I've Been Diagnosed!

A friend with a degree in Psychology told me recently that she thinks I have a disease… or, that’s not really true. I think she used the word “condition” and had a medical name for it that sounded like something I ordered at a Jordanian restaurant...

When we went to the restaurant yesterday, I learned that the owner grew up poor in Jordan. Ever since I read a book about Lawrence of Arabia I’ve been interested in Jordanian history. Lawrence of Arabia was a secret agent for British intelligence...

I think Edgar Allan Poe was a secret agent, too…

There was a series on PBS years ago about Riley the British spy in Russia during the Revolution there. The kids were still little. We all watched it together. At the time, I was running a small-town newspaper in western Nebraska at the remote fringes of the Sandhills and all we could get on television was PBS…

The Grant Tribune-Sentinel -- that was the name of the newspaper. To this day, it’s the only general circulation newspaper in all of American history to ever endorse Lyndon Larouche for President. I think it was in 1988...

We went to Nebraska after I got run out of Detroit. A good friend of Henry Kissinger lived there, a high roller in Detroit who’d gotten his start in Cleveland’s “Purple Gang,” importing Canadian whiskey during Prohibition but then got into drugs and didn’t want snoopy reporters around...

My dad's dad -- Grandpa "Babe" -- sold a few bottles of bootleg whiskey around town back then. He drove an Indian motorcycle. He said it was ok to shoot a deer out of season so's long as the family needed the meat...

My life would have been different had Roosevelt not ended Prohibition. I always loved going to old bars to bull shit and play pool. I think the Packers are playing this coming Sunday and if they win they’re in and I’d love to be in a Wisconsin bar if and when that happened... Without Rogers!...

I’ve only been to an old bar to bull shit and play pool once since I retired… what’s it been? let me think? about four years? I learned that I wasn’t as good of a pool player as I remembered myself to be and never went back and the bar food is deep fried in kettles of guilt...

My wife and I cook our own meals almost all the time. We don’t go to bars, but sometimes to restaurants that have a liquor license to meet up with friends like the one with a degree in Psychology who said she noticed that I hardly ever complete one thought before jumping into another, which, she said, is a symptom of a condition with a medical name.

I said to her:

“That’s because my mind’s working whenever I open my mouth."

I explained to her that lots of people have told me that it makes them uncomfortable; suggesting that I spend more time thinking before opening my mouth.

"I’ve tried," I told her, "but it takes too much time and then I lose my train of thought. I’ve been thinking about my oldest daughter whose been pondering the metaphysical implications of the number zero and one of my granddaughters is a whiz in calculus… sounds like the ol’ Leibniz/Newton debate, don’tchya think… Is my condition curable?”