Teasers

Hello folks, after several consecutive weeks of blogging I find my creative juices restored and my slightly off kilter world view decidedly askew.  I want to thank you for helping me reach this point again and giving me the wherewithal to pick up my long neglected Cinderella of a book. As a thank you I will be posting several excerpts from my magnum opus over the next few days.  These tidbits will, I hope, grant me some measure of believability when I blame a day without a post on being busy with my book. Anyway, here are a few paragraphs from the opening chapter of Part II of my novel 'Codswallop'.


Chapter I

When I was twenty-three, and in my defense, quite lonely, I agreed to go on a blind date at the urging of a family friend. The girl, I was assured, was a dark haired beauty with the kind looks that drive men to bad decisions and lawyers to raise the price of prenuptial agreements. The “matchmaker” may have also mentioned something about her personality, I don’t recall. I do, however, quite clearly recall thinking upon her opening her apartment door for me that my decision-making faculties would remain decidedly unimpaired. It may well have turned out to be a pleasant evening.(1) I mean Monica Lewinsky managed to catch the eye of the most powerful man in the world, so nothing’s impossible, but about twenty minutes into our evening she made a declaration that guaranteed that our already doomed experiment of a blind date would end in total and complete failure.

 She was a “naturist.”


Before I could inquire as to whether that was an actual word, (2) she explained that naturists (by this I deuced that there was at least one other) don’t believe in wasting their lives indoors. They prefer to live, as she put it, lives engaged with nature. Her idea of a night of fun included hiking, sitting in front of a bonfire, taking walks on the beach, and anything else you might do in summer camp or read in a personal ad. Anyway, the long and short of it was, she didn’t own a TV! I knew right then (along with when she opened the door(3)) that would be the last time we went out.


Television is, as you may have gathered by now, very important to me. In fact, during summers when I wasn’t in school or working, and during my extended period of unemployment, television made up a solid three quarters of my waking life, trumping such activities as exercising, being outside and dating. If she was a naturist than I was technologist, an avid indoorsman, preferring to live a life engaged with my remote control. It was nearly four years since that unfortunate date and in all that time, I had never met another person who cared about TV as much as I did. Then I met six hundred of them.


Footnotes:
1) As I understand, there are an infinite number of parallel universes in addition to our own, and the way I see it, in at least one of them, I must be something other than shallow.
2) My spell check seems to think it is though I still have my reservations.
3) Like I said, decidedly unimpaired.