I am also supposed to list seven things about myself I’ve not mentioned before.

Seriously?  I wrote out “101 Things About Me” twice already with no overlap…I’m tapped out people!

Oh, OK.  Fine.  How hard can seven things be?  Right?

1. The last movie I saw was “Alice in Wonderland” which qualified as “being stoned by proxy” for two hours.  Also, the movie was good but the ending sucked like a starving man at a crawfish feed.
     
2. I saw the band Train in concert in a tiny town in southern Oregon.  Sort of an outdoor music festival type thing.  They KILLED.  Then they resurrected the bodies and KILLED THEM AGAIN just to prove their unending awesome.
     
3. Speaking of music, the other day someone said a song on the radio “sounded like high school” and it made me think for a while.  High school for me sounded like a combination of Van Halen, Def Leopard, Bryan Adams, Damn Yankees, Enigma, Richard Marx, Madonna, Michael W Smith, and Amy Grant.  Probably all played at the same time.
     
4. I am a manly-man; I like football, baseball, Sportscenter, beer, fast cars, scantily clad women, and all the other manly-man things in the world.  Conversely, Pride and Prejudice remains both my favorite book and favorite movie.  So sue me.
     
5. While I’m not much of a cologne wearer, my favorite is Armani.  Not the new Armani, but the original classic Armani Cologne.  The one my daughter said smells like old people (I disagree, I say it smells like a fine men’s store).
     
6. Video footage of me doing stupid things can be found on the interwebs, performing the following general activities:  Skiing, falling off the roof of a building, launching a potato more than a mile with a cannon made out of irrigation piping, smoking a cigar while golfing without pants (it’s not a detail captured on film, but rest assured that alcohol WAS a factor).  No, I will not tell you how to find them.
     
7. For years (decades actually), I was far more recognized for my artwork than for my writing.  I have literally hundreds if not thousands of dollars in art supplies, a wonderful drawing desk, and a significant investment in digital tools as well.  I won awards, my art was published multiple times, and I was probably a strong enough illustrator to work professionally full time if I’d have wanted to go that route.

   Then two things happened:

   When I started my divorce from wife #1, I ended up giving away 95% of my portfolio stuff and only kept the really awful painting starts that I didn’t want her to destroy out of spite.

   Around the same time I had a series of neurological issues that have left me with minor and intermittent dyskinesia (yes, the same dyskinesia that TB’s wife named her blog after, and which is often seen in Parkinson’s patients after years of Levodopa use) of the limbs and acute focal dystonia (like super powerful writer’s cramp plus spasmodic muscle twitches) in my right hand.

   And about a 70% reduction in my ultra-fine motor control in my wrist and fingers.  Fine motor control is pretty OK, I can type and write notes in handwriting that doesn’t look like mine, and use a screwdriver, etc…but the ultrafine control, the sub centimeter precision movements are gone.  It’s like the brain sends the message but the hand just never gets the delivery.

   Two MRI scans, plus two neurological specialists and a series of medical trials later, and I can officially say “I’m ok, it’s very rare and I just have a loose wire somewhere above my shoulders and below my brainstem.”  No big deal, doesn’t happen more than a couple of times a year, and it doesn’t keep me from working or driving or golfing or rocking out the Guitar Hero or gunning down splicers in Bioshock 2.

   But it does keep me from doing art.  At all.  I struggled with it SO HARD four years ago that I’m too afraid to try again.  I don’t want to KNOW that I can’t do it anymore.  I’d rather just keep setting up my desk, making my workspace ready, keeping all my supplies at hand and pretend that I’ll actually do it again someday.

   Otherwise it’s admitting that the one thing about me that I used to think “made me special” really is dead.