest about me was "the rocking." Imagining someone else doing that, I guess I would think they were a little spastic. That's the thing that stands out about me? I always knew I did it but it was just an aside sort of thing. But that stands out about me. I'm clearly a spastic. Whatever else is wrong with me, whatever else goes along with being this way, this kind of special, we don't really know. W...

This is an interesting time for those of us who predate the internet and smartphones. Mobile phones at all, really. Having grown up using rotary phone land lines and the post office, the changes are many and dramatic. Telling these stories and thinking "kids today will never understand" is, for me, remarking about how different things got very suddenly, but I can see that, to the kids, I'm just talking about how things were a long-ass time ago. The year I was born is, to my daughter, the equivalent to 1930 to me. For her to try to understand how things were when I was born is like me trying to relate to prohibition.

What if we are fulfilling our destiny? What if, all along, the planet (and the universe) was working toward having us continue to seek more and more power until we generated the nuclear devices that will irradiate the planet, creating heavy elements that did not previously exist, thus boosting the explosion of the sun when all the planets crash into it, creating a larger explosion and therefore setting off a chain reaction at a higher temperature/energy, causing the post-supernova Sol to be elevated to a higher level than it would have been if Earth had gone in as a wet rock? What if we have evolved from bacteria, through the chain of mammals, to the bipedal organisms we are today with the specific intent of seeking out stronger energy sources, with the intention being to generate more explosive power at the end of our solar system? What if all solar systems are trying to increase the power of their explosions in all the ways they can, and it's some sort of contest between stars to...

They're trying to maintain too much control. Some things you just don't need to control. The People, as Ramona says below, need to be able to protest when things aren't right. They're trying to do it the right way, and not in the face of the fascist bully police themselves. Because you know what happens then. I can't help but notice that the people who most loudly yell about their second amendment rights are often the same people who trample the first amendment rights of others. The ones who recognize that the police state is getting out of control are commonly the same who are saying that everyone in the nation doesn't need guns. So the ones with the guns are on the side of the ones with the guns, and the ones without the guns are asking everyone to lay them down. Clearly, when the uprising happens, it will be the unarmed against the unjust. I am going to go into some unpopular territory here. I wish none of this was happening the way it is, with the brutal...

If you think football players should be forced to stand during the anthem, you're not wrong. It's your opinion, it can't be wrong. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that these protests mean the protesters don't love this country. They love it enough to want to help fix it. If you think it doesn't need fixing and that showing respect for the anthem is more important than police showing respect for human life, then you can be considered part of the problem. Whenever I see these down-and-dirty argument threads on standing for the anthem, I see that the ones saying the flag needs to be respected at all costs are also the ones who have the little flag emojis in their screen names. Is that a prescribed, acceptable use of the flag's image? Little digitized versions used to set yourself apart from your countrymen, because you're a "true patriot"? I feel that the flag represents the country, which includes its people, and that means a lot of thin...

It was April 1, sometime in the late '80s. I drove out to Alhambra to my bass player's house. I parked my truck around the corner, out of sight of his front door. I walked to his house, and I got myself to panting. I knocked on the door. When Anthony opened it, I told him a story of how I was driving down his street, and I was going too fast. I said I was going about 50, and I know because I was looking down at my speed when the lady pulled out in front of me. I said I hit her, but good. T-boned her right there on his street. I was panicking, saying I didn't know what I was going to do. When he seemed good and concerned, I dropped it on him: "April Fool!" He said I should be an actor.