Musings of an Idiot

By

Harold Anderson

Foreword

I like to write.  I like to tell tales.  I am the son of a teller of tales.  My father would go on for hours talking about life on the farm, growing up in the Great Depression, and especially, about the war.  He was a reluctant soldier, drafted into WW II, who served for three years – two of them in Europe (he was in the Normandy Invasion, D- Day plus two).  He was scared to death the entire time and just wanted to go home.  Most servicemen brought souvenirs home from the war:  bits of enemy uniforms, captured flags or weapons – all kinds of detritus of war.  Daddy brought home some of that, but mostly he brought tales; and oh, how he loved to tell them.  Three years of experiencing them, and fifty years of telling them.  His tales were well used.  He got more mileage out of them than I have my 87 Chevy pick-up.

My mother hardly ever told tales.  She just spent most of her time seething.  She did tell me a good one about the Great Flood of 1919, which I will include later (If I remember to).

There used to be a term “idiot savant.”  The PC people got ahold of it, and it is now just “savant”.  You know that I am talking about: people who go about like Goofy saying “Ga-hip, Ga-hip,”  but can  tell you your birth date by looking at your tire tread, or can hear a symphony just once and play it back by ear, without missing a note,  on a Jew’s harp.  I am not a “savant” – just an idiot.  But I do have a penchant for writing – just for writing, mind you, not for spelling (thank God for Spellcheck!).

I used to write the humor page for the (now discontinued) Mississippi Forestry Commission magazine Forestry Forum and a lot of people liked my stuff.  With the advent of e-mail – and now Facebook – I can’t resist rambling a bit on the keyboard.  My stuff is, as Mr. Shakespeare said, “like a tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.  What does that say of you people who ask for more?  Hum?

When I was a kid, I used to collect jokes like my grandsons collect dolls, er, “action figures.”  The closest we came to that when I was a kid were those little green “army men.”  We would line them up in battle field array, build fortifications with dominoes and my adversary (usually Jim Allred) and I would arm ourselves with rubber bands that launched bits of folded paper and lay waste to each other’s forces.  It was a war of attrition:  the last one to have a man standing was the winner! Yea, blow the bugles and bang the drums!  But I digress. (I told you I was an idiot.) Anyway, I never forgot a joke, and I built quite a repertoire.  Kids would gather around me on the school ground and say, “Harold, you idiot,” tell us a joke.” And I would oblige.  I liked the attention.

Many of you have said “Harold, you should write a book.”  To which I replied, “NEVER!”  Do you have any idea how much work that would be?  I would have to write, edit, proof read rewrite and then hire a proof reader to catch all the mistakes then do it over again, and where would I find a publisher?  I know nothing about that.  Would I do like Dave Ramsey: get it published by a vanity press then spend the rest of my life selling the thing out of the trunk of my car?  Then there would be all the TV talk shows and traveling to Sweden to get my Nobel! That’s why I retired: to avoid all that work!

Robert Frost said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Well, I say, “Harold there is that doesn’t love work.”  I am just a little bit lazy.

I am the Maynard G. Krebbs of the AARP set.

Some of you second generation cousins probably need an explanation:  Maynard G. Krebbs was a beatnik character of the popular fifties TV program, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” You probably need more explanation.  Beatniks preceded hippies.  They were social drop-outs who wore black berets, black T- shirts, goat-tees, were dirty and sat around thumping on bongo drums, staring into space reciting terrible poems laced with such profound idioms as “cool, daddy-O” and DEFINITELY DID NOT WORK.  Every time ol’ Maynard heard the word “work” he would get this terrified look in his eyes, sort of like a bunny rabbit facing the Big Bad Wolf, and whine in a plaintive, begging voice “Work? Work?

I will make an offer to any of you cousins:  If you know how to publish this as a book, have at it.  We will split the profits.  Deal?

People have told me, “Harold, how do you make up all those stories, and then write them so humorously?”

A sad but true fact:  I don’t make them up.  They all happened to me.  I just tell the tale. (From time to time, I do embellish a bit – but only a bit.)  Writing is no big deal.  Here’s my goal:  To write so people can understand.   My system is to write something, forget I have written it, (which is pretty easy for me – now, what was I writing about?  Oh, yeah.) then read it.  If I, a bona fide idiot, can understand it, I figure you really smart people can probably read it while expanding Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and get the nuance of every word.

My problem is getting started.  I like to write, but when the urge strikes, I tend to try to find something else to do.  Kind of like a not-quite-potty-trained two-year-old when he gets that certain sensation in his bowels.  One famous writer (I forget who, or maybe no one, and I just made this up) said:  “Writing is easy.  You just stare at a black piece of paper and sweat blood. “ It is not that bad for me.  Of course I am not under the pressure of meeting a deadline or starving to death. Once I get started, the words just form in my mind (that’s not a problem, because there is not much else going on up there), roll down my arms and fall off the tip of my pen onto the paper (or, in this case, fall off the tips of my fingers onto the keyboard and thus onto virtual paper.

 By the way, everyone, please print these pages out, if only to throw them away.  We tree farmers really do need the business.

So, I am going to muse and ramble a bit.  There is no plot and this is the ultimate “open-ended” project, since I don’t plan an end.  I will just stop when I get tired of it or die, whichever comes first. I will post installments on the Anderson Cousins BlogSpot.  Since Julie has come to be the unofficial on-line Anderson Cousin moderator, I will advise her when another installment is posted.  She can read it and, if she thinks it is worthy, notify the rest of you.

Let’s see, let me empty my mind and go back and re-read that.  Yep, it makes sense to me, so I KNOW all of you will understand it.