not plagarism...just admiration

Today I found a wonderful blog written by an 82 year old woman named  Helen to her friend of 60 years....my kind of people, obviously, and she has a multitude of fans..... one of whom wrote the following comment.  It is so much of an "oh, gawd, I wish I had said that" that I simply must pass it on.  I will have to go back and see if I can find the name of the commenter in order to give proper credit.  Ah, the name is "Hillbilly" .....don't know whether it is a male or a female, but my hunch says is is a woman......not the kind of thing a man would think of  doing , I feel......no explosions, five alarm fires or mass devastation.....just taking care of things effectively and quietly.
Huzzah, Hillbilly, whoever you are.

Here's the quote:

"A little confession, when I was in Kmart the other day I hid all of Glen Becks books behind other books so that they were not on display. Petty I know, but it made me feel better."

Where are all the Commenters ?

One fascinating thing I discovered during my perusal of other people's blogs was the frequency with which the blogger whined and complained about the fact that nobody commented.  Now, this was not true of all of them....many blogs had more comments than content......(I don't quite know what to make of THAT.)  But since I have been guilty of begging and pleading for comments to my blog I was heartened that this loathesome neediness is apparently a common flaw among us bloggers.  I am pretty sure that the Bloggers' Lament is not motivated by the need for fulsome praise as much as a wistful wish for a bit of dialogue, some feedback, even criticism........anything to indicate that someone has paused and tasted before passing through the room.

AND to carry the thought a bit further, apparently the resistance, reluctance and downright stinginess  to comment is somewhat universal among the followers of blogs.  I wish I could understand this rather selfish withholding of any acknowledgement .........the widespread indulgence of taking everything offered as Freebies........the act of gobbling up all of the goodies without so much as offering even a satisfied burp in response.  Sigh.  I guess we must forgive them, for they know not what they do.....or don't do....or, oh, hell, you know what I mean.

Referrals

I nearly forgot.....during those days when I have been perusing other people's blogs, being too weak and infirm to work much on my own, I made a promise to you to point you toward some of my wonderful discoveries. Without further ado I want to direct your attention to one of the funniest blogs in the world, for sure.    (my opinion, of course)

This gem is written by a young man named Justin, age 29 who claims he simply reports on pearls  of  wisdom and humor which fall from the mouth of his 74 year old father.  I am goggle eyed with admiration and envy and weak with laughter.

If you haven't already discovered this wonder, go forth and enjoy:

                                      http://twitter.com/Shitmydadsays


You can thank me later.  (and be sure you do....)

Dr. Freudenstearn Will See You Now

Everyone who knows me will tell you that I have theories up the wazoo about everything related to the Sweet Mystery of Life.  I have always been a prodigious ponderer and I have shouted "Eureka" so many times during my life that I feel I have wrested ownership of the phrase away from that Greek who first uttered it. (can't remember his name, but you know who I mean.)  At a certain point in my 40's I felt I had finally figured it all out......everything seemed perfectly clear.........that pinnacle lasted all of about 10 minutes before I detected a few weak spots.  From then on things went downhill rapidly and since that moment the more I have learned the less I feel I know and understand.  Consequently, at my current advanced age I usually feel like I know absolutely nothing for sure, understand life not at all and people and the world in general even less. At least you could say I am not deluding myself.....

  However, I recently have had a few moments of clarity during which a few things seemed to come together to make some sense after all....... At this moment my character flaw as a Hoarder of epic proportions has paid off since I never actually discard any of my theories when they crash and crumble.....just toss them into the Broken Theory Closet in the back of my mind and periodically take them out, ponder them and try to fit some of the pieces together in a new structure...........

Ah, that all sounds so promising, doesn't it?  The only trouble is that, since I first started making these notes  for a new day's blog I have forgotten where I intended to go with this. (!)  I can promise you, no one is more disappointed over this fact than ME.  I was so looking forward eagerly to what fascinating morsel of the truth I was going to reveal.   Oy vey........the trouble with being long winded AND ancient is that lately I sometimes find myself approaching  the end of a sentence having forgotten where the hell I was going when I started it.  Obviously, that curse infects blogs as well as casual conversations.  I wonder if there is any hope for a cure????  Sob. 

Oh, well.....I guess for the time being  I had better put those broken theory fragments back into the closet and restate my current condition as being one in which I don't know anything for sure and understand  life even less so don't look to me to explain anything..  Too bad......just when it looked like true enlightenment might be just around the corner Senior Dementia has to set in.......what a bummer.  To all of you out there who are laughing or trying to conceal the fact that you are laughing, go ahead........laugh.......the day will come when you too will get to the end of the joke and realize you have forgotten the punch line.    And for those of you who aren't laughing but are shifting your fannies uneasily in your chairs with uncomfortable recognition........bless you, my poor dears.......cuddle up a little closer and let's at least all keep warm.

When In Doubt, Reconnoiter

I have just spent another exhausting ( and expensive ) week coping with computer troubles and, since I am still recuperating from my bout with the flu I am really a shoddy, mangled mess all in all.  For some reason, in my weakened and uninspired state, I decided to do a bit of investigating of other blogs to see what the vast world of blogging had to offer.  I am overwhelmed and a bit intimidated.......holy moly there are a lot of blogs out there !!  And some of them are even quite good.....lots written by professional writers who not only blog, but give us amateurs tips about the right and wrong ways to do it.  The one tip that I found most useful at this moment was the advice that, when your brain turns to cream of wheat and you can't blog worth a damn you should simply dash off a humble little piece to keep the thing alive.  Great idea !  That is exactly what I am doing herein.  When my strength returns I will hopefully resume my carefree blathering and will even mention a few of my favorite new blogsites but for the time being this poor excuse is all you are going to get from me.  Sorry about that..........migawd......that reminded me of a line from so far out of the past I am not even sure I am remembering it from this lifetime.   When I was very young there was a weekly radio program called "The Easy Aces"......all I am sure of is that it was about a married couple, had considerable humor and my Mother loved it whereas she had no time at all for the much more popular "One Man's Family"....definitely no humor there, just boring melodrama.  Anyway, there was an ongoing saying on the Aces which went something like, "Ya gotta take the bitter with the better".  Out of context it does not have much punch, but it does apply to my followers and the definite up and down-ness of this blog.  In case you didn't know, in cyberland as everywhere else, you takes your chances........

Chapter 2 of My Elegy on Touch Typing

While away in the kitchen dishing up Friskies Pate and mincing raw liver it occurred to me that I had better explain a few things  before continuing my tale of gratitude for being forced by my Dad to take a course in Typing and how it affected my entire life.

I want to make it perfectly clear that NO one, upon reading my descriptions of Life with Father should ever feel the teeniest bit sorry for me. It may appear at times that he was brutal, unkind even sadistic, and all of that may have some aspects of truth, but I do not condemn him for any of that nor do I wish that things had been substantially different .......the fact is that without having had to cope with, endure, survive, forgive and ultimately understand him I would not be the person that I am today (whoever that may be)and possibly not even be here today. And, for better or for worse, I am relatively content with who I am and how I got here, so whatever feelings you may feel upon reading my tales......take my word for it......feeling sorry for me should not be one of them.

There is a theory I read about in some philosophy book that one actually picks one's parents depending upon what lessons one must learn this time around that were not learned or dealt with in the last lifetime. (and, I do believe you have to keep going around until you learn 'em all..........what a terrible waste if we only got one shot at it)  I have come to subscribe to that theory .....it certainly fits perfectly with what I have observed about the way life works and I will keep it until I find something that fits  better. It is my belief that I picked my parents precisely because of the vast opportunities they would offer me to learn a number of my unlearned lessons, and, heaven knows, my family provided me with a goldmine of possiblilities for my "education". (too many options, so little time, but I hope I will get to deal next time around with some of the lessons missed or failed at in this trip. I mean, for crissakes, a person can only do so much ........)

Anyway, my servitude as typing slave continued through  high  school and college and while I remained a rather inept typist and never really got to be a great one  my skills were adequate enough to get by, .......except for the time I was writing a letter to some Government Agency about selling them a stock of surplus zinc chromate tape that Pappy had acquired and I sent it off without properly proofing it, resulting in a proposal to sell them the entire stock in my father's vast Whorehouse instead of Warehouse.  (of  course, I never heard  the end of that one, but I'll bet some bored Govt. paper pusher blessed me for brightening his day  and, as I recall, my Dad  got the contract.  (I wonder if they were disappointed when all they received was zinc chromate tape?.....)  But my insipid typing got me through a hundred college term papers and further, got me a job as a Girl Friday for a family of Builders when I graduated and could not find any work at all in anything remotely related to art or design.  Further, it kept me from starving totally as a starving artist when I opened my own studio and found one could not live on art alone.
 
Now, my studio was one of 3 which had been built onto the front of an old house, the house in turn having  been subdivided and parcelled out piecemeal among the shops with  leftover rooms being bundled into so-called  apartments in the back of the building.  My studio was the middle of the 3 and if fell to my lucky lot to win the living room of the house  -  a fair sized room with a real FIREPLACE and a tiny bathroom with no sink but a toilet and shower.......(the sink was in the work areas)......I ultimately moved in and lived there but that is another  blog.  My neighbor to my right of me was a friend who had a design studio and what was called in those days a Studio Greeting Card Co......that meant one of the first outfits to dispense with flowers and sloppy sentiment and to approach things with humor and disrespect.  This was my outlet for a line of my own greeting cards......very disrespectful and some even humorous.  But to the left of me was most fascinating business on the block.......a shady establishment we jokingly called the Dirty Record Business.........run by a dreadful man we called Dirty Bill who thought that the funniest thing he had ever heard was that there was a real town called Intercourse, Pa.  The records were not really that dirty.....most were  simply bawdy or vulgar songs but his prize piece was one called "Erotica" which consisted of nothing but creaking bedsprings whose cadence increased, culminating in silence and a loudly whispered, "Oh Baby".  All of these were sold via mail order and, to put it simply, the dirty dog was making an effing fortune.  The only catch was that periodically the police found it necessary to make some token effort to stamp out this foul blight on our city and performed a sort of raid on  the place.  The first time they actually caught Bill there  and took him off to the pokey for an hour or two.  Subsequent raids were somehow tipped off so Bill could run out the back if he were there, leaving his office manager and chief record packer, a nice, middle aged  Jewish lady named Roz,  to be hauled off to the jailhouse in his stead.  This was all a source of much merriment to us until the fateful moment when Roz needed help in handling the orders and I, as usual,  needed  money to pay my bills.   So before you can wink and twirl the ends of your moustache, there I was for 4 hours a day typing labels for the Dirty Record business and eating again. 

I could go on forever with this story but I will save some of the good stuff for yet another blog.  Suffice it to say that Dirty Bill may have been a pig but typing for him saved my bacon.

My next bout of gratitude came at age 40 when I decided there had to be a better way of trying to make a living and I went to computer programming school........I never would have had a chance had I not  been able to type my programs into the computer so we can chalk up my entire second career to my ability to type.  And the latest set of "thank yous" have been prompted by this whole 3rd career as a blogging fool which would be impossible were it not for my ability to be staring into space thinking of what I wanted to say while my fingers obediently put my thoughts onto the screen.

So, actually, all of you lucky beneficiaries of my blogging should really execute a few low bows and say, "Thank you, Freddie"..........it only seems fair, doesn't it?

No, The Cats Have Not Eaten Me....Yet

As far as I can tell, I am still alive and have not been dined on by my feline companions......I surely would have noticed if they had begin to nibble a morsel here and there, wouldn't I??.........though if they started on my toes I might not notice since it is not as easy for me to see them nowadays......

I told my friend Anne, in Devon, that I suspect the fever fried part of my brain, but I think I have enough left to blog.  That is if I can manage to adjust to blogging on my laptop whose keyboard is quite different from my PC's and seems to be equipped with an invisible key that automatically puts spaces in the middle of my words and even switches to italics at the most inopportune times.  My desktop has gone south again and I am waiting eagerly to hear from my guru hoping he can fix it or me or  both.    @#$%&** and other obscenities.

However, I will persevere  in spite of aberrant keyboards and  dyslexic fingers.  Funny......I have many reasons to be grateful to my Father, aside from having inherited his prodigious love of words and (please excuse my pride) his amazing intellect (neither thing requiring him to acknowledge my existence in order to give them to me) but the ability to touch type may be very close to the top of the list of things for which I am infinitely grateful to him.  There I was in high school at about age 16, infinitely miserable like any normal teenager, taking all sorts of artistic and intellectual subjects, working at an artistic job handpainting decorative bottles after school and weekends and never giving a thought to the  business world when one day he looked up over his newspaper, found me within his line of  vision and said something like, "you are in high school now, aren't you?".  Cautiously I admitterd that I was, not quite sure whether to confess to the crime or deny it.   He pondered a millisecond before raising the paper and uttering the significant command,  "Take typing !".......which, of course, I did at once if not sooner.

First, I will never forget the amazing moment during that course, while blindly and hopelessly following the teacher's instructions in an exercise, I noticed that my fingers had begun to type words without me.........it was almost as mind-boggling a moment as the one when I first learned to read!!  To this day I still do not understand how this skill works and why, at certain times the effect works perfectly and at other times exasperating imperfectly.  It is something like the thing about Not thinking about Elephants, I think, but I still consider it something of a miracle and no one can talk me out of that notion.  But to get back to the point, at the time I never dreamed the effect that acquiring that skill would have on my life..........the first clue came the day my Father lowered his paper again, found me in the room with him and asked, "Can you type yet?"  My timorous nod sealed my fate for the next I don't know how many years and influenced my life forever after.

Now, my Father was, at this time, an architect, engineer and building contractor with his own small construction firm.  I knew a little about the intricacies of the business but I was soon to learn more than was really necessary for any 16 year old (or almost anyone) to know.  Without going into any more detail I will simply report that in the twinkling of an eye I was drafted into typing business letters, proposals, and building specifications and was a full fledged (unrewarded and unacknowledged)  secretary to Fairway Construction Company......in my spare time of  course which involved nights and weekends.

Hmmm......as often happpens, this blog seems to have gotten out of hand......amazing how I lose control of these things once black letters begin appearing on the screen .........and the time has come when, in order to preserve my toes, I had better go and feed the cats their dinner so I am going to have to finish these wanderings down memory lane in a 2nd chapter.  Stay tuned or, as I am famous for declaring in my emails, "more later."