* The full, real title is I’ve never had a mullet, and other Things I Feel I Have the Right to Brag About and also Things I Cannot Stand. Just, you know, FYI.

You should know that what follows is a) a partial list only, and b) they’re not in any particular order of Cannot Stand vs. Brag. I would say to put your Big Boy Panties on and read carefully, but it’s odd how similar the things I can’t stand and the things I want to brag about actually are.

I’m not sure what that says about me, but anyway – to be safe – how about I don’t say anything about your panties. No need to tip the scales against me…

This is the very face of irony. And its finger.

Just enjoy the read.

• I will not eat food while wearing a jacket.
• I’ve never been bitten by a rattlesnake.
• Pudding, Cool Whip, and/or meringue, formless foods that try to make you think they can stand alone.
• I cannot, cannot, cannot abide a haircut where they “wet your hair” instead of rinsing it, fully.
• I hate talking on the phone.
• I have good teeth.
• People who pass gas and are proud of it.
• I don’t like people who don’t use turn signals, myself included.
• I rarely get sick.
• Animals like me.
• I’m a very good driver.
• I can listen to a song I like on repeat way, way longer than you can.
• I do not appreciate tardy people, and I tell them that.
• I cook well.
• Interestingly, I can give myself a fever.
• I disapprove of people who smack.
• I am, for the most part, actually clever.
• I’ve been featured on the back cover of The Dramatist three times.
• Spandex.
• I frown on poor penmanship.
• People who say “kewl.”
• I’ve never broken any bones…well, not my own. (Please see the next bulleted point).
• Once, I got so mad at this boy, at some Christian Bible camp I had to go to, that I wished and wished he’d get hurt. And he did, he broke his collar bone.
• I dreamed once that a man was going to drown, and he did.
• Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. And talk of future meetings.
• I am routinely complimented on my penmanship. FYI.
• Truckers.
• I learned Hebrew when I was four.
• I’ve never had a mullet.
• But, I have eyelashes of jealous, enviable length.
• No one in my family has ever baby talked the babies.
• I wrote my first poem when I was eleven.
• People who prefer not to use deodorant.
• 4-way stops.
• Answering the phone. (Please see the fifth bulleted point, above).
• Lying.
• I only have original art in my house.
• I’m more than likely the reincarnation of either Truman Capote, Noel Coward, or Oscar Wilde. I’m just saying. Because that’s like, totally something to brag about.
• Fedoras and scarves.
• My cat, Aristophanes, is part-bobcat.
• Church cantatas that include handbells. 
• My legs.
• Hang nails.
• I have a brother who is half-Iranian, a second brother and sister who are half-Polish, and a third brother who is half-Cherokee, between my parents. On top of that, as you might have guessed, we’re all half-siblings. Now, add on top of that this: the Iranian brother is Muslim, but our mother comes from a Jewish family, which makes us Jewish, so I feel certain war will eventually break out between us. Talk about a conflict of interest.
• I was once ranked third in the state in Men’s singles tennis.
• My brother who is half-Iranian is also an up-and-coming rap artist, in Las Vegas, by the way. I thought you should know that.
• I have an autographed book by Eudora Welty, who was a friend of my mother’s.
• Screaming, and any variation of it.
• Proselytizers.
• Mississippi is no longer the fattest state in the nation.
• My grandmother once made me stop the car and get out, to help a turtle get across the road. That’s the stock I come from.
• Billy Hull, who lived down the road from me, was once the longest-serving County Supervisor in the United States. He held the record until he died.
• My cousin, Lucy, was a second-alternate for the 1996 Olympic gymnastics team, behind Amanda Borden.
• My Uncle Oscar started Morrison’s Cafeterias.
• My Nana is deaf in the same ear as Caesar.
• Feet.
• I was Little Mr. Winston County in 1983.
• Fred Phelps.
• I won the Mississippi State Horticulture award in 1994, even though I didn’t climb the tree like everyone else at the week-long camp did to retrieve a sample of blighted mistletoe.
• Boogers.
• People who end all of their sentences as if they’re asking questions.
• I’ve never gotten pregnant.
• I almost met Harper Lee.
• I can play the piano by ear, if the piano is out of tune like U.L’s.
• Oh, and get this, U.L. had a brother who was a dwarf, named Ran.
• I saved a young boy from drowning when I was fifteen.
• Coffee.
• I know the world’s greatest drummer. No lie.
• That being said, the world’s foremost banjo player is from my hometown.
• My mother dated Marty Stuart, years ago.
• Pumpkin pie.
• I once sang a note, and held it for a minute and twenty-eight seconds. But, only once.
• Even people who hate me, like me.
• Sweating in work clothes.
• Computers that are slow.
• I once got stung by twelve yellow jackets, at the same time. Three on the face, alone. And lived to tell it.
• I used to make my own books of poetry from discarded gift boxes and wood glue, which I for years thought was more durable than normal glue. They fell apart, though, after about five reads.
• One of my neighbors, growing up, had a pet monkey that did not like curtains, or his daughter.
• My Aunt Sally lived to be 100; my Uncle Pat, 102.
• I am the Cat Whisperer.
• People who pepper their conversations with French. How gauche.
• My blog is an app on someone’s iPhone.
• Rude children.
• Waking up.

Both art and a good philosophy.

I’d like to continue but, ironically, another thing I can’t stand is writing. Who’d’ve thunk it? I’m driven to write, though, I can’t ignore that, but I still find it painful and grueling.  Probably because it’s such a raw craft, makes me vulnerable…or better yet, makes me think and feel that I’m vulnerable.

Which reminds me…

•  Being vulnerable, you know, and stupid things like that.

Oh, and, one last thing…

•  I’ve held a baby gopher turtle. I bet you haven’t.

I know that makes you jealous, the baby gopher turtle part, and I’m sorry for that. I would be too, I mean, come on! It was a baby gopher turtle! You’ve probably never even heard of a gopher turtle, in the first place…raise your hands if you have.

I didn’t see a single hand go up.

Ok, I’m done. That’s all for now.

So…go on and have a good one.

Related Posts:

• Yes, Virginia, I am a vegetarian.
• I don’t have to use a walker to pump my gas.
• I try not to abuse the privilege of a horn.
• Suffice it to say, I was spanked, a second time, OR The 100th Blog.
• I can't die here, not this close to the Mennonite bakery.

U.L. didn’t really believe in that, unless you’d done some really horrendous thing, which I never truly did because God, you know, also rented a room at U.L.’s house, and so it was really hard to get away with much of anything between the two of them. And then there was Jesus. He was always like, Hey, we’ll fix it later. I liked him the most. I hated that he moved out.

Rent's pretty cheap here: one soul for life.

I’m not saying I never got spanked, kids being kids, but I tried really hard to be a good boy. And, for the most part, I was.

I didn’t do anything illegal until I was of age, which then made it not illegal…well, some things. But, I would imagine living in Orlando would challenge anyone’s fealty to the law. I was, until the age of twenty-one, give or take a few years, so picture-perfect that I could have had my own Bible story. It would be a devastatingly, achingly luculent parable about the evils of children who were born a smoke screen. About the shocking shallowness that excessive daydreaming and over-reading of literary classics causes in small boys who are living so many different, confusing lives.

And it would also, in spades I tell you, address the dangers of being quiet, of staying quiet, and of speaking low, when speaking was necessary.

In my family, you see, we fought with the standard Victorian weapons of mass destruction: words and stares.

U.L. could cut you down to size quicker than a bee sting with nothing but the curve of an eyebrow, and Nana could put you in your place with just the ever so subtle shift of her mouth. I won’t even speak of Tigi or GamVa, here. Their powers of reprimand are too potent to even be put on the page.

This is how we loved and fought: tersely and sternly…and yet, genuinely.

We also did not raise our voices. That wasn’t “of class.” So, imagine if you will, fighting fire with a flame, or sometimes half a spark, or better yet, a defective Bic lighter.

Regardless, it’s still eerily effective.

We would rather live together in abject silence until the anger passed over, much like the Angel of Death, except instead of painting my bedroom door with a red slash, I would walk around embarrassed with flushed cheeks at the “crime I had committed,” whatever it may have been.

It never failed to work.

Ah, the Old South: antebellum homes, insane half-Jewish blood, candle factories, magnolias, cattle farms, churches, guilt…oh, and cornbread dressing.

It's our state flower and a sure-fire yard killer.

It’s just about the only South I know.

So, then, with a family this prone to not showing how upset they are about anything on earth, what oh what could I have done to garner a spanking? Two, even?

I’m glad you pretended to ask.

My first offense was, I think in retrospect, worthy of a spanking. I’d been left alone too long in the house, and I’d discovered my mother’s deteriorating vanity, full of old make-up, in a back bedroom. We never went into this part of the house, except when U.L. felt the need to play “The Old Rugged Cross,” or “Whispering Hope,” on the stagy upright that sat against the front parlor window, next to her bedroom.

We couldn’t go in the parlor at night because the curtains were too sheer…music only happened in that house when the sun was out.

I, naturally, went into her bedroom, then, during the day. And in it, there stood this huge vanity, an antique, with an oval, gilded mirror that seemed to float above the dresser. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? I sat down on the soft, rounded bench, covered barely with the remains of a tulle and cotton cushion, and proceeded to open every single drawer.

I collected quite a bit of mascara, lipstick, melted rouge, and broken eyeliner pencils, one that was shamelessly from the 80s and electric blue.

I bet you think I made my lips up, slapped some rouge on my cheeks, outlined my eyelids, extended my lashes. 

But, I didn’t. That small mountain was a later one to climb. No, I, instead, took my loot and crawled onto the ancient sleigh bed in the room there, and began to draw on the quilted bedspread. It was a garish pink a la Tigi, and so I had to concentrate and dig deeply into the fabric for my artwork to be clearly seen.

And the things I drew.

I drew spaceships, and birds, and in one of the corners a rather macabre scene: a hearse, with a small comment bubble wafting above the hood that said simply, “But, he was dead.”

Do you know how much determination it takes to draw on fabric, of any kind? Of course, I was spanked. I was seven.

I’d have spanked myself, had I known what bits of family history I was ruining. (Or adding to).

How I avoided therapy, though, is not surprising: Could you imagine a southern family admitting to the plain fact of having something akin to an idiot savant in their midst, and out in public?  Hardly. I just became a “colorful child, and so imaginative.” I didn’t get to many birthday parties.

This is the very definition of a Merry Un-Birthday.

The second time I was spanked was because I’d convinced a slow cousin of mine to sneak off with me, one afternoon, to the neighbor’s barn to see a litter of new puppies that had been born to the rogue part-Collie/part-Cujo who’d taken up residence there.

I’m not sure if I was spanked then because I’d manipulated a slow cousin or because of the threat of rabies or a combination of the two.

Suffice it to say, I was spanked, a second time. I was eleven.

In between those four years, and up until I turned thirty, I fell into the expected pattern of familial silence, much to their relief. I did my work, I sang in church, I wrote little stories, I read every blame book I came across, I didn’t put any elbows on the table, I said Yes Ma’am and No Sir, and all-in-all became the storybook child everyone wants.

At least on Sundays.

The trouble is, those Sundays just never were quite as good as the stories I read.

Which, I think, says a lot about what I tried to be, then.

But a lot more about whom I’m becoming now.

Related Posts:

• God had given him one-half of His Own Right Eye.
• Yes, Virginia, I am a vegetarian.
• I’ve never had a mullet, and other Things I Can Brag About [...]*
• Gary makes me hungry.
• “I’m the freaking boss of TV, just so you know.”

I’ve not really attempted that, yet, as you may can tell.  Until this morning. (So far so good).

So, this morning:  I’ve got two things on my mind, I mean from the moment I woke up, these were the things most prevalent in my thoughts.  If only they had been the only two. At any rate, a much-overused phrase of mine, I’m going to start sharing those things, in their pure forms. I’m trying to start that right now, today. So, here they are, Roman Numerals I and II.

I

I am more than a little worried that I’m losing words, literally.  Losing language.  I can’t seem to keep clear about words these days, and so, that means, naturally, that I can’t keep clear about writing, either.  It wasn’t always like this, I used to be Faulknerian. But now, embarassingly in conversation, or inevitably while I’m teaching in front of my undergraduates, I’ll rattle off a string of words that don’t entirely make sense…and when you’re teaching literature, composition, and the like, that’s a hard thing to bounce back from. I’m not sure how believable an absent-minded professor can be at my age. 

Oddly enough, they've forgotten to include "remember."

I thought: Stick to the old writing rule, Kris. Write what you know, what you’ve done, those things should be sliding right along with your blood, so much a part of you as they are. 

And I do, I try my best to write what I know, what I see, what I remember, but in the end, the blood moves too fast, and if I cut myself, I can’t seem to clot. And one of two things happen: I bleed everywhere, all over the page, words falling over themselves, which I allow, because I think – get it all out, the “right” words are in there somewhere, OR, in effort to stanch the flow, I panic and restrict my creativity to a condensed single line, a quip – my plays are itching with this rash; it seems that I quip more often than bleed these days…until I started blogging and convinced myself that there was too much space online to waste on quips. 

I’m sick of quips, and in love with them.  What an ironic blister: I mean, what kind of writer’s block makes you write quips, even when you’re finally focused and getting fuller, richer sentences to form?  Maybe I’m just innately a boring man. Or worse yet, simply aware of my own truth: I’m as much a failure as a success.

I start so many plays but finish nothing, I bet I have a hundred plays throbbing on my jump drive, all shapes and sizes, and it’s not that I don’t have motivation, or I should say inclination…I know plenty of people in the industry, none that are paid to care about one more writer, though. I don’t really mind, and I suppose that’s the problem, so I write for myself, or this blog, or a few friends, but I have such ennui, the older I get, and I don’t know where it stems from.

No, that’s not true, I do. 

I’m worried to death that I’m losing language because I’m losing myself. I’m worried that I’m about to go insane, like the majority have on my Semitic side.  Mostly, I’m terrified by the thought; sometimes, I’m propelled by it, almost eager in my anticipation for it: to, at last, understand my mother, her mother, to, in some form, connect with them. Nothing else has worked; perhaps, it’s the madness that keeps us together, hogs let loose in a stall, bumping our fat backside histories into each other, rooting in the mud for a cool spot for just ourselves. Hogs, I think, are jealous beasts. They know the knife is coming, and so, they grow selfish of their time. Of their mud. Of their coolness.

I also get easily overwhelmed at the responsibilities of being an “artist.” Because what else am I really?  A man is known by the company he keeps, and the only company I’ve ever kept and entertained is writing, is words, and now I think they’re leaving me, after all this time, tired of the wait.  The incessant pressure to create; the greater pressure to succeed.  I get the terms confused, the goals off course, the purpose corrupted.  But, I can’t cook enough food, or keep the beds made long enough, to keep them, I’m afraid. And that’s no way to treat company.

And yet. I’m driven by this fear that I’m losing a grip on reality.  That there’s a perverse joy in typing this, not in my private letters, but on a public blog.  Some might say that’s a cry for help, but it’s been my experience that there’s never a noise so loud as a cry when someone needs help.  When they want it.  I’m not crying; so, I don’t feel this is the case with me.  No, it’s about accountability. 

All I’ve ever known is severe accountability.

In the Baptist denomination, the age of accountability is about twelve…so, really, I suppose I’m just keeping with routine, since I’ve been making myself accountable for almost twenty years now.  And what have I discovered?

That I’ve become a confessionalist. 

Despite Dr. Lest; the only professor I’ve ever had who failed me on a paper. Granted, I got prose, poetry, prosody confused, I was learning, but god what’s a term? The bones of the paper were solid, the meat was good meat. I wrote a great paper, about O’Hara, and he’s the one who missed the point; he stole the poem afterwards, though. I’d appended a poem, that I written, having been so inspired by O’Hara, a poet I’d never before heard of.  The paper was returned, the poem was not. And even though Dr. Lest laughed when he read aloud our “Thoughts on What Poetry Is,” anonymously, that someone in the class, me, felt that poetry was all confession. He merely reinforced that in me; I believe it still.

Maybe I’m not even a playwright, not a poet, just an opportunist of my own insecurities and infidelities and neuroses. That’s what a confession is, right? 

The crazier thing is that, all along, all this time, I had no idea I’d grow up to be a conflict; accepting that it is one thing, but I’m not sure which one I am yet:  man vs. fate, man vs. nature, or man vs. himself, society, or, what’s more likely, God. And not knowing is quite another thing, entirely.

II

I’m heading, now, this weekend, back home. I have an outhouse to tackle.

The stories this outhouse could tell.

It’s directly behind U.L.’s house, a bit south of the first line of trees and suckle vine; it’s been there for years.  And it’s not the only one. There are several more scattered over the hundreds and hundreds of acres that stretch through the pine to who knows where. I’ve been told it stretches all the way past Bond Road, and if you kept a steady foot, after several days of walking you’d reach the Old Shelt House. All alone, sitting in the middle of a small ring of crepe myrtle, with its wild hair.

Who didn’t know about the Shelt House. She’d murdered her husband and her children, and locked herself in the attic, determined to suffocate herself in the insulation; the Depression was such a horrible shame to so many. She, like most of her evil-dead kind, only came out at midnight on Halloween, but being fair to those who might not celebrate Halloween (we didn’t, for instance, and instead of candy, collected canned goods to give to the needy and unfortunate children, who, on at least three occasions, I often saw on Halloween night dressed to the nines in costumes getting enough candy to rot dentures while I stood in simple clothes – though once I got to be Cookie Monster – and beg for a dented can of peaches which I could have just put in their plastic pumpkin right then, but I digress), Old Mrs. Shelt also came out at random times throughout the year. I still never saw her, even though she was nice enough to come out again; somehow, she was always only seen by couples, in high school, on weekend nights, who were, for some reason, in the middle of the woods, alone.

To me, this outhouse, though, it’s almost a shrine.  It’s going to be rather hard to tear it down, because with it will go many childhood memories. (We’ll talk more later about how sad it is that a child should have any memories, whatsoever, attached to an outhouse).

But, it stood, and had for all these years, by my favorite climbing tree and was a top-notch guardian to my rusted stew pot in which I collected beige gravel. Those smooth pebbles had nearly reached the lip of that dateless, blue-spotted pot when it disappeared.  Soon after, went the tree. I guess, it was only a matter of time before the outhouse would have to go, as well.

And, oh, I’ve wondered all sorts of delectable things about this particular outhouse closest to the house: like, who was the last person to use it back when we had the farm; how did so many bird cages get left inside of it; when did we ever have birds, in the first place; why was a sewing machine, no make that three, of them in this outhouse, maybe they were worth money – I could certainly have used them when I played Mud Pie Bakery, don’t ask me how, I just knew I could; and most importantly, was the fact of its prior function the reason that so many beautiful plants grew, thrived around it, a veritable moat of flora.

I’m hoping I find out some of these things…I work a lot better with a good story. And, really, when work of any type involves an tearing down an outhouse, one known to harbor yellow jackets and red wasps (an allergy), poison ivy and a holly bush bent on world domination – wouldn’t you work better with a good story, too?

Or, at the least, come up with a good one when you’re done…? Yeah, I thought so…

Related Posts:

• He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.
• I’m made of sterner stuff than common sense, I’ll have you know.
• I was able to order my fish sandwich without incident.
• That time I was in a Sartre play: part of a memoir, sort of.
• Because hands can do everything but lie.