Who The Heck Am I

Good Morning Friends. If we are following the theme of Blaugust this is “Introduce Yourself Week” and while I understand that I made this calendar… I never quite know what to do for this one. When you have been blogging in one form or another going on twenty years… I’ve already poured a lot of information about myself out into the ether. So instead of telling my life story once again… as I have done so many times, I thought I would share a few photos and write about them. This is a very young version of me… with Freddie Bear. I am not sure if it was originally called this on the packaging or if I gave him that name… but he was my constant companion followed by Raggedy Ann and Andy and a Sock Monkey I named Charlie. I’ve recently seen Freddie Bear and he is completely ragged from lots and lots of tiny hands hugging and loving him.

Another photo that I find funny is me and a childhood friend entering the yearly talent show, doing a dance number from Staying Alive. You would never know it from my 6’4″ blocky frame and complete lack of physical dexterity… but I was in Dance as a child. In theory, the story goes that I watched Olympic gymnasts and wanted to take gymnastics… and in our tiny town this was only taught by the local dance instructor. The “tax” that she placed upon male students, is that if they wanted to take gymnastics they also had to take tap and ballet. So I think I took around five years of tap, ballet, and gymnastics… and you could never tell it by the way I currently stumble about. It did however broaden my horizons quite a bit and I was in the regional production of the nutcracker several times as a tiny rat and as a tin soldier. I remember being so terrified of the seven-headed rat king on stage that I chewed on my plastic sword.

This is what remains of the very first automobile that I called “Bob” but being the weird artsy kid I said it was spelled without any Bs. I was a weird kid. I gave $200 for this vehicle and it carried me through college and survived a drunk lady backing into it at my wife’s apartment without so much as a scratch. It was not exactly a comfortable vehicle for someone over six feet tall to drive, but it was mine. The thing about an automobile more than anything is that it represents the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want. I come from fairly humble means and there was not a chance in hell that my parents could afford to buy me something, so I think I spent money from working as a camp counselor at scout camp on it. I was an eagle scout and got brought onto staff one year when the camp decided that they wanted EVERY counselor to be an eagle for some reason. The biggest thing I remember about that summer was when we had to clear the copperhead snakes out from under the medical building. Probably not something you would ever have a bunch of teenagers do today… but I will never forget the distinct copperhead smell.

Now I live a relatively quiet life in suburbia. We bought our home in 1999 and have seen no reason to move. We love our neighborhood because it is this blend of older folks and young families, and over the years has become significantly more diverse. Most people bought here for the same reason we did… because it was cheap. Our house is roughly 1800 sq/ft and we paid somewhere in the vicinity of 83k in 1999… which had roughly tripled in value since we have been here. The thing I dig the most about our neighborhood though is how easy it would be for us to walk to the store or to a restaurant, even though we are often too busy to do this thing. Another thing I love is the fact that we have neighborhood ducks seen above. There are several ponds in the neighborhood and as a result, dusks roam around pretty regularly in small groups. Everyone stops for the ducks because they secretly rule the town. I am just thankful we got ducks because the neighborhood across the busy road… has geese and geese are assholes.

Being the soft-hearted person that I am… we are also the house in the neighborhood that puts out food for the community of feral cats. Seen lounging on our doormat is “Greybie” who is a grey tabby male that is extremely friendly… at least for a feral. He has this weird hang-up where he knows who we are if we are walking out of the house… but gets confused that we might be the same humans if we are walking into the house. Not pictured is “Tabby” who has only recently let me start petting her. They are all fairly skittish but along with a solid black cat they represent the cats that hang out in front of our house on the regular. We are not terribly original in our naming scheme in part because we don’t want to get too attached… because feral cats have a habit of eventually disappearing.

The whole feeding outdoor cats thing… more or less started because of “Tripod” pictured above. She is a three-legged calico and has been living in our backyard for going on four years. We even have a house that she can sleep in during the winter months with bedding to keep her warm. We’ve never gotten more than a few feet from her before she moves away and as such is still extremely feral… but also shows up at meal time every day. Occasionally she has a visiting tomcat that we call “splotchie” because he has an almost jaguar-like pattern on his grey and black coat. Almost all of the ferals that we see on the regular have been captured at one point and “fixed” then had their ears notched to indicate that they were released. I would adopt “Tripod” in a heartbeat, but given we have been doing this dance for years… I doubt she would ever trust me enough to come inside.

Speaking of Indoor Cats, this is my eldest Mollie. She is an asshole. Like she loves me but also is big into “love bites” thinking that is a proper way of showing affection. So loving on her is always a juggling act of trying to keep your hand out of her mouth. We rescued her from a large dog shelter, and she had been the only cat for two years there. As a result, I think she doesn’t quite know “how to cat”, and has trouble bonding… or at least her bonding is nowhere near what you would expect from a normal cat. She loves me and spends most of the day beside me on a box with a pink fleece blanket on it… pictured above. The problem with Mollie is… she does not understand how to play with our other girls and can get a little aggressive. Leading right now to the practice of us guarding our youngest while she goes to the litter box… which I hope does not last forever.

Then you have my baby girl Josie, who we have had for two years. Not pictured is her amazing ringtail… which basically turns up on itself in a loop… as its natural resting position. We are in a period of transition right now as the three girls figure out the new normal. That said if I am sitting downstairs on the couch, she is almost assuredly laying on my legs. Until Gracie came she also used to sleep on me every night… now she is sorta feeling out the new situation. She loves boxes and sitting on them… and it is weird how she has aged since we got the youngin. Not sure if this is a matter of perspective or if she really has decided that she needs to be a big sister. She is still deeply prone to bouts of kittenhood, especially when I get out the laser pointer. I work from home and she doesn’t spend much time upstairs, but when it is about time for me to “get off work” she comes up and reminds me.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will already be well versed in Gracie. She is a mess and one of the most active kittens I have ever experienced. She has learned how to climb things that no cat has ever figured out… which means we are constantly on the defensive. She would be in trouble were it not for the fact that she is so damned adorable. We would also probably call her “Little Shit” were it not for the fact we have already had a beloved cat from our past with that unfortunate moniker. Gracie basically wants whatever she can see… and then attacks it. She is super fierce… except when it comes to her interactions with Mollie who towers over her. As a result, we essentially have to take her to the litter box a few times a day, because she is too scared to come upstairs to them. She bonded heavily with my wife, but now that she is going back to school during the day… it will be interesting to see if “daddy” is suddenly cooler than I have been to this point.

Other than that… my primary hobby is gaming and I spend most evenings whiling away the hours playing some game while snuggling with cats. I’ve been working remotely for the last three years, and it does not appear that there is going to be any change to that. I’m a fairly simple person and honestly fairly boring. I’ve been a geek since before that term was really bandied about with any sense of street cred to it. I love comic books, all manner of science fiction and fantasy, and have been pouring my soul into either artwork or writing my entire life. I need to get back into drawing again because it was a huge part of my life for the first twenty years… and then I effectively just sort of severed that part of me. I keep thinking about doing Inktober, and maybe this year will be the year I actually do.

In 1998, our first year out of college I had a sort of tragic event happen to me that I never recovered from creatively. My wife was teaching in a very small “one-horse town”, and I was having to commute almost two hours a day to work as a result. At some point during that year, she was responsible for the senior class, and their class project was to fix up and paint the recreation center. I was asked if I would be willing to paint a mural with their mascot, and I spent the night laying out a sketch for it and had not actually started on it. We were up there until after midnight, so we locked the building and I left all of my supplies. When we came back about mid-day the next day… all of my stuff had been stolen. I am not really sure how to explain how big of a violation that felt.

More than just losing the paint and brushes… it was like my language for HOW to function creatively was stolen from me. I had spent over a decade building a collection of brushes that all did different things.. found sometimes in thrift stores, some given to me by friends… I knew how each of them worked intimately. Then with all of that gone… I didn’t even understand how to begin to replace it. A new brush doesn’t perform the way one that has been used for a decade performs. So it is like a part of me just shut down and never came back… and now roughly twenty-five years later… I’ve yet to really regain the confidence to begin creating art again. I shifted to pouring all of my hopes and dreams and thoughts into words.

Sometimes a blog post develops a life of its own… and this one today certainly has. I didn’t set out to talk about this. That is the hardest lesson that I have learned over all these years of blogging, which is that you have to go with the flow of the post. Sometimes your emotions are going to spill out in the process and it is okay to show your weaknesses. It means I have to put a lot of trust in the hands of my readers, but for the most part, if you stick around here… you are not here for the topics.