7 Things

Sure, it was a spam tag, but el dude posted a link to my blog, so I don't feel so bad playing along. Plus, I found a way to make my response vaguely original, so I'm going with it. I need the material anyway. My life is low on close encounters with the famous kind, so I reverted to the original seven weird things about yourself.

So without any more yammerin', here's seven weird things about me.

1. I have a soft spot for country music, not the new crap that bills itself as country but the stuff recorded from before I was born. Maybe it's something to do with its reflections of the rhythms and melodies of the speech from my youth or maybe it's just the soundtrack to a childhood spent next to my grandfather in his truck, the radio always tuned to the local station. Whatever it is, I love classic country like Johnny Cash and "Willie, Waylon, and the boys." Start moving too much into the '80s with Conway Twitty and his rhinestone leisure suits and you start losing me. I even really like Bluegrass. Of course, the old country is still alive, just in a drastically different evolutionary stage. If you listen closely to bands like The Shins or even not so closely to bands like Iron and Wine, you can hear the refrains of bluegrass and country from long ago underneath their hipster melodies.

2. I would actually undergo surgery if they could implant an audio system directly into my head that followed my tastes and kept me supplied with a constant soundtrack custom suited to me and my current mood. I can't imagine a body modification that would make me happier, actually. That would be my heroin.

3. I actually felt a little twinge of loss at the news of Bobby Fischer's death, even if the fact he was a raging anti-Semite and the fact he was happy about 9/11. Brilliance is hard to ignore, and for me, hard not to love. He reminds me of sitting on a lake in the north Georgia mountains playing chess with a younger cousin under the tutelage of an older, autistic cousin. I think David and I were the only ones who really "got" Scott.

4. I once almost got kicked out of college when I was still in high school. I was taking college English courses through a nearby private college and they had been sending a professor to our campus, but after the first quarter of classes, they stopped sending one out, leaving us with an unclear future as to our senior English credits. I sent an angry, quite vulgar e-mail to the generic "Contact Us" address on their website, honestly not thinking anyone would really read it or would just delete it if they did. I think I may have mentioned something about their molesting dogs or the like. Unfortunately for me, they did read the e-mail and they did take it seriously. It was a very uncomfortable moment, although it did help develop that quality of mine where I tend to watch what I say around people. If I say something bad about you, it is almost guaranteed to be said to your face and intended for you to laugh about as well. You've probably never heard me trash talk many people.

5. I once got called into the police station for a bombing at Wal-Mart while I was in high school. A group of friends and I had gone to Wal-Mart to pick up supplies for a band trip to find Wal-Mart without power, so we immediately turned around and headed back to the high school. The next week we come back to find out that someone had thrown out a Works bomb, which was a 2-liter coke bottle into which a coil of tin foil was place and as it was eaten away by a caustic drain cleaner since pulled from the market, the gas pressure in the bottle increased until the bottle exploded. I know how they're made because those same friends and I had actually made 20 oz. versions in the woods behind my house a few weeks earlier, but got freaked out and quit. Still, we hadn't done anything of the sort in a public place, much less the parking lot of Wal-Mart. No matter our innocence, it was a very scary event for kids who'd never gotten into any real trouble to have to go in and talk to a detective about what we were doing there, how we exited the parking lot and so on. Luckily, because we actually were innocent, the cops believed our story and nothing happened. Still, I've never really been one to believe in the power of truth to win in the end, so I fully expected to have no way to discredit the guy who said that we were the ones who did it.

6. I was never a video game geek. Considering the kids I hung out with in middle and high school, my level of intelligence and my general lack of social skills, you'd think I would have had gamers' thumb in high school, but video games usually bored me. I read as much as you would have expected from me, but most of the video games I owned spent most of their time unplayed. I could handle fighting games, but anything that took longer than 2 minutes to find a measurable level of success lost my interest in a hurry. Yes, I was too ADHD for video games.

7. I'm entirely convinced that my crotch is more sanitary than almost any public restroom and that unless said restroom has a way for me to wash my hands without touching anything, I'll actually skip the process and call it even. I flush the toilet with my foot or elbow anyway depending on how high up the lever is. The worst are the restrooms with a door you have to pull open to get out. You watch all the people who leave after touching the toilet flusher (and themselves) without washing their hands and use the same handle you do and you know that washing your hands is pointless. My favorites are the ones with the automatic faucets and paper dispenser or driers and either doors that are pushed (so you can kick or shoulder it open) or the ones with no door but a hallway that blocks the view inside. The worst are the faucets that have to be twisted on and doors that have to be pulled because you have to use your hands to touch both.