Apology for Musings and Doggerel*

* Actually started this over a year ago as the introductory blog for this discourse. I forgot about it, then stumbled on it earlier this week. Better late than never as Chaucer coined. A mind is a terrible thing when wasted. - BB

From the Greek “apologia” in the manner of Plato, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, I write this to give insight to my frame of mind. Be afraid, be very afraid.

1954… the Lone Ranger’s last radio episode aired, the H-Bomb was tested on Bikini Atoll, Bill Haley & the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock". America was in transition. World War II morphed into the Korean War that morphed into the Cold War. Amid this melee, I was born.

The bosom of the 50s nurtured me. The golden age of television’s glowing cathode ray was my lodestar. Nascent rock n’ roll was my lullaby.  “May you live in interesting times,” is said to be an ancient Chinese curse. Actually written by a Victorian-era British writer, it is apocryphal, yet apropos.

A brief list of events that occurred while I aged from 5 to 10:

1959 – Revolution in Cuba led by Fidel Castro

1960 – U2 pilot Gary Powers shot down over Russia  - war possible

1961 – Berlin wall erected – war possible

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis – war imminent

1963 – President John F. Kennedy assassinated

1964 – Troops, not just advisers, sent to Vietnam.

Those are just the highlights of what occurred during my first 10 years on this planet. Mixing that with the normal twists and turns of childhood produced a strange potting soil to germinate the sprouting seeds of my consciousness.

Theories on personality development abound - Psychoanalytic, Humanist, Behaviorist, and Biopsychological to name a few. Whatever witch's brew of genetics, societal factors and husbandry produced the psyche that types these words is inconsequential. I have no idea what will incite my interest and give impetus to my doggerel. 

My father was once asked why I acted as I did. Dad shrugged his shoulders and said, "All I can tell you is when he was a kid, I put more stitches in his head than I can count." - as ever - BB
“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.” -Oscar Wilde