Category: Uncategorized

I could give a long discourse on the significance of the Thanksgiving holiday. But I know probably everyone is more interested celebrating than reading blogs. Consequently, I simply want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving wonderland!. I hope everyone will have fun, frivolity, food, and more food. And please, try to be civil during discussions of politics, football, and overcooked green bean casseroles at the dinner table.

Weird Fact

A horse named Thanksgiving won the Travers Stakes in 1938. He was trained by Mary Hirsch, who was the first woman in the United States licensed as a Thoroughbred trainer.

The German artist Joseph Beuys once said, “Everyone is an artist”.  However, not everyone is great in every artistic endeavor. 

I tried to be a singer, but I sing like a frog stuck in a rack.  Nowadays whenever I sing the scales, my dog starts howling like a coyote on the lonesome prairie. 

I can’t draw except for Picassoish stick figures and squares that look like blobs of chewing gum.  I could call it “abstract art”, but everyone would know I have less talent than a middle school artiste. 

I played the cymbals in kindergarten, but I couldn’t stand the sound of clanging metal.  Besides, how many cymbalists became rock, rap, or even elevator music stars?  Maybe I should have played a different instrument like the glockenspiel, the bag pipes, or spoons. I might have been a contestant on American Idol. 

I did some acting in junior high school.  However, I didn’t have the movie star good looks, though I could always be a comedian.   Groucho Marx, Jackie Gleason, George Carlin, John Belushi, Rodney Dangerfield, and David Letterman were not exactly handsome, yet they made a fortune telling jokes.   

Yet the allure of Hollywood, Broadway, and the local comedy clubs didn’t allure me.  Maybe because I don’t like being a ham in front of an audience.  

I don’t know how to sculpt, I am not a great photographer, and I dance more like Fred Flintstone than Fred Astaire. 

That is why I write.  It is the one artistic endeavor I can do successfully. 

Writing for me is not easy.  Not only am I not a fast typist, I suffer from that dreadful malady—writers block.  Besides, with the internet, I spend too much time reading news stories and looking at sports scores than writing sentences and paragraphs. 

Besides not being easy, writing can be so exasperating.  I am a perfectionist when it comes to the written word.  I can spend hours writing a simple declarative sentence.  Besides, punctuation can be as nerve wracking as seeing the Greek letters in calculus theorems.  I would like to write something without punctuation, but then my writing would look like incomprehensible streams of consciousness. 

Yet the writer’s life does have its allures.  Even if I don’t write down a single word, I enjoy sitting in front of my trusty computer devising great thoughts.  While I am not a tailor or a tinkerer, I am definitely a great thinker. 

Like every wordsmith, I dream of authoring a New York Times bestseller or winning the Nobel Prize,  But even though I don’t, I will continue writing and writing. 

Weird Fact

When writing, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck used up to 60 pencils a day.