CAUTIOUS BABY BOOMER BLOGGER VISION

As a cautious baby boomer blogger harvesting stories and insights for more than four thousand (4031) blog posts running seven hundred and fifty words each, on average, comes to more than three million words.

Divide that by 90,000, the sweet spot number of words in a novel, and if I were a novelist I’d have written thirty three books by now.

Instead, I wrote, and continue to write, boomerpdx.

For that I blame higher education, college, grades 13-16, or 17, depending on your schedule.

There I was, a happy moron, happy to be dense, happy let it ride any which way life turned.

After my best year in sports, I got an offer to go to college and continue playing sports and get paid.

The experience didn’t match the expectations I’d built up the year before, so I blamed the school and joined the Army to continue playing sports and getting paid.

It turned out worse than my freshman year, but I learned what it took to make it to the next level. And?

I didn’t have it. I had something, just not that.

In college I took classes taught by friends of the coach to keep everyone eligible.

It wasn’t rocks for jocks, but close.

The one that got me interested in learning more than sixth grade history was a middle-aged drunk with hygiene problems he brought to class.

He was a jacket and tie man with a yellow necked white shirt, a narrow face, straight down mustache, and flat hair with short sides.

Instead of putting on a professor show, the song and dance of higher education excitement to be so lucky to teach such bright students, he gave the class the sort of dead-eye expression he got after three rounds and counting in a bar last night.

I overheard two scholarship guys talking:

 

Guy 1: He looks like shit.

Guy 2: That’s his normal look.

Guy 1: How do you know?

Guy 2: I saw him at the bar staring at his drink like he was about to teach it a lesson, like he looks at us.

 

The lesson I got?

Professor of History sounds like a prestigious honor, but not if you missed your true calling.

For me that could be ‘novelist or blogger.’ Maybe him, too.

 

Why The Dead Eye?

In my last year of college before graduating with a BS in American History with a focus on Northwest History and a minor in Latin American History, I took rocks for jocks.

It was my last science credit. I would have had a BA if I knew how to speak another language.

Hard to say which was my strong suite, college math or college French; strong meaning which one I dropped first.

The geology professor was a small man who looked dig-ready, retirement ready, since this was his last term.

His weren’t the dead eyes of the history man. The similarity was in their feelings.

They both seemed like guys who missed their boat, but still got on a good one.

Both had been in the classroom for decades and had a certain remorse I recognized from my summer pulling green chain at the Georgia Pacific mill in Bunker Hill.

I moved from the green chain to feeding a wood dryer with an older man who’d followed millwork from the south, to the midwest, and now the Northwest.

 

Mill Man: I’ve been doing this kind of work since I dropped out of school at sixteen. I already knew all I needed to know. The only time off I got was for WWII when I was stationed in Hawaii. 

Some guys discharged out there and never came back after the Big One.

I even thought about it.

 

He had a look in his eye I’d never seen, kind of a dead eye with a small sparkle that looked like sun coming through surf bubbles in a warm water ocean kind of look.

The man had memories.

The history man had a mind full of untold stories related to his thesis.

The rock man had a world of exploration he’d never chip at.

They all had something missing.

 

Who Would Approach An Elk In Rut?

Most often we see people approaching buffalo, or buffalo approaching people.

We see it when it ends poorly and someone goes flying.

You walk up to an elk for a quick photo and you’ll notice the difference in horns between the two animals.

A buffalo might hook you, gore you, and swing you up in the air with a shake of their head.

The elk, on the other hand, may gore with one of many horns on both sides of their rack.

They might take you for a ride in the rack cradle and you’ll wish it was a simple gore and toss.

When something is dangerous enough to warrant warnings, beware.

We’re all good on this one?

 

PS:

We have elections in America to get a second chance.

If the person in office is doing a bang-up job and earned your approval, vote for them.

If the person in office is a mouthpiece for someone else, someone who urges voters to imagine it’s him on the ballot, take another look.

Who is voting for an imaginary candidate with felony convictions, a dismissive attitude toward the laws of the land we all work to live by, a man who governs under the concept that laws are laws because he says so.

 

PSS:

Look at your ballot and vote for the people who seem to understand the job at hand.

Vote for people with the education and experience to do a better job than what’s being done.

Vote for the people endorsed by officials and organizations you’re familiar with.

Vote like it means something when your governor says, like Tate Reeves of Mississippi who promised, “If I’m elected governor, I will work for President Trump.”

Mississippi is the 32nd largest by area and 35th-most populous of the 50 U.S. states and has the lowest per-capita income.

It’s also #28 in state education ranking.

Oregon is ranked #39 in the same U.S. News and World Report.

And #48 in economy.

Vote for smarter; stay away from the elk in rut.