Big Ugly Man Doll

When did I get old?

Nine pm used to mean there were 4 more hours left to pack in every inch of an exciting life. Later on, 9 pm meant another 2 more hours in the day.  Now 9 pm means I’m late for my medication and need to get to bed as soon as I can. What the hell happened? 

When the kids were going through puberty – when they started, that is, since they’re not all completely finished with the process – we got them a book called something like “Hey, What’s Going On Down There?  A Teenager’s Guide to Your Changing Body.”  

We need to update this book.  

Now that I’m staring down the barrel of 50, I think we need a book of our own:  Same concept, same title, but a drop-head like “A 50-Something’s Guide to What the Hell Just Happened to Your Body.”  It would include chapters like “Is it Supposed to Look Like That?”, “Never Trust a Fart,” and “Three Ways to Tell if You’re Actually Urinating RIGHT NOW!”  (Hey, it’s not like we can see it anymore.)  There could be a handy guide in the back for dealing with insurance companies.  

My parents gave me The Talk when I hit puberty, but I feel like they fell down on the job with the “Next Talk,” which parents should have with their kids when you hit about 45 or so.  Not their fault – as a society, we don’t talk about this kind of thing.  I guess women talk to each other a bit about menopause, but trust me that guys Never Talk About Anything.  No 50-something dude has ever swiveled his chair around, leaned over to the cubicle next to him, and asked a co-worker, “Hey, Tom, is yours getting smaller?”  We don’t talk about it. 

(Imagine if he did, though:  “Does it still work?  As long as it works, size is NOT the biggest issue.”)

So, I’m getting old.  I’m so old that I remember when loose coupling described a dating technique and then, later, a programming technique.  (Although honestly, for most of us geeks, it described a programming technique and a dating concept with which we would have liked to become familiar.) 

As I reflect on my birthday today, I realize that these days, loose coupling describes the relationships between most of my bodily functions.  

We need to be talking to our kids as they hit their late 40s and early 50s, and try to prepare them for these changes.  Imagine Carrie’s 30th High School reunion, wondering why we’re all suddenly incontinent?  “Son, your shit’s gonna start falling apart, and that’s OK.”  I’ve had shit stop working that I didn’t even know I had in the first place.  Plus I’m still in denial about my glasses.  Luckily, I don’t really need them, except to read and to see things at a distance.  Other than that, I’m fine.  

But it’s not all bad.  As I rack up birthdays, I realize that I still don’t have even half as many as The Queen Mother of Pink, who’s 99.  With any luck, I’ll have years to complain about my shit slowly falling apart.  Gram doesn’t complain, though – she just powers through.  Ninty-nine years old and still, she persists.  Pretty good role model, if you ask me.

The Three Lunatic Children are getting funnier, too, and faster on the draw, so that’s another advantage to getting old:  watching them grow into their own.  Sometimes they go out of their way to sound like me, which is most certainly going to get them into trouble one of these days.  I mean, look how I wound up?  The oldest one got me a few nights ago:

HTR:  I was thinking about déjà vu.
BUMD:  I‘ve thought about that before.
HTR (without missing a beat):  I knew you were gonna say that. 

Birthdays – they’re like the ultimate déjà vu, until they’re not.  But since it’s my birthday, I want to tell you about St. Patrick, who is the reason my middle name is Patrick.  (Actually, that’s not true:  My godfather, Mike Burke, is the reason my middle name is Patrick.  I understand the conversation went something like: “If he’s born on St. Patrick’s Day, you HAVE to name him Patrick!”  “No.”  “Middle name?”  “OK.”   I owe him a debt I can never repay.)

St. Patrick died around 493 – pretty good gig to be remembered for more than 1500 years, to say nothing of having libations drunk in your name every year.  I’m not much given to prayer, but since I seem to have a patron saint of my own, I’ve been thinking about asking him about that whole deal with the snakes.  I’m thinking we could use a good old-fashioned snake drive these days.

So I’m not as old as St. Patrick, nor even half as old as the Queen Mother of Pink, but with the luck of the Irish, I’ll get there!  Perhaps in a thousand years, they’ll be drinking libations in my name as well.  It could happen!  In the meantime, I’ll have one of whatever that man on the floor’s having.

And so, happy birthday to me, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you, Dear Friend, Fond Relation, and Gentle Reader!  Beannachtam na Femle Padraig, and let’s get all these snakes out of here!

Oh, look at the time!   I didn’t realize it was that late – I need to get to bed.

Tags: Children // 2 Comments »

Don’t Panic.

While I am certain that I do not speak for all Americans, which is these days mainly a question of decibels and volume, I feel comfortable speaking for some reasonable percentage of us when I describe how many of us feel this morning.

If you haven’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you should.  There is a scene very early where Earthman Arthur Dent has just regained consciousness on a Vogon spaceship, where his friend has rescued him from what is now the smoking remains of what had been our planet.

“…There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! And there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.
He passed out.”

That’s how many of us feel right now.  The enormity of the situation, the magnitude of the mistake – there is no way for our imaginations to feel the impact of climate change denials and LGBT rights reversals and ACA repeals all at once.  It’s too big.   America has gone.  We can’t grasp it.  Many of us never seriously believed it existed anyway.

Don’t panic.  Yes, the Vogons control both houses of Congress, and we’ve elected The Donald to the White House, Zaphod Beeblebrox with one head and small hands.

I have learned a lot from having kids.  One of the most interesting things we noticed is that all of them – the Human Tape Recorder, Number One Son, and the Reigning Queen of Pink – all went through some of the same mechanisms of growth and development; parenting books and the internet tell us that most children do this as well.  When the kids were little, we’d watch them becoming older, more mature, and marvel at their independence – and then suddenly they’d be clingy and fearful.  It seemed they had regressed two years overnight.  Then, a few weeks or a month later, they bounced out and moved on, standing taller than ever, butterflies with new wings.  They had just needed that reassurance, that sense of touching home base, of being sure that there was a safe place behind them before they moved on to the next part of their broader world view.

That’s how I see America right now.

EIGHT WHOLE YEARS with a black president?  All that LGBT legislation protecting the dignity of all people?  The hard-line conservative core reacted like 6-yr-olds.  There was just too much change, too fast.  With this election, conservative America had a chance to regress for a while, to touch home base, and that’s the way the country voted.

Just like my kids at that age, though, we’ve *seen* the broader world.  The genie is out of that bottle.  We know it will be waiting for us; we know we’re going to go back to it.  America would just like a few more years under a fuzzy blanket, please.   Give us 8, 10, 15 years and we’ll be back where we were and then some; we will remember this episode as an embarrassing and brief blip in our history.

That’s my hope, anyway.  Don’t think it’s inevitable – it’s not.   Don’t think it won’t take a lot of effort – it will.  We need to do our best, as the parents of this still-young country, to keep prodding it to be better, to keep calling our elected officials, to keep yelling when yelling will help. to keep whispering when whispering works, to keep loving the country and the idea of the country.

It seems very dire right now, and many of my friends worry that the current spectacle is reminiscent of the Nazis.  They’re not wrong, and there is evil afoot in the world – it looks like intolerance, it looks like intransigence, it looks like the willful suspension of belief in facts, and we must speak against it when we see it.   Fascism is a scary specter, but don’t think it’s inevitable – it’s not.

America may not have been ready for the social progress that it made, but it will be.  This is a road we’re paving slowly, and the pendulum will swing back toward education, toward tolerance, toward dignity and a more worldly world view.

That’s my hope, anyway.

In the mean time…

Don’t Panic.

 

Tags: Children // 5 Comments »

Last night was one of the great days of summer, with the chance to lie on the grass and watch stars shooting overhead, as the Perseids come streaking through our atmosphere, heating up and burning themselves out in a flaming blaze of glory as they crash.  The Human Tape Recorder and the Reigning Queen of Pink stayed up all night last night, on beach towels in the backyard, to watch one of natures great fireworks displays.  Around 1230, they woke me to join them.

I’ve always loved meteor showers, so I did as I was told, brought a blanket outside for a while, and stared up at the stars.  Within about 5 minutes, the score was Team Perseids 4, Team West Nile 3, and Team Zika was up to 7 with a hat trick.  Mosquitoes love me.  The girls were sad to see me go back inside, although that may just have been because I had been drawing fire from the flying vampiric plankton that flies around my back yard.  I itched my way back to my own bed and wished them well, but that’s not what I came to tell you about.

I came to talk about the draft election.

Are you on the fence about voting this November?  Let’s say you vote for Trump, and then let’s fast forward a few years into his administration with the current GOP platform.  (Go ahead, read it.  I’ll wait.)  Now, ask yourself these questions:

If your daughter wants an abortion, or worse, needs an abortion, and she can’t, legally, have one, how will you feel about having voted for a misogynist-in-chief? How will you look your daughter in the eye and tell her that you voted for this man knowing that he doesn’t believe she has the right to make decisions about her own body?

If your teen-aged child, maturing in this political environment, is conflicted about their sexuality and wonders about their possible attraction to their own gender, how will they ask you about it? Knowing that you voted for a party that holds hate in high regard, a party that has pledged to repeal laws allowing adults who love one another to marry, how will you look your child in the eye and tell them that you’re looking forward to their straight sibling’s wedding, but that you voted against their right to have one?  If your gay child should leave the nest to live with their same-sex soulmate, will you remind them that you’ve voted against their right to legally adopt your grandchildren?

When your Muslim friends ask about celebrating Eid in their public school and are laughed at, or worse, while walking past the Ten Commandments or the Christmas tree in the school office, how will you look them in the eye and tell them that you voted for a government that values “America’s Judeo-Christian heritage” more highly than America’s heritage of freedom? Will you remind your Hindu friends that you voted for a party that believes a good understanding of the Bible to be indispensable for the development of an educated citizenry?  Just the Bible, not the Koran, not the Talmud, not the Upanishads, or the Tao Te Ching.

When your neighbor asks you to attend their young son’s funeral, how will you look them in the eye and tell them that you voted for increased magazine capacities in automatic rifles?  That you voted for the right of anybody who hears the voice of god whispering in their ear to carry that gun anywhere they go, Linus with a 5.56-mm security blanket and a hundred rounds in the clip, a good guy with a gun until he saw that kid in the hoodie with his phone, wrong place, wrong time, his mom didn’t know he’d stopped taking his meds two weeks ago, our thoughts and prayers are with you?

When your neighbor asks you to attend a loved one’s funeral after they succumb to an anaphylactic allergic reaction because they ate something that wasn’t accurately labeled, how will you look them in the eye and explain that you voted for a party that has pledged to repeal federal mandates for food labeling?

When you look in the mirror in the morning, will you be able to look yourself in the eye knowing that you voted for a party that holds monochromatic monotheism in higher regard than modern medicine, a party that puts faith before fact, a party that will sideline science, social justice, and STEM schools because stem cell research might offend their narrow notion of God?

You don’t have to vote for Hillary Clinton.  I understand.  She’s a career politician, and she’s made the Faustian bargains that career politicians make.  She’s competent, she’s qualified, and she’s not cuddly and likable.  You don’t have to vote FOR anything.

Against, now – that’s another story.   When you go to the polls November 8th, don’t vote FOR anything.  Press the button that says Hillary Clinton.  You’re not really voting for her.  You’re casting your vote against.

Vote against misogyny.

Vote against racism.

The Trump campaign may flame out like a Perseid meteor long before November, a spectacular magnesium flare streaking across our political sky as millions stay up late to watch.  But it might not.

And if it doesn’t, and if in November you find yourself faced with the dilemma of decision, I urge you to cast your ballot for sanity and competence.   If it really bothers you, remind yourself that you’re not voting for Hillary Clinton.

You’re voting against hate.

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Children // 3 Comments »

So there we were, once again on the open road, driving into a cloudbank from hell. The rains that we drove through that Thursday in June killed 20 people, destroying homes and families alike. The weather is capricious – many people were devastated, while the biggest impact to us was a cleaner car, proving that there is no justice to be found in this world.    It also resulted in a more full hotel, but we would only find that out later.

We were driving into the Homestead, which bills itself as the oldest resort in the country and has the provenance – and sense of antiquity – to back it up.  Celebrating 250 years in business this year, it boasts 15,000 acres of fields and forests, with activities ranging from wading and swimming pools to hot springs and warm springs where Thomas Jefferson used to “take the waters” for his health and welfare, from horseback riding and falconry to archery and skeet, from hiking the gorge to just sitting back on the veranda and watching the world go by.  Sitting, typing this from the veranda, I present my view.

I can easily imagine my friend Mark Twain sitting on this same veranda. Mind you, this particular building wasn’t completed until the 1920s, so he certainly didn’t, but he would have enjoyed it.

Thursday dinner was at their Casino restaurant, with a table that couldn’t stop moving.  While the table was loose from the base, and the base was not stable on the floor, we still knew it was actually the Reigning Queen of Pink causing our dinners to bounce – the table was rocking in rhythm. Any of the rest of us and it would have been rocking asymmetrically; with her at the helm, our dinners were executing a perfect sine wave.  The restaurant at the Casino (which turns out of be a word used in its original meaning, which has to do with indoor sports and has nothing, to my regret, to do with gambling) had a small army of staff milling about, which was odd because none of them seemed to be able to find our table.  I mean, the movement might have been throwing them off, but still.

As the Homestead is celebrating 250 in business this year, they are setting off fireworks each Friday in the summer.  To further commemorate this 250th anniversary, they’re serving a different cake every day of the year, in the lobby with tea from 3-4pm.  Friday’s was lemon blueberry – most excellent! I can’t imagine more than about 100 ways to do cake; hats off to their chef.

Speaking of Anniversaries: allow me to digress a moment on the reason for the trip. My parents this June celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The same month saw my mother turn 70 a few days later.  They are amazing!  (For those of you doing the math at home, yes, my father plays up the fact that she was a teen-aged bride.)

My father, having been a math major, added 50 with 70 and declared it a 120 celebration – and celebrate we did, with them and the Very Clever Aunt and Her Michael. We are, at least on my side, new to the “resort” scene. In this case, certainly, I could get used to this in a hurry.

Friday we were joined by the aforementioned Very Clever Aunt and Her Michael; dinner was at Jefferson’s.  There any number of amazing restaurants at the Homestead, plus four bars.  In point of fact, dinner was preceded by drinks with Kipling, who went out of his way to ensure that we had excellent seating and an excellent time.  Jefferson’s was a great dinner; I enjoyed braised lamb to die for with gnocchi and sage.  One of the funniest bits was actually a few hours before dinner; I got a call from the restaurant confirming our dinner reservations – they had meant to reach my father.  I decided that I might not be “the” Lang, but I was “a” Lang, and I was qualified to confirm our reservation.  The RQOP, who’s first name starts begins the alphabet, stepped out of the shadows and announced that no, SHE was “A. Lang,” by god.  I stood corrected, but I confirmed the reservations anyway.

Following dinner and the fireworks, we retired to the Very Clever Grandparent’s room.  We had all been carefully instructed: “no presents.”  We decided that “no presents” didn’t count if the presents were consumable and stood a good chance of not leaving the grounds.

During the course of the trip, I posted a postcard or two – and found a wonder. I have always wanted to drop a letter into one of those old-fashioned “mail your letters here in this box on the wall” boxes; the old Cutler Mailing System letterboxes.   As a former letter carrier, those things were cool – a blend of art and function, usually with old art-deco styling to them.  I doublechecked first, since many times you see them and they’re no longer being serviced or checked on, but the Homestead confirmed that theirs is still in use, and if you’re on the upper floor, you can still drop your letter in the upper box and it will slide into this one.

This town is small enough that the post office closes before noon on Saturday, and the Homestead doesn’t bother – so any mail that misses on Friday will go out Monday.  I am perhaps irrationally excited to have mailed things from a Cutler box.

The next day dawning bright and clear, we hiked the Cascades Gorge. That sounds simple, but it isn’t.  The reason it isn’t is named Brian La Fountain, who is the funniest, most well informed, most energetic, most passionate tour guide I have ever encountered. Number One Son, who does NOT want to go outside much, not only expounded on his appreciation for the hike, but gave Brian a hug – a rare compliment from a 16-yr-old boy.

The hike itself was amazing. I shall include only a sample of the views, because if I posted all the pictures I took, this post would take more time to load than we took hiking the gorge.

Brian explained a dozen things in a dozen ways, and did so while keeping up a running patter of puns and jokes that jollied even my jaded children into enjoying themselves. He is a terrific guide; making sure people can hear him, making sure we understood the rules and their reasons. I also noticed his quiet attention to the details that he didn’t talk about – he was very careful about counting the group, making sure that everyone was keeping up and doing OK with climbing over the wet bridges and steeper rocks, without making it at all obvious that he was doing so: The mark of a great guide is that you don’t see the attention he’s paying. He’s a great guide. He also has a gift for stand-up comedy to rival Leno.  He told us only one lie: He said he was 50 years old.  No one with his exuberance, good looks, and joy de vivre could be so old.

The interesting views of nature are not limited to the gorge, however.  Right outside our door was a tree.  Well, a few dozen trees, really, but one of them stood out – most trees, growing as they do straight up and tall, have a somewhat phallic look to them anyway.  Very few have the balls to show for it, though.  (The Human Tape Recorder decided this one much be named Johnny One-Nut.)  The most embarrassing bit is that I took the picture, then sent it in a text to a good friend, female type.

BUMD:  Tree balls – bigger than I thought they’d be!
Her:  Wow that’s an interesting tree.  That protrusion looks quite phallic.
BUMD: Oh my god, I’m sending you deciduous dick pics. I’m so busted!

So, I’ve joined the ranks of the Bros who send dick pics.  I feel so basic!

In addition to the amazing nature scenes, there are outdoor pools and spas and springs, plus there’s an indoor pool – in case it’s raining, or you’re just feeling indoorsy.  And when I say indoor pool, I mean This Is What I Want My Basement To Look Like.   Is that too much to ask?  This pool is larger than my house and would have made the Romans proud.  One of the best parts of swimming was seeing Her Michael’s tattoo: It says “#FFFFFF TRASH” – which is funny on a lot of levels, not least that it’s only supported by Netscape 5.0 these days.

We had a terrific time all around.  SOBUMD and I were instructed on our golf swings, the girls went horseback riding with FOBUMD, and the ladies took in the wonders of the Spa.  We all wound up in the outdoor pool (of course it has a bar, why do you ask?) at one point or another, complete with its massive water slides.  Canoeing, however, was cancelled due to the torrential rains that we’d driven through – a good call on the part of the Homestead.  There was a delightful dinner at a grill named after Sam Snead, who is famous in the golf world and called this town home.  On top of all that, I was very lucky and, with 5 minutes to spare, had the  chance to satisfy a life-long interest in falconry with Remington, the Harris Hawk.

Falconry is fascinating.  It turns out that while much falconry is in fact accomplished with falcons, much more is done with hawks here in the United States.  The Homestead has many birds and trainers; I was introduced to Linda – and Remington.  You need 2 and half years of training apprenticeship to receive a falconry license in the US.  Linda names some of her birds, such as Remington, after guns – because as far as the US fish and wildlife department is concerned, in her hands, that’s a lethal hunting weapon.  This is somewhat incongruous considering that you need practically nothing to own an actual Remington.

Wearing the gauntlet, I had Remington land on my hand and then, with a slight flick of the wrist, sent her aloft again, on her way to the nearby roof.  Despite a wingspan of close to 3 feet, she weighs only slightly more than 2 pounds – and can fly through any opening wider than her chestplate.  Linda had her demonstrate this by standing us increasing close together and convincing her to fly between us – impressively nearly knocking my phone from my hand in the process.  I was wing-whacked a few times – it was an experience I’ve thought about for more than 40 years, and I was thrilled.

That evening was the last, and as fitting of a final dinner at such a place and to commemorate such a 120 celebration, dinner was in the formal dining room.  If you’re picturing something from Downton Abby, you’re not too far wrong.  We dressed, we all dressed.  Even those of us who do not, as a rule, dress for dinner, dressed.

That’s right – the kids cleaned up.  Even Number One Son, who looks slightly like Kramer from Seinfeld in this picture.  Glamour seems to come more naturally to the girls.   I tend to wear business attire pretty much every weekday, so the whole business of getting dressed up wasn’t as traumatic for me as it was for Number One Son – he dressed for the ages, for one of the most formal events of his young life.  I dressed for a Tuesday.  Hardly seems fair, really.  Also, the Very Clever Aunt and Her Michael were not exempt from this!  While the caption over their heads states “Birds of North America,” they are from Baltimore, and so technically I think this is a picture of Orioles.

The dinner was sumptuous, with live music, yummy wine, appetizers, and dancing – until SOBUMD took her first bite of her dinner and had an anaphylactic reaction to something in the sauce. She’s highly allergic to cinnamon, and while the staff didn’t think there was any in the dish, there must have been something close enough to it.  She had been looking forward to that plate since before we’d arrived, so not being able to eat it was killing her – unfortunately very nearly literally; it took me 20 minutes to get her back to the room, along with several hits from her emergency inhaler and enough Benadryl to stop a horse.  (She decided against the epi-pen only because that would have involved an ambulance ride to the nearest ER, and the Benadryl and inhalers were starting to kick in – along with not wanting to further complicate the evening.)   The rest of the crew was able to finish dinner (although the prime rib evidently got the better of Number One Son), and we all made it to our respective beds.  Luckily, we all woke in the morning as well.

I woke early and took a few pre-dawn pictures of the place for posterity, to compliment the pictures of the previous evenings.  The building is too large for any one picture; these only just begin to provide a sense of scale.  There are nearly 500 rooms, all of which were full while we were there – largely because The Greenbriar, which is only a few dozen miles away, had flooded in the recent rains and sent a lot of its overflow to The Homestead.  Our building itself had taken some water, but nothing compared to the devastation around us.  The wet grounds provided morning fog for the sun to burn through, the kind that armature photographers love.

Eventually the sunrise did what it always does to such times, and it was time be under way, back to the open road, and home.  We returned to our lives feeling like Muggles, bereft of the magic words that had sustained us for the past days:  “Please charge this to room 7155.”   It turns out that doesn’t work at my local grocery store at all.  We also missed the whole concept of having cocktails served before going through for dinner.  This is an inherently civilized thing to do.  If I could have brought the redoubtable Kipling home with us, I would have.

The after action report on the 120 celebration and the Homestead Weekend was best summed up in an email exchange between FOBUMD, who organized and funded the entire trip, and the rest of us.  A few days after we arrived home and became reacquainted with our more usual standard of living, he sent the entire party a note thanking us for celebrating with them.

For a change, I was speechless.  The English language doesn’t have a lot of good words to convey the sense of appreciation we felt, but I was reminded of FOBUMD’s description of an evening he spent, years ago, with his brother George. “A brother is someone who picks you up in the rain with little notice, takes you home, stays up past 2 am while you talk and finish all his Scotch, then drives you back to the airport in the morning and says ‘Great to see you’ – and means it!”

A father, to continue this example, is someone who celebrates a set of anniversaries and birthdays by taking the whole family to an amazing resort, coordinates specific activities for specific people, makes sure the logistics are so seamless as to be invisible, pays for it all, and then thanks US for coming – and means it.

He concluded that we have the best family in the world, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree.  We’re looking forward to the 100th anniversary!

 

 

 

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If this blog had any formal education, it would be in 4th Grade and almost as smart as Donald Trump.

Ten years ago I opened the Big Ugly Man Doll for business.  I had no idea what I was doing, just that I was doing it.  For the record, SOBUMD dragged me into the digital age kicking and screaming all the way.  She did not simply encourage me to start blogging.   She set up the initial account, over at LiveJournal, sat me in front of the screen, and said, “Type.”

This is all her fault, and I’ve never truly thanked her for it.  Thank you, my love!

My First Post was as follows:

First Post!  w00t!  Somehow it’s less exciting when it’s my own journal. It’s like getting all worked up about being the first to write in the new diary, and then remembering that you live by yourself, in a tower, with only the howling wind to read your deathless prose. Not entirely unlike the sense of serenity and satisfaction you got from watching your digital wristwatch flip to the new year at midnight. (You knew that you could reset the time to watch it do that whenever you wanted, and that it was usually off by 2-3 minutes anyway, but it didn’t matter, did it? We were crazy then.)

So, welcome. You’re probably in the wrong place.  I am the Big Ugly Man Doll.  Stick around and I’ll tell you why.

We’ve come a long way in 10 years.  Road trips.  Pigs.  The ManFAQ, still one of my favorite bits, to be honest.  An entire year of weekly horoscopes – and wow, that was a beast!  Do you realize there are 12 of the damn things?  Every week?  And I have met people I would never otherwise have met – wonderful friends, fellow bloggers, some of whom I’ve met in person, some of whom I’m simply looking forward to meeting in person some day.  Amazing people and storytellers, sharing snippets of real life.   There have been a few passes at the end of the world (which, yes, predicted the rise of the Donald back in 2011), and countless musings.

It’s tapered off recently, not because I’m any less irritated at the state of the world – quite the opposite, in fact!  I simply find myself at the confluence of the rivers of Time, Inspiration, and Energy with decreasing frequency these days.  It will get better.  I’m sure I’ll grab the tail of that highly caffeinated tiger again, and you’ll all be forced once again to read my deathless prose over the roar of the howling wind in that tower.

I don’t think I ever mentioned this, but that bit in the last line, “You’re probably in the wrong place” – I stole that without shame or remorse from Steven Brust’s blog, the DreamCafe.  He’s changed the tagline now, but it’s still a great blog (and he is a great writer).

So thank you all, Dear Friends, Fond Relations, and Gentle Readers, for staying with me for the ride.  I shall remain BUMD, and I shall get back to writing more often.  Real Soon Now.  And for anyone who’s thinking, “oh no, thank you, BUMD” – trust me, thank SOBUMD.   I wouldn’t be here without her!

 

 

 

 

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