JUST WRITE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (4-11-24)

 

      I'm approaching my nine year anniversary writing for this paper, and it has been an absolute joy, for one of us at least. Maybe you read this column with your morning coffee, and that's how you were able to quit coffee. Maybe you read this article to find an intelligent take on things you hadn't thought of before, only to find that I haven't thought of it either. Maybe you line your parrot's cage with it, and I'd like to think that it gives him a chuckle once in a while. Whatever the reason that you read a newspaper, please keep doing it, because that's where ideas are exchanged. And if you don't like any of my ideas, you can exchange them for credit.

     It's only fitting that I would take to writing, based on my SAT scores in high school. In the math section I scored a 425, which is about the same score you would get if you dipped your cat's paws in #2 pencil shavings and let him stroll around the pages of the test looking for other pencils to knock off the desk as he filled in the answers. My verbal score wasn't that much better, but when I wrote an essay in my college application, I was quickly accepted merely to prevent me from ever doing it again.

    Sometimes people will ask a writer where he gets his inspiration. For me, thinking of inane things is what I would normally do anyway. When I look at the crazy world around me, it doesn't take much effort to make it a little crazier. It might be an obscure reference, or a play on words, or some goofy dialogue. I carry a pad around me, and if I think of something that doesn't make much sense I write it down. If I think of something intellectually advanced I just chalk it up to bad luck, and don't bother to write it down. Other times idea output is directly proportional to alcohol input. 

     Many clever things I come up never make it into this column, and you'll just have to take my word that they were clever. Because writing a humor column is a lot like having an argument with a bully; you always think of something REALLY GREAT to say well after the opportunity to use it has passed. Another fertile time for the germination of ideas is in bed at night. Many creative people have expressed the same thing. An observation might wander into my brain looking for a place where it won't be disturbed, but I don't jot it down since it was SO GOOD I'll be able to think of it tomorrow. Will I remember what it was after I fall asleep? In my dreams.

     I'm an avid reader of novels, and that's inspiring enough. I don't read a lot of science fiction because I'm afraid that it might not be fiction. I like murder mysteries; I read them for my health. My health, you ask? Yes, because I know every possible way you might try to kill me, and trust me, you won't get away with it. But most of all I like characters, people who do and say things that make you want to get to know them better.

     It's less strenuous for authors than it used to be because there are more words now. This year alone, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word "influencer" to the language. That's fine, but if I get pulled over for driving under the influence of an influencer, I may be the only one not laughing. Merriam Webster admitted "yeet," which means, well, I have no idea what it means even after I read the definition.

     Dictionaries are SO heavy that we could get rid of a bunch of words and no one would miss them. "Hat box," "clothes pin," "toll call," just put them in the dust bin, along with "dust bin." Words we use all the time but have no good reason why, like "okey dokey," you can deep-six those, too. In fact, you can deep-six "deep-six" as well. 

     I sometimes publish these columns in a blog so that people all over the world can see what Americans are like if they were anything like me, and I've recently been logging hundreds of hits a day from the city-state of Singapore. Either Singaporeans have an unusual sense of humor, or they are somehow using it to create spam or sow seeds of chaos somehow. If that's the case, I amuse myself by thinking that my blog is being open-sourced in searches by their artificial intelligence models. I can't wait to see how that comes out.

     Contrary to the way I am in person, in print I have to strive to offend people as seldom as possible- I try not to say anything too racy, make fun of orange-looking presidents, or religions, races, creeds or things that I don't agree with that almost everyone else agrees with. That doesn't leave much to work with, but if it makes me laugh, I'll find it.

     So thank you for reading, and the thought of nine more years of writing gives me the yeets, and that means more than you could possibly know. Or less, I'm not exactly sure which.

HAIR THERE AND EVERYWHERE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (3-14-24)

 
     Nothing says more about your personal style than your hair. I firmly believe that you can track the entire thread of your life by mapping the different stages your hair has gone through. It's like cutting a tree open and counting the rings, only less messy but perhaps more painful. Now that the '80s are long over maybe you wish you had tried the tree method rather than allow yourself to be photographed and run the risk that Facebook Memories may someday be invented.

     My hair has been through many trials and tribulations, and I wish I had been more sensitive to what it was going through. I was bald at a very early age. It made my head look too large for my body, and my self-esteem took a beating. I tried a comb-over for a while, but I didn't even have enough hair for that. I considered plugs, but I was afraid of electrocuting myself. It wasn't until later that I found out that MOST babies are bald. My hair grew in and I felt much better. Then my teeth started falling out, but that's a story for another time. (I did get money for them under my pillow, so I tried acquire more teeth from alternate sources, and put the money into a no-load, tax-deferred vehicle, and I wish I could remember where I parked it.)

     What was your best hair? If you're a woman I don't even have to look at you to know. My theory is that 85 percent of all women look best with shoulder-length hair. Seven percent might look good with long hair, but that's usually because they ALWAYS had long hair, and it's hard to picture them any other way. About 5 percent of girls look good with short hair but would look even better with longer hair. About 3 percent can pull off the bald look, but those are usually model types who could eat you for dinner, so you generally want to pretend you didn't notice they were bald. Another 2 percent are not good with fractions. A girl once told me she used to have long hair all the way down her back, but it's unusual for girls to have such a hairy back.

     If you survived the '80s I bet you teased your hair, possibly in order to save everyone else the trouble. Maybe you lightened it. Maybe you darkened it. Maybe you straightened it, maybe you curled it, maybe you used something called a crimper. But I doubt you just left it alone. I knew a girl who I guess wante

     When I was a kid my Dad used to cut my hair, and he was spectacularly bad at it. He took a little of the top, a little off the sides and then cut my bangs at a 45-degree angle, so I would have had to walk around with my head tilted sideways for it to be straight. He did it for free, so I couldn't even ask for my money back. I later found a book on his bookshelf detailing how you could cut a kid's hair EXACTLY that way, and I realized that that is why children run with scissors.

     These days I only get my hair cut a couple times a year, mostly because I'm too cheap to do it more often. A haircut and a shave isn't two bits anymore, you know. If you're too young to remember, two bits is a quarter, which doesn't seem weird until you consider that one bit must be 12 and a half cents. Anyway, after the haircut, J.D. sometimes asks me if I want product in my hair, but he won't say which product. In case it might cost more I tell him just to use by-products instead.

     It seems like the older you get, the more innovative hair becomes. No longer content with sprouting from your head, it seeks alternate, more adventurous avenues of germination. Your nose, your ears, your neck and other, odder frontiers, places where no human has yet planted the flag of sovereignty. My wife even found a little stray hair sprouting from her chin and claimed that it was mine.

     You always want the hair you don't have. I never liked my super-straight hair, but when I got older it gradually became curly. When I realized it was curly because it went gray, I didn't like that either. I had salt-and-pepper hair, but my cardiologist didn't like THAT. So, even if you're not thrilled with your hair, don't do anything drastic or weird that will make your husband say HOW could you do this to ME? The grass is always greener on the other side, but that's not a good reason to for your hair to be.