Yoikes...I Hath Been Tagged...

...Pixie asked that i reveal six weird things about myself...it was a large field of oddities and hard to narrow down, but here goes (in no particular order of importance)

1. my feet...to say that they are Hobbit-like is to be kind...i was born with three bones missing in each foot making them extremely flat... in high school gym class, my wet footprints leading from the showers to the locker area prompted the gym teacher to ask if i had a duck in my locker...funny guy...

2. my middle name which is Klor...like my pedal extremeties, another present from my loving parents...also my father's middle name, i hated it with a passion when i was a little kid...but then i discovered where the name came from...when my father was born, the delivery was very difficult and he and my grandmother were both in danger of dying...but an old Swedish country doctor stayed with them for several days, tending each problem that arose...as you might have figured out, they both recovered fully...this kindly old doctor was named Klor Parent...so my father was given that name, and i in turn was given the name...i now wear it proudly...

3. like Pixie, i have a serious peanut butter jones...for as long as i can remember i have slathered peanut oleo on any number of foodstuffs...in addition to the wonderful peanut butter and bacon sammiches, i used to put peanut butter and mustard on my hotdogs, peanut butter and Miracle Whip on bologna, would heat it up and pour it over vanilla ice cream with hot fudge...thank you George Washington Carver...

4. first spoken words...i was one of those wide-eyed silent sort of babies...my folks later told me that they were concerned that i was deaf or at least a little vacant...but just short of my second birthday, i was sitting on the floor with my grandmother as she read the newspaper...she was a tiny woman and it was easier than trying to hold the paper up as she read...anyway...she would read outloud to me in hopes to get me to say something...anything...and wouldn't you know it, one day i point at an advertisement and blurt out "Sealy Posturpedic Mattress"...Grandma swore to her dying day that this story is absolutely true...

5. i am a pack rat...maybe not all that weird...but i still have an old coffee can full of drawing pencils from my days at art school in the '70's...and i haven't done a pencil drawing in decades....at the violin shop where i work, i have several boxes of wood chunks of various types and sizes, stuff that most builders would have thrown away...perhaps it's because i have such a high regard for the magnificent trees that give themselves so that we might make music with them...

6. i love cemeteries...graveyards...burial grounds, what have you...and not the flat expanses of stoneless green with tuffs of plastic flowers marking the final resting place of someone's loved one that are in favor these days, but old graveyards with big trees, massive blocks of granite and marble, crypts and mausoleums...where i grew up there were hundreds of such places to explore within easy driving distance of my house...old boneyards from the days of The Revolutionary War and the conflicts with the Native American tribes that fought fiercely to hold on to their beautiful Ohio homeland...i guess the really weird part is that my girlfriend and i used to hang out after school in a particularly old magnificent cemetary and get high and screw our brains out in a mausoleum that always seemed to be unlocked...right there on a marble bench in front of all the dearly departed stacked in the wall in neat rows...if there is a hell, my ticket has already been punched...

...weird enough for ye?...