getting livingsimpleton off the ground

01/02/10

Encouraged by friends and family to use my latest enforced home confinement (more on that later) to advantage, I'm firing up this weblog. I hate the word blog. It sounds so...well, blah-g. Anyway, I've been particularly encouraged by my wife who probably figures that any time I spend pinned down to the keyboard hoping to be creative is time that she won't have to talk to me. Fine.

Actually, I'm excited about the prospects for this thing. I'll be able to formalize and sanitize some of my rants about things that stir me up: family, friends, my interrupted and now stagnant career in the college bookstore industry, Twins baseball, politics, jazz, movies, books, crosswords and the passing parade in general. I've got a few contacts at local law firms so I'll probably be able to find an attorney to defend me against the worst charges of libel and slander and enough friends (I think) to risk losing a few if sensitivities get bruised. My family has moved well past the point of even hoping that there's any redemption for me and now relies almost exclusively on rolling their collective eyes at whatever stupid thing I've done lately. Mostly though, it'll be me who'll be the laughing stock here. I've sensed for quite a while now that it's usually best to be quick with jokes at my own expense in order to beat anyone else to the punch.

I'm currently scheduled for surgery this coming Thursday to repair (ok, re-repair) a ruptured quad muscle of the left leg. I'd originally battered the poor thing back in July while up in the north woods. Getting out of that situation was tricky at best so I must have subconsciously decided to keep it a little more local this time around. Slipping and falling on the sidewalk in front of my house on Christmas day definitely made for an easier trip to urgent care than getting the Cook County first responders and ambulance out to the end of the Arrowhead Trail and back again. I'm sure that those folks up north are still getting plenty of laughs out of that stupid-tourist story and don't really need to see me any time soon anyway.

Here I sit with surgery a week away and another 3-4 month recovery period looming after that. What better way to while away the time than to do this on-line journal thing? Unless I can get my hands on a complete run of 30 Rock dvds on the cheap. My wife, Miz Susan, takes some credit for jinxing us with this latest fiasco. She bought me this cute forest green t-shirt with the motto "Live Simply". As if anything has ever been simple for me or for her since she met me. Our lives definitely took a sharp left hand veer away from the simple life with my Christmas morning acrobatics and maybe she did jinx us. Hence the weblog title, livingsimpleton. Da-da!!