Eight Random Facts about Me

I've been tagged by Toni, Shawn and Jason. It's about time I got on with it.

1. I was one of the last kids in my school to swear off Sesame Street. When I was in eighth grade, I still had a stack of 45 RPM records with such famous hits as the Sesame Street theme song, Somebody Come and Play, I Love Trash, I've Got Two Eyes, and Big Bird's alphabet song (the one where he finds the alphabet chalked onto the sidewalk and thinks its one big word). I couldn't get enough. While the world dreamed of living in a yellow submarine, I was playing games at the ladybug picnic.

I put them away for good when my step-brother announced it to my schoolmates.

The great sadness of my childhood was that Ernie, Bert, Grover, Oscar, Big Bird, Kermit, Cookie Monster, The Count (ah, ah), et al were not real. I dreamed of a living, breathing Muppet world and vowed when I was in sixth grade to bring them to life, so I bought a science book from the grade above me and read it from cover to cover. When I finally went to college, Robotics seemed like too much math, so I settled for a generic computer programming degree instead.

2. When I was in fifth grade, all the neighborhood girls three or more years younger than myself had crushes on me. Nobody my own age, of course. So I set up a kissing booth thinking to make a few dollars. This created a "swarm" of about fifteen girls, so I crawled on top of a mobile home trailer and dangled my hand. The first stepped up and pecked at it like a woodpecker until I jerked it back and closed up shop.

There was another girl that was older than me that always referred to me as dimples. She always greeted me on the bus as such, then laughed as I squirmed and turned red. If she ever saw me around the neighborhood, she would chase me, threatening to kiss me if she caught me. I was too fast.

3. I've always had a dream, and not so coincidentally, same too with my father. Thankfully, I at least was instilled with a worker gene.

4. In college, while wrestling with Jeff Gordon, I threw him onto his guitar, snapping the neck clean off it. I didn't have money or any access to money, so he took my skis as collateral until such a time as I had it fixed. At the end of the school year, situation unchanged, I took my skis back. He asked, "How do I know you'll make good?" I answered, "You don't."

That summer a friend bet me that he could shimmy up the side of a skinned log we had stuck in the ground as the first ingredient of a home-made crane. He didn't make it five feet. Instead of paying me, he offered a guitar that he had taken from a previous business partner who had screwed him out of some money. I accepted. The next semester started without me in attendance, but I took a special trip to Washington State University in order to make good on my word. The guitar was far superior in quality and sound to the one I had broken. It even had built-in pickups for plugging into an amp. I was feeling quite magnanimous as I handed him the guitar in a beautiful, hard-shell case.

Jeff picked it up, strummed it once, leaned it against the wall and said, "Thanks. I've got a lot of homework to do, so if you don't mind…"

5. I have an obsessive personality, whatever that means. For example, when I finally got it in my head that I wanted to play guitar, I drove everyone absolutely bat shit crazy talking about it. I played Johnny B. Goode in my room over and over until Dave Haase finally told me to play something else. Then I went through a Doors phase. In college it was The Wham Rap, which led to Lip Synch. Later, much later, in the bars, happy hour, after work, it was Karaoke. Then it was La Fonda Del Sol where a band had me sing Cover of the Rolling Stone. Then it was softball. Now it's writing. I talked a lot about it as recently as a month ago, but now, for some reason, I don't blather on about it, preferring now to get something done and let the work do the talking for me.

6. I'm phenomenal at making new friends. Keeping them… now that's the trick.

7. At forty two, I think I'm finally over high school. Maybe.

8. I have an infinite capacity to love and forgive, and I often wonder why people don't see that. Then again, maybe they do.

I'm supposed to tag eight people, so here goes: Tee, Mr. Schprock, Beth, Jen, Natalie, Toast, Peter, Unlucky Girl. I'm not sure if the last two would even be interested, but I think they would be interesting.