Episode 6: Happy Valentine’s Day! — Becoming Super Rog!

February 15, 2025

Prepare to be weird (a good weird)

My Internet Bride

We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

Dr. Seuss

In 2000, I found my weird.

I started internet dating. Digital photography was still rare, but a friend of mine owned this thing called a “scanner;” it could convert a photo into a digital file. Magical. For my dating profile – where I described myself as “fat, bald, and unemployed; so I’ve got all that going for me” – I posted a photo of myself (no need to post people more attractive than me – pretty much everyone) where I looked halfway decent (that’s as good as it gets).

I was holding a Thanksgiving turkey.

A woman from New Hampshire asked, “Are you the one on the right or the left?”

We’ve been married 24 years

Weird?

“Being A Weird Is Just A Natural Side-Effect Of Being Awesome.”

Internet

Happy Valentine’s Day, Brenda!

My Not-So-Weird Internet Bride

And Happy Valentine’s Day to you all, too! Weird or not.

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You Call That Progress?

Investigations Continue

Shifting from blindly writing to blindly planning, I sense, I smell, I feel structure: lurking, creeping, buried.

My dream is to weld Nerdanalys with humor, fusing all I’ve learned about structure from crafting magic clown acts, framing standup comedy routines, composing humorous essays and speeches, earning a Master of Arts in Writing, and working with Anne Helmstedter and my cohorts in The Sellable Book Inner Circle.

Planning is hard.

It smells like work, work I’ve evaded for 70 years.

I’m more ad hoc, ad-lib, improve, “wing it” kinda guy.

As a Bucknell undergrad, I asked one of my Religion (my major) professors for an “Incomplete.” I explained, “You can either give me an incomplete or fail me.”

“You drive a hard bargain. I worry eventually you’ll have two papers due instead of just one.”

Absolutely correct.

Lesson learned, from then on pulled my inescapable all-nighter whenever the paper was due.

The next year, as I was leaving the University Center at midnight, I ran into a classmate who asked, “How’s your final paper going?”

“I’m going over to a friend’s house to start writing it now.”

She laughed. “No, really, how’s it going?”

“Really. I’m starting soon.”

She was aghast.

I had nine hours.

When I walked into class the next morning at 8:45, she shrugged her question. I gave her my thumbs up and held up 2 copies of my 20 page paper – the original and a copy still warm from the copier.

She was awed.

Just minutes earlier, typing the conclusion, I thought: “Now I realize what I SHOULD have written.”

Thanks to that epiphany, from then forward, I wrote a first draft, to figure out what I really wanted to say, planned my paper, and finally wrote a muscular final version.

Just kidding.

I kept stumbling along, dodging due dates, avoiding professors begging for my paper (I once had to explain to Campus Security why I roamed the religion department at 2:00 AM, explaining I was delivering my way overdue paper).

I’m still bumbling, but I do write early and often. I think (hope) I’ve improved, but I’ve still got a lot to learn about a little thing called “planning.”

Wish me luck.