#1 (Not the Potty Kind)

I don't know why I decided to write one of these things. That'sprobaby the first line written by 78% of the people who do this; that would probably be an interesting study, but it's true. I simply don' t know.

My sister might be on the right track. She calls me a "words person." She's said that a few times, but I remember once she announced it to everyone at my neice's first birthday party. My sister was helping her daughter open her gifts, cuz one year old's aren't too good at it, some sort of lack of thumb control that doesn't get sorted out until deep into the second year of life. On her own, my neice had only managed to tear some of the paper off most of the gifts, punch herself in the head, and eat some tape. Granted, a one year old trying to spit out tape that's stuck to her tongue is a pretty amusing sight (trust me, the video is worth watching again and again), but it's not exactly how my sister had scripted the party. Regardless, I'm pretty certain that more people would have enjoyed the tape spitting than the opening of the gifts, but that's not in the birthday party handbook, so we had to move on.

Eventually my sister, and my neice, who was now eating a clump of hair she'd managed to tear out of a very irritated cat's butt, got to my present. I had bought my niece the Dr. Suess Birthday Book. I can't remember the exact title, and I'm too lazy to go to Amazon and look it up, but you know the book. That wasn't really the whole present. I'd also decided to write a poem for my neice's special day, I'd decided to try my hand at writng a Dr. Suess style poem just for her called "Hooray hooray, you're one today... " I have a tendancy to do things like that. I wrote one for my mom's fiftieth birthday, for my sister's college graduation, and I even proposed to my wife in a poem, but this was different. All the previous poems were for an audience of one. I hadn't given much thought to it before, but as smart as she was, cat butt hair and all, my neice couldn't read, so someone else had to. That someone was my sister. Out loud. Infront of the entire party.

She prefaced the reading with, "get ready to cry everyone, my brother is a words person." Don't get me wrong, I'm a guy's guy kinda guy. I love football and action movies where people get punched in the ear for no apparent reason and hockey (only the fights though) and scantily clad women,and I'm inexplicably drawn to kickboxing on ESPN2 at 3 in the morning, so I'm not talking about those flowery poems about perfume and love and thou and thee and dead British guys in tights and frilly collars, poetry can be much more than that, just ask Dr. Suess or Shel Silverstein. It's just that I like to write. I like words. I like to have fun with them. I like to play with them, and poetry doesn't have rules. I don't like rules. Rule suck.

I think of theEnglish language as a big ole pile of word clay, that I can mold into whatever I want, and I don't even need to wear a smock. See, theEnglish language has words like "smock." How can you not love words when there are words like "smock?"

I love that word clay. If I want to make a horse, I can. If I want to make a ducky, I can. I can make whatever I want, even if it's a horse-ducky hybrid thing, a hordusecky, and you can't stop me. You see, I'm one of those kinds of people that, now, will not be able to get horduseckies out of my head, with their beaks and hooves and manes and incessent quacking all the time... Soon, you'll see, there'll be horse-ducky stories and horse-ducky poems and horse-ducky songs (I bet you can't wait 'til karaoke night now). Cuz, that's what I do. I write. I take that big ole pile of English word clay, and I write. I love to write. Whether or not I'm good at it is irrelevent, it's the process I love. It's what I do. You might get bored and surf the web, or flip the channels, or go shopping, or some old fashioned gator rastlin', or try to talk your spouse into letting you adopt a monkey, or whatever it is that you people do. Me, I write. Constantly. Notebooks upon notebooks full ofstuff.

I write whatever's on my mind, which is usually alot, I think my brain is like an 8 track player, I'm not exactly surehow an 8 track player works, if there's even any out there that still work, but I like the concept. Bear with me for a second, while I explore this idea. I would say, in my brain, there's always at least 8 different things running through it at any given time. Example, right now I have -
What am I going to do at work Monday?
I hope it doesn't slap me in the face.
Where are the Christmas lights?
What is that thing on the window?
Monkeys are funny.
Where did I put that little package collection slip thingie and do I need it tomorrow at the post office?
I need to floss more.
Where did my wife just go?
Oh, there's a stain on the couch.
Does anyone think Carrot Top is the least bit amusing?
Why is the dog doing that?

That's eleven. Eleven things, and each of those things made me start thinking about other things. It's like I have a 11 trackplayer in my head, and no one even invented one of those. I often wonder if those scattered thoughts are what everyone has in their brains. Do other people focus and concentrate on only one or two things? I can't even imagine that. Sure it makes life tricky. It's hard to concentrate. It's hard to stay on task. It's hard to have a conversation with someone who is boring, but that's just the way my brain works. And it works for me, cuz I write stories. I write essays. I write endless lists. I write poems. All that writing helps me get the ideas and thoughts and out of my head and into the world, and I love to find just the right way to communicate my ideas to people.

Maybe my sister is right. Maybe all of that makes me a "words person." Maybe that stain on the couch is goulash. Goulash, that's a better word that smock. Maybe I knew all along why I decided to write one of these blog things. Maybe, just maybe, if you stick with me and check back every now and again, you'll see a poem about a hordusecky hybrid thing.