A few of my favorites
This is going to be a tough one.
Seriously, sometimes these columns jump in my face and demand to be written. They swirl in my head, make their way through my heart, then come out on my fingertips and onto the keyboard.
Sometimes something just ticks you off and you have to express it or it will eat your innards.
“Innards.” Kind of a cool word.
Try as I might not to let politics enter any of my columns, you have to remember that I’m a human — I’m more than just some overly-large, bald man who exudes a James Bond/Jason Momoa-type aura. I am the “Nearly Dead Sexiest Man Alive” in the elderly, overweight and bald, and way past my “sell by” date, category.
No, I did not just make that category up.
Sorry. Distracted. My forte.
Politics does sometimes skirt or dip into my columns. I don’t mean it to, really. But its cliché and stupid to write about celebrity news all the time. I mean, who cares, right?
Nobody can actually understand anything I write about myself about when I grew up because, face it, I didn’t grow up here. I can’t recall Friday football nights at Hoskins, or the gang gathering around after a Clinton vs. Oak Ridge football game. That’s a really awesome memory to have, but it’s not mine.
I can write some funny stuff — I have the plaques that’s say other people (out-of-state people who judge such things for the Tennessee Press Association) think I can write some funny stuff.
But how much funny stuff can you take in a year? And maybe you want your hometown newspaper columnist to be a bit more serious. To be less “irreverent,” because someone told me once that they didn’t like that about my columns. That I was “irreverent.”
My mother and father didn’t raise me to alter your world view, though. You believe what you believe. Maybe, sometimes, I provide something to think about.
Like, when I say, “I like the word, ‘Monkey.’”
I just like the way it sounds. It sounds monkey-ish. It’s the perfect word for that animal, in my opinion. I like the word “plethora,” too. My favorite sentence might be something along the line of, “With a plethora of grand baseball expertise on the field, the Chicago White Sox made the dreadful Chicago Cubs look like an uncoordinated knot of toads and/or troupe of monkeys.”
There’s a lot of words in that sentence that I just like. I like to say them, I like to hear them.
I also like learning about the names of groups of animals, like a “knot of toads,” and a “murder of crows.”
A dear and close friend of mine told about learning there is such a thing as an “unkindness” of … something.
Drove me crazy for about three hours until I realized that, I, too (like some people in the world), have Internet. It’s an “unkindness of ravens.”
Birds have really cool group names. So do some mammals. A “business of ferrets.” That’s just kinda awesome. My grandmother told me once that you haven’t lived a life worth being remembered if it wasn’t filled with kindness. If it wasn’t filled with love. And I’m not talking about putting foodstuffs in a blessing box (be sure to do that, by the way), and then bragging about it. You do those kinds of things for the joy it brings you — inside. The sense that you did good, did something for someone else just because ...
Because you love them, as a fellow human beings on this crazy planet.
We should, I think, do more of that. And more often. And maybe not just because it makes you feel good, but because it helps someone else. That was redundant, wasn’t it?
Another favorite word. I’ll have to fit that in to my next “ideal” sentence.
It’s all well and good that you count your coins and pat yourself on the back for making something of yourself. It’s the American way — Go forth and multiply dollars and cents, right?
Do good. Harm no one. Enjoy life.
So, a shout out to Fox and Farley law offices, and Bruce Fox, for the concept of “Blessing Boxes” in our community.
They truly “surf.”
Another favorite word and/or phrase of mine.
