OLD DAME DANCING

So now it’s blogging. Okay, call me a Luddite. Several have. I’ve been operating computers since 1985 and I’ve bought more PCs than cars. But truth to tell, cars and computers are a lot alike to me—I drive them both without any idea of what’s going on under the hood. As long as the thing gets me where I want to go, I’m satisfied.

And as I’ve told Dickie time and again, there’s no point in learning something if that thing happens to be a passing fad—like DOS, for instance. If I had been able to learn DOS (and I wasn’t able, as Dickie’s epic teaching sessions tearfully demonstrated) it would have been time and good brain cells wasted. Because where is DOS today? Gone, that’s where. Vanished at the whim of some computer wizard named Gates.

But now blogging is here where DOS once was.

Until very recently I bundled blogging into the tech package with texting. I though blogging was 1) unsafe 2) incredibly narcissistic and 3) completely devoid of profitability. But now the Luddite is a blogger. And I’m reminded of the late Don Marquis who wrote: “wotthehell, wotthehell, there’s a dance in the old dame yet.” And as if to prove I’m still here, this is the opening entry on my new blog Old Dame Dancing.

But the real reason for launching this blog is Dickie. He’s been hocking me to do it. His motives are strictly selfish, of course. He is presently teaching himself all about blogs and is eager to use me as a blog guinea pig. Dickie goes into everything with all cylinders firing, and he has a track record of convincing me to straggle along. In the end it was just easier to write the blog than to present reasons for not writing one. I gave argument one half-hearted try:

“What would I blog about?”

“I don’t know,” Dickie snapped. “I don’t care! Something! Anything!”

So here is Old Dame Dancing, and now that the blog page has been boosted up on my website, I will obligingly write stuff for it. And since I think every blog should have a position, I am declaring my intention to write about all sorts of stuff that I know about: Alopecia areata, since I’ve been bean-bald since 2004. Chinese martial arts, since I’ve been a wushu student for fourteen years. Greyhounds, since I’ve been owned by several for sixteen years. Martini drinkers, since I’ve been married to two. (At different times, of course.) Writing for dollars and pleasure, since I’ve been at it for more than forty years. Retirement issues, since I used to think a Social Security check made you a retiree … until I began to question why I was still working. And finally comment, which gives me license to write about anything I please. But whatever the subject du jour, I intended to do it in the spirit of Don Marquis’s disreputable alleycat Mehitabel who observed to Archy the cockroach, “Toujours gai, kid, toujours gai.”

Tags: Alopecia areata, Chinese martial arts, DOS, Greyhounds, Martini drinkers, wushu

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