“You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.” Okay, I am going with something completely different today. That quote is by Neil Gaiman. Who is Neil Gaiman? you might ask. Well, thank God for Wikipedia... I didn't know either until I looked him up. He is a pretty well regarded author actually. He has won the Bram Stoker award, a Hugo, a Nebula, a Newbery and a Carnegie award for his writing. Not Bad! With all of those awards, someone must have read his stuff!
There are two types of writing in the world... fiction and nonfiction. Each type takes its own skills. To write fiction well, you need to be creative. I mean think about it, often times you are creating your own world, or at a minimum, new people to inhabit worlds people already know. I find it absolutely amazing when someone can take me away from this world and actually make me see another world of their own creation. In my opinion it is just as impressive to write nonfiction. With nonfiction you are using your analytical and research skills to tell a story that may not be obvious to everyone. You are also oftentimes taking the mundane and trying to make it exciting... or at least exciting enough for someone to keep reading about it. Gaiman writes fiction. To get back to his quote, I agree with it totally. Life can be and usually is a collection of inexplicably odd moments. These are what we remember fondly, anyway. I don't know about you, but I rarely remember what I had for dinner on any given day more than two days back. I eat dinner every day, yet I really can't remember any of those meals because they all run together. No need for an explanation there! Yet I remember vividly little odd things that have happened to me along with the major moments of my life. My life has been filled with odd moments. So odd in fact, that I don't really know where to begin. I couldn't tell you all of them anyway. They float into my mind, make me smile, and then float out again. I just thought of two that I have no explanation for. Why they happened? Who knows, they just did. The first one that comes to mind was that I once partied with a coven of witches in Philadelphia. Originally, my friend and I were going to Philly to hang out with his sister. Little did we know that his sister hung out with self-proclaimed witches. You never would have known that any of them were witches. A few of them were cute, and the others were average looking. I kept asking one of the cuties to put a hex on me, but that only led to her spiking my drink with an illegal substance. It was an interesting evening! No explanation ever came for why they were witches. I didn't really care. As long as we weren't going to become human sacrifices, I was okay to party with them. The night went by without incident, although I must say that we met a number of weird characters that evening. Oddly enough, these girls went to Temple, and that school's mascot is an owl. How fitting that these witches were going to Temple and rooting for owls! No explanations here! Just relating an odd moment from my past. The second odd moment that came to mind happened in the Hampton's in New York. When I was younger, a bunch of us used to rent a bungalow out on the beach during the summer. It was funny, there were people walking in and out of that bungalow all of the time, and half of the time I had no clue who the people were. We would all invite friends up for the weekend, so it wasn't surprising that there could be thirty people hanging out in the yard or house at any given time... and you might know maybe half of them. The time that really sticks out to me though was one day when me and a friend of mine were just hanging on the beach drinking beers. Neither one of us was going in the water, we were just standing there talking when all of a sudden, one of the girls from the party going on at the house came running up and said "hey come on let's go swimming and ran by us and went into the surf. We just stood there and watched her for a couple of minutes and she would yell "come on in, the water is fine!" and other such nonsense. We were content to drink our beers since neither one of us was really into her. Well, the next thing you know, the girl whipped off her bikini top and yelled "Hey guys come on! Hello!!!" Well, you know we both just looked at each other in disbelief, dropped our beers and went in the water! I still don't know that girl's name, although we hung out with her the rest of the day and me and her sang with the band later that night. (Just for the record, they shut our mike off after the first thirty seconds or so. We were THAT bad! Thank God we were friends with some of the guys in the band, they let us stay up there for a song or two before asking us to go back in the crowd.) So anyway, there are a couple of odd moments in my life without explanation. There are one or two more that involve shouting mazel tov! at inappropriate times, or allowing drunk friends to chase garbage trucks down Lexington Avenue in the early morning hours after they mistakenly identify them as buses. These too, deserve no explanations. Anyway, odd moments bring color to our lives. Tell me some of your odd moments, and I will tell you who you are. Or more exactly, who you were. We all change. The odd moments I have now have nothing to do with drinking or partying. They involve my daughters and their thoughts and hopes, and the moments we spend together. Fishing, hiking, karate and learning make for a much better combination than booze and cigars for making my odd moments nowadays.
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