I am blowing off the studio tonight?

I am blowing off the studio tonight because I felt this need to write. I know that is not such a great choice considering I am in the middle of a time crunch, but I was asked what my favorite blog post was today and that question alone got me thinking about my stories. Yes, I said stories. I have only considered thinking of myself as a storyteller in the last 10 years, but when I look back on my life, I am certain that I have been a storyteller since birth. When I was young my favorite book was The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn . The operative word being adventure. I lived in a neighborhood of boys, you know the tree climbing, bat swinging, worm gathering, slimy frog grabbing, mud flinging, cliff diving, road rash savoring types. My father told me from a very young age that I could be anything I wanted to when I grew up. He did this as we drove past a female construction worker mind you. I knew instantly I wanted to be like those boys. I wanted to be adventure seeking, dirt loving, and spontaneous. I wanted to be like Huckelberry Finn.

I spent years trying to keep up with the guys in the neighborhood. If they climbed I climbed higher, if they jumped, well I didn't think twice. When they ate mud, well what do you think? I did it too. I was always upset when I wasn't included (insert He Man Woman Haters Club- No GIRLS aloud). Of course it came complete with "if you were like us, you wouldn't care about equality, you would just go out an get what you need". So I was born into storytelling as a means of one upping my male counterparts. You do know about that fish I caught don't you?

There have been many times I have been asked if I would ever consider turning my writing into a book. I would love to write a book, but I think I would have to unlock a major puzzle first. I only seem to be able to get as far as the title. It would be called "Adventures with Pete" and be about the adventures of friendships. I spent a few years training for these long distance cycling events. I would often write about the training I was doing (I wish I still had some of that writing). It was laughable stuff. Just how often do you skirt death on the road in the presence of the same person? The escapades I had with my good friend Pete were not quite as death defying as cycling with Bud, but they are incredibly awesome and intricate tales in their own right.

Sometimes I tell stories when I teach. One of my students wrote me a note a year ago about how she would miss my crazy tales. I never realized how funny I must sound talking to these HS students in a nostalgic manner. By the way, high school is so different these days. I live it every day, and even though I think I finally understand this age, when I sit down and talk to my own kids I still managed to get ribbed endlessly about how ridiculous I sound. In other words, I remind myself of my uncle; goofy, wonderful, and wise. I rolled my eyes at him just as many times as well.

He would have this habit of deducing the information that he was observing in life. The scientist in him would come out with some crazy hypothesis such as this theory he had about license plate coding. A vehicle tag could tell you where a person was from. SYR-3452 for example, would be someone from Syracuse. Once my cousin and my college roommate tried to see if he could figure out where we had been all day by the dirt on my car. What was funny about this was that we spent the day all over western NY, we went from Syracuse to Auburn, to Cortlandt, to Clyde (where they were having their field days) to Oswego, eating fried smelts at Rudys Lakeside before heading home the long way, through Geneva. In our what seemed like a 300 + mile day we hadn't a care in the world. We were oblivious to anything outside our egocentric universe. As we sat there trying to get him to ramble off where we had been by examining the car he amazingly started to talk about some things we had seen that day. You see, there on the back porch, listening to him tell us this totally random story, he had us convinced he could pull it off. What he was doing was telling us about his own adventures of going to Clyde for the field days and deciding that lunch up in Oswego would be nice where he happened upon Rudy's, then he decided to make a loop through Geneva rather than coming back the way they came... OK, it was completely coincidence but the three of us were rolling at his seemingly magic powers, especially when it was coupled with the story of how the yellow brick road came to be in downtown Chittenang0.

So where am I going with this? Beats me, my only goal was procrastinating my way out of playing with mud tonight. My hands are cracked and dry. I am tired. I need some regrouping time.

More later. Of this I am certain!