I just got of the phone with my best bud Jon. We usually give each other a ring after work to see what's up and to coordinate a game of golf or one of our various other extracurricular activities that we like to do to kill time. Jon's wife likes to refer to me as his boyfriend, as in: "What are you and your little boyfriend going to do tonight? Stroke each others clubs?" This evening's phone call consisted of Jon telling me a story about a brave insect.

"So as soon as I got in to my truck this Katydid flies.."

"Wait, what the hell's a Katydid," I interrupt.

"You know, it looks like a grasshopper. So this Katydid..."

"Well is it a grasshopper,"

"Listen man, I am not a fucking entomologist. It is just this grasshopper looking thing. Will you please let me finish? So this thing, it flies on to my windshield as soon as I am pulling out of the parking lot and the damned thing stays there the whole way home. On the highway and everything!"

"So what did you do when you got home?"

I grabbed a stick, let it climb on, and put it up in a tree. What? Did you think I would have squashed it?"

"Well, you did just tell me the other day about the rock that you threw at that wild turkey that was in the field behind the house that you were working on. You hit the thing from like eighty yards man!"

"No, I was actually really impressed by that little bug's tenacity. Gotta respect something like that"

"You sure do," I agree.

"Is this what you and your boyfriend really talk about," I hear his wife say in the background. "Fucking grasshoppers!"

Well, yeah.

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This was going to be my first post but for some reason I either scrapped it or just plain forgot that I wrote it.
June 26, 2008 I am going to start a diar...err, journal but I guess since it is on the internet I will have to call it a blog. I have always wanted to have a journal but the longest that I have ever been able to keep one going was 3 weeks. It was a travel log and even then, with all the free time in the world on my hands, I didn’t write in it every day. The initial idea was that I was going to record all the cool shit that would happen to me as I traveled through Europe, solo. I imagined all the beautiful women that I would meet, the lasting international friendships that I would make and the resulting invitations to country houses in Provence that would be extended to me every summer for the rest of my life. This would all be written in my travel log and upon return to the ‘States’ (as we international travelers say) I would use it to write a book whose modest yet not insubstantial earnings would allow me the freedom to travel indefinitely. My Swedish wife Brigita and I would educate our children ourselves. We would move from country to country learning the ways of all the peoples of the earth--an education no public school in The County* could ever match. Of course they would go on to University in Switzerland and take postings in the Diplomatic Corps of their respective homelands (Brigita, whose father was invariably an international lawyer, would ensure that each of our eight children would have citizenship in their place of birth…in case you were wondering) and by the time I was 60 my offspring would serve in the highest levels of government of the worlds most powerful countries. Unfortunately nothing especially fantastic happened at all so most of the stuff I wrote down was just a record of how long I sat in this train station or that café and what beverage I had in my hand at the time. I am now hesitant to mention my international phase in casual conversation because I hate being misjudged and lets face it, blogs are all about judging. The first blog entry is crucial. Who is this guy? What’s he all about? The thought of being perceived as pretentious makes me feel like such a sissy. I know that is a pretty lame term but that is just how I feel. I am pretty sure that it has something to do with the fact that I come from a family whose primary concerns are celebrating every (and I mean every) holiday on the calendar by roasting whole pigs, floating down rivers in tractor tubes, or taking each others money in poker games. Cancun is the farthest that anyone of them has traveled and was best described by my aunt as 'kick ass'. As a child I was constantly embarrassed by them but now they are what keep me grounded. “So what’s it like to live with all those commies over there”, my cousin asked when I returned from an extended stint. “At least tell me you got some ass”. These are definitely not the people to discuss the revolutionary design of the flying buttress or the literary dominance of Balzac. But then again, neither am I. Really.
*Western suburbs of a Midwestern American city

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A couple of my friends just bought kayaks and I will soon be following suit. We had been talking about it for months, researching it for a few weeks and this past weekend two of us finally pulled the trigger. I, as I have made apparent, am the sad bloke that lives paycheck to paycheck and will be waiting until this Friday to get a boat of my own. I mention this not out of some kind of testosterone induced, extreme-sport touting male posturing (Hey dude, you wanna slay some phat rapids this weekend?) but rather I think it funny (dare I say cute) that we guys and our guy buddies like to spend time and money on a few common hobbies that we can do together when our wives or girlfriends have to work or simply feel generous enough to let us have a few hours, an entire day or even a whole weekend to play together. The other day I was driving near the park and I saw two bearded fellows on mopeds with tennis rackets strapped to their backs. Those two guys are all about beards, riding their mopeds and playin' tennis, I thought. Good for them.

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