Anything goes...

As you may have noticed, I renamed the venue because the name January was really just a place-keeper anyway and thankfully, it is not January anymore. Plus I came up with a name I like better. So have at it.

Bob and a little friend he likes
to call "old blue."

I was talking with my brother-in-law last week about my blog, hoping for some positive feedback. I generally try hard to ignore his opinions because so often he is just trying to provoke me. It’s the big brother in him. For instance, when we first bought our house all of the rooms were painted in very flat, drab, dark colors. More depressing shades are hard to find. So the first thing I did (or kindly asked the husband to do) was to repaint every room with bright, happy colors and the bro-in-law (Bob) is fond of telling me that I “emasculated” the house. I wish now I had simply responded, “good, that’s what I meant to do.” Because who needs some figuratively heavy-handed and testosterone-loaded house looming over them every minute? Instead I tried to sell him on the beauty of my color choices – which was fruitless. But unlike decorating, when it comes to writing and the English language, I do respect Bob’s opinion. While not scoring tremendously high on the ambition charts (and I’m confident he won’t take offense at that), Bob did get unnaturally high scores on his SATs and GREs and he was an English major so I tend to think he knows a little something about writing and language. Plus he’s a real New York Times crossword puzzle enthusiast; not necessarily on par with puzzle master Will Shortz or anything, but I’ve rarely seen him unable to finish any puzzle, any day of the week. The point is, I was hoping for his stamp of approval and feeling a little nervous about soliciting his opinion. I was hoping to avoid criticism (I'm sensitive).

He reported that he has indeed been keeping up with my writing. His favorite post so far was the profanity-laden one about the f-word. He says it sounded the most natural, like it was just me “riffing” on everyday “stuff”. I have known Bob since I was 14 years old so I guess he would know what my natural speech sounds like. Well, I don’t know that I actually spoke more than 3 words in front of him until sometime in my 20s (I was very shy) but still, the guy’s been listening to me for quite some time. You’d think if all he wanted to hear was me “riffing” he could just call me up on the phone. Let us note, however, that when I do call my sister’s house and he answers, I say, “hi Bob! It’s me.” To which he usually replies “oh, it’s just you,” and real unenthusiastic about it, too. Nevertheless, he liked that little bit of writing so I figure that counts for something.

But of course, not every post can be about swearing. While it feels good to let it all out, I’m no Gordon Ramsey or anything. My feeling is that there should be some point to each post and if the point can be made without all those four-letter words, well then I should aspire to be one of those good authors who once knew better words, right? I don’t know, I guess the point of this thought is that I know I’m going to be really boring to people some days and some folks probably do not care about anything I have to say about autism but that’s okay. It feels intuitive to me to just do this. So this is for you Bob, and you can say whatever you like. Just don’t call me fat.