This is my third such blog. I've been writing stupid shit and posting it on the Internet for strangers and friends to read for the past 5 years. You might recognize my writing style from [REDACTED] or [REDACTED], but let's not make a big deal about that here, shall we? I'm trying to start fresh. To turn over a new virtual leaf, as it were. Frankly I'm trying to attract a better class of readers this time around. If I'm not involved in any restraining orders this year then I'll know I'm headed in the right direction.
So, as far as you know, my name is Chuck. At the moment I live in Virginia, or as it says on the highway signs when you cross the border from Maryland: "Where the South begins"*. And Virginia truly is the gateway state to the Southern U.S. We have rednecks, but they are well behaved and generally have decent dental plans. You will see the occasional confederate flag, but it's usually tastefully displayed or small. Or both. We do have corn liquor, but it's not sold in stores. And while we have hundreds of baptist churches peppered throughout the state, there aren't a lot of anti-abortion anti-gay pro-God billboards along the highways.
So it's the South, but not "Banjo and Overalls" South.
I haven't always lived here. In fact, just last year I was wrapping up a 15+ year tour of duty in war torn Connecticut (a.k.a "Where Fun Goes to Die"). At some point after moving there back in the 90's (from Boston, for those playing Blog Bingo) I lost my way and started an insta-family with a girlfriend and her two daughters; we bought a nice house in the suburbs and I drove an SUV, wore polo shirts and khakis, mowed the lawn with a push-mower, and started taking prescription drugs for high blood pressure.
10 years, about 23 assorted pets, and one very broken relationship later, I was left alone, paying a mortgage for a house I didn't want to live in anymore, in a state that I never really wanted to be in in the first place. I burned all of my khakis, bought a motorcycle, got tattoos, started blogging, and promptly spent the next few years struggling through yet another disaster of a romance whilst trying desperately to sell my house.
Last summer I finally found a
The original plan was to head as far South as possible and settle somewhere in Florida. For the record, the motivating factors for choosing Florida were 1) sun, 2) sand, 3) palm trees, 4) bikinis (not on me), and 5) my B.F.F. Brian lives there. But for reasons that are not entirely your business, I instead found myself just outside of Richmond in a little apartment complex with a lake and fountains and a pool and just the right amount of old people (enough to guarantee that someone will chat you up if you go outside at mail time, but not enough so that there are bingo games held in the clubhouse every Saturday night).
According to the grey hairs starting to salt my otherwise brown hair and reddish goatee, I am pushing my late thirties. I suppose this means that in a few more years, I'll no longer be relevant. In general. I'm having a bit of an issue accepting this, but it's not because I'm in denial, mostly I kinda just think I'm still pretty cool, for an old guy.
I've been a computer programmer for 20 years, and am sort of going through a mid-career crisis at the moment, thinking defiantly that I'll be able to course-correct without crashing - even at this late stage in the game. It's going to be tough, for sure, on account of not actually having a college degree. I do have plenty of mostly useless skills, however: I was a classically trained pianist (lol peen-ist) as a child (I dropped out of Berklee College of Music because I slept through a meeting with my advisor and ended up getting stuck with a shitty major), and before I truly became a real grown up with actual bills and stuff I was a sandwich-maker, a record store manager, a college town pizza delivery boy (best. job. ever), a rave / club DJ, and an assistant manager at an Army and Navy store.
Not all at the same time, mind you, I don't have that kind of energy.
Lightning round:
I can spin a basketball on my finger for about 10 seconds, but never longer than that. I'm tall enough to have never dated a girl as tall or taller than me (but not so tall that I would become freakishly gangly). I can juggle. I hadn't touched a piano in 20 years until my buddy Rich conned me into playing a chopsticks duet with him at a restaurant bar in LA a few months ago. We ended up jamming some blues together. It may or may not have sounded good, we were pretty hammered. I rarely throw up (except when someone else is hurling). I am missing the tippity tops of both of my index fingers, lost in unrelated vegetable slicing incidents. I fancy myself a writer; I've got about a dozen unfinished books and screenplays sitting in my documents folder on my laptop. I'm single, but not looking (sorry ladies).
(That last one is a whole other blog post, so I'll leave it at that for now.)
And that's it. You now know more about me than my mom does (true story).
Before I leave you to clean up, I'll answer the burning question that I'm sure is on everyone's mind, which is: "That's all well and good Chuck, but what's this blog all ABOUT. What's it all FOR?"
Correction. I won't answer that. I can't. I honestly have no idea. I've done this long enough to know that I have no clue what this will turn into or where it will go, and that's part of the fun. For both of us. What it has been up until now, is probably a pretty good indication of where it's going, but since I don't really pay much attention when I write I'm going to be just as surprised as you are by the results.
Thanks for visiting, and don't forget to tip your waitress. Kisses!
* The highway signs don't really say this. At least I don't remember for sure whether they do or not, because every time I've passed them I've been sun-stroked and choking on truck diesel fumes after being stuck on the back of a motorcycle throughout the Beltway traffic corridor. **
** Consider the above footnote to be a generous correction of truth, and as such you probably shouldn't expect that it will ever happen again. Now that we've gotten to know each other, you should know that I'm simply not to be trusted to be a source of truth and knowledge, let alone wit or creative banter. On the scale of "things you should believe on the Internet", this site should fall somewhere just above Fox News, but below Wikipedia. I won't lie to you or mislead you intentionally, but I damn sure am not planning on fact-checking what I say, and whether something is funny to me is more important when deciding what to write than it's verity. You want independent and honest journalism, go here.
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