Ever get kind of goofy, because it’s late?

Maybe you’re reading a story, and you’re sleepy but it pulls you onward. Your eyes ache, still you are reading on and on?

Why do we do that?

Henrietta, Texas: When I reached high school, studying a language was optional. We had a choice of Latin.

Our school was small, and the reason we had Latin offered, instead of French or Spanish or German, was because of Ms. Edwina Nutter. A teacher of English, she also knew Latin.

Ergo, Latin.

(J’regrette! Lo siento mucho! Gotdammenstein!)

Ms. Nutter was no nutter; shrewd and humorous she was. She liked to travel, and since a nine-month teaching job paid frugally, every other year she’d promote a grand tour of Europe, with herself as the guide, travelling free. An educated woman in a small Texas town.

Latin not useful, you say? Ha! I beg to differ …

To this day, I still recall these five handy phrases …

• Semper Fidelis. (Always Faithful.)
• Agricolae puellae sunt. (The girls are farmers.)
• Pax vobiscum. (Peace go with you.)
• Vini, Vidi, Vici. (I came, I saw, I conquered.)
• Est ne puella? (Are you a girl?)

As you can see, these five phrases will cover almost any situation. At least, they have for me. Highly recommended!

As expected, I met Tim W., the last known paid web designer in San Francisco, in Townsend Center hallway. I carried a blogging book; still studying, you see. He suggested to search out favorite blauthors. Good idea.

Sure enough, Jon E. almost escaped. Due to the enslaving nature of the cell phone, however, he was impelled to return, and I signed paperwork on May Day. New home for voicemail numbers coming soon. This will make me mobile. Or, as we say in our slogan from the Abe’s SuperBudget VoiceMail brochures, “Freedom to Move!”

Today I found Adrienne laughing in the kitchen. “We’re out of sacks for the trash,” she said. I should add that we normally put the trash into large brown grocery-store bags.

“I got this one,” she said, holding up a white plastic sack with a cute pink drawcord. “It’s silly, though, because I saw one of these over at [somebody’s] house, and looked all over to find one.” She looked at me expectantly.

“So I see you found one?” I said.

“Well, duh, yeah,” she said, “but the point is that they have rows and rows of brown grocery-store bags, and I was hunting all over for this kind, because I saw this kind.”

We all do this. We overlook a solution to our problem, because we’re holding some other picture in the mind. The mind is a targeting device. It gets a picture and then searches to find it. Picturing a white bag, we’ll overlook hundreds of brown bags.

Is that really … seeing?

People say, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” I think, rather, we should be very careful about what we picture, as we’ll probably spend lots of time seeking it.

Maybe we’re seeking after what seems urgent. Because it looks urgent. Maybe we overlook what’s actually important.

Now and then, for a fresh view of what’s important, visit Jim Sloman’s site at May You Be Happy.com. Always a new view. See for yourself.

That is the lesson of the paper bag.

Marines sweep title. Scoreboard Marines 150,000, Iraq 200. Recently Saddam Hussein forgot to Beware the Ides of March, and … Whoops! At first, I was thinking …

It was an anxious, tense feeling, reminding me of a day in October of 1962, standing on the lawn of Midwestern University, looking up into the huge trees before the vast Admin Building. Listening to the radio, hearing how our navy was moving into position to block the Soviet ships approaching Cuba.

War hovered; it was scary. It was a fall day. The sky was grey, the branches of the trees were mostly bare, and a light, breeze spun across the lawn and through the trees. It was very quiet, except for the tinny sound of the radio.

Then, I went to lunch. It was fried chicken, at some place across the street. Why do we remember these things?

No matter. Saddam has fallen. And the current feeling is well expressed in this swell little ditty ‘Bomb Iraq‘, by Vince Vance and the Valiants. See and here it is now, hear, hear! — Bomb Iraq Music Video

Sounds good to me.

San Francisco, 1976: You have dialed (415) 751-4022. A click, and one of those new answering machines begins speaking. It says …

“Hello! You have reached the lejurious office of the Thumbtack Bugle, high atop Third Avenue. Right now, we’re out on motorcycles, putting up posters all over town, but this machine would be as happy as a machine ever gets to take any short message you might care to leave. I’m now going to make a beeping sound by magic. Behold!”

And then a beeping sound. Another thrilling chapter of …

The Thumbtack Bugle — We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all over town!

When I was very young, perhaps 9, I was visiting at my grandparents farm, 8 miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Two-storied, white with a red roof, it stood atop a hill with a wreath of tall trees around it.

“Unless you toot your own horn, same horn shall not be tooteth!”

With my grandmother in her cool, shady kitchen, I chattered. The conversation must have related to taking credit for one’s accomplishments, because she said, “Unless you toot your own horn, same horn shall not be tooteth!”

Honest, those were the exact words she used. She didn’t talk like that all the time. She was making a joke. And, at the time, I thought it hilariously funny. I laughed and laughed. It was so funny that, here 50 years later, I can quote her words exactly.

So perhaps it was fated …

In the days when I’d started my first business, Simple Simon Bookkeeping, my first client was Phil Groves who had just set up his ice-cream shop, Raskin-Flakkers, in the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco.

About a year later, I had several bookkeeping clients, and my daily hours (1-4pm Monday-Friday) had begun to seem busy! On many days, I actually got several calls!

This particular day, it was Phil Groves calling, and he’d got a motorcycle. He had therefore decided to start an advertising leaflet, a single printed page called the “Thumbtack Bugle”, containing short classified ads, and he would tack this leaflet on all the bulletin boards all around San Francisco.

Since I had regular telephone hours, he wanted to know if I could handle the telephone communications? We made some arrangement, and I was the marketing front-end for the Bugle.

He sold darn few classified ads. It took an eternity to put up all the flyers. Even carrying other folks posters along for ten dollars didn’t make it worth-while. Therefore he attempted to hire two half-wits to do the job. They lasted about two weeks, and the Bugle went into mothballs.

A year later, and one night I had a dream. In the dream, I’d been to Marin County, to look at an apartment, and was driving back across the Golden Gate bridge in an open, red convertible. The sun was glorious, the air clean, and in this dream I thought to myself, “Now that Paul (my younger brother back in Texas) has gone off to college, he’s not using his dirt-bike motorcycle any more. If I had him ship it, I could start up the Bugle again!”

I woke up, and began making my plans. I called Phil Groves and made a deal, then figured out how to change the rates, the route, and to focus on carrying posters for other folks.

I made a logo. It was a bugle on a cord, held up by a big thumbtack. From the bell of the bugle came the large word: “Toot!”

With this logo at the top, I designed a new poster, a big one, that said “We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all across town.” While I was laying it out, a phone call interrupted.

It was a religious group, calling long-distance from Nevada City, California. They had a poster to go up. Was this the Thumbtack Bugle? Were we still in business?

“We are,” I said.

What is new about weblogs?

What’s new here is that anyone can publish. No thought required about the format, about FTP clients. Just open a webpage, type into a box, and click. Bango! You’re published. This means that …

This makes web-publishing as easy as surfing, or operating a television. Your mama could do it. That means it’s easy.

In addition, now we get the smarty-pants, the artsy, the web designers. Suddenly they’re artistes. They can tweak and twitter, and all the world is aglow in the bask of their friends, and wine. No doubt. This is a fine feeling. I may sneer, but wouldn’t I go back to college age — just for an hour — and experience the richness of the emotions among my peers, the admiration, the fun? Of course I would. You would too. Don’t lie. You know you would.

So the point is: these young ones get all artsy, and by golly, here’s the truth: This is a new creative outlet! It’s a new outlet in three ways. You can have beautiful layouts. You can have cool pix. You can write with beauty and style.

If you got no style, you can scour for cool stuff and post that. Sort of getting your admiration by being the most clever scavenger-hunter in the group. You remember that from 5th grade, don’t you? Scavenger hunts?

This is something new. It will grow like topsy.

Lesson three. A blog is not reality. It is a construction. Why do birds make nests? Why does a man with a hammer walk around looking for nails sticking up? It is the nature of water to flow downhill.

Make sense? A blog is not reality. Instead …

A blog is a construction. Perhaps it is artistic. Perhaps it blogges at bloggy time. It’s well known that it steam-engines at steam-engine time. This might be the same thing.

The blog is a construction. This means you can cheat. E Pluribus Zample …

Spozin you had nothing to say? Today. No problemo. This is the perfect time to soak in the rich bath of memory, savoring the scent of a madelaine cookie, in remembrance of things past. Now’s the time for Looky Back. Just dredge and repeat, dredge and repeat. In no time there’s your post for today.

Now I have an advantage over some of you whipper-snappers — as my Grandfather would deem ye, I reckon — and that advantage is that I am 59. What does this mean? It means there is plenty of the good stuff lying around on my time-track. I’m as littered with good stuff as crates of contraband litter the smuggler’s cave.

What else? You can move time forward and back. So what if you had the funny conversation at the dentist on Tuesday. Need material for Wednesday? Slide that puppy around! As Julia Child says (in context of dropping the fancy dinner onto the kitchen floor) “Who’s to know?”

What’s what I say. What say you?