"Once more into the breach..."

Summer is over.

Call me pressimistic, but it's the last day of August, 2009 and while the sun is shining and the sky is a shy shade of blue it's still the early days of Fall. The beginning of the rainy season and six months of gloom and fog. Admittedly, we can kiss the Summer temperatures that historians here in Seattle will etch in the annals of time, and those of us that were here for them will tell our heirs that we survived the "Great Heat of ought-nine." Summer slips away before us like the LED readout on a gasoline pump, but I have to say that I'm looking forward to Fall. I always do.

Autumn in Huntsville, Alabama, is/was always spectacular: foliage as far as the eye can see in glorious hues of red, amber, and gold. There is the smell of chimneys in the crisp evening air as the football season progresses and the dry, satisfying crunch of dead leaves that seem to swarm your feet like curious puppies. I miss it.

So, here I am, taking metaphorical pen to per once more in an attempt to ... I don't know ... catalog my life? Tell a story to whomever will listen? Amuse an audience? That's probably closest to the truth.

I do know that this is Stephen Fry's fault though. If I hadn't been listening to his audio narrative of a collection of his memoirs entitled, Rescuing the Spectacled Bear, and being so enraptured with his wordsmithing then I probably would have left well enough alone. Oh well, so be it.

For those who came in late...

I celebrated my third anniversary of living in Seattle in the early days of this month. This time around I'm enjoying it. I think it's the combination of having my own car, friends, and somewhat of a life that's made the difference from almost ten years ago when I tried this before. (One day, I'm going to have to transpose my handwritten journal of the year before and after the seven months I lasted the first time. Some of it was quite good.)

You know, for all the fact that I'm a direhard Leo and love being the center of attention, I absolutely hate telling my life story in any form. There just doesn't seem to be that much to tell. And yet, I've traveled a great deal of the world, I've met some famous people, had many adventures (which, at the time, I didn't catagorize under the heading "adventure," they were catagorized as, at worst, "near-death situations," or at best, "pains in the ass.") I suppose that hindsight not only lets us see with rose-colored glasses that bare a striking resembalance to Groucho Marx.

Just for giggles, I'm going to try and recall some of these. Let's see, in no particular order, I came within inches of falling off the side of a mountain in the Rockies, I met a world-class magician who stayed up until the small hours doing magic tricks for a friend and me, I walked a few miles in London by myself long after the tube had closed at 11 pm. What else? I've been friends with a licensed bounty hunter, studied martial arts under a sifu ("master") who trained with the Shaolin priests (and once held the world's record for fastest punch), I've been on television and radio and engaged but only head-over-heels in love once.

And how many people can honestly say that they've known the right woman? Just because she just didn't end up with me doesn't diminish the fact.

Okay, I'll stop here. It just sounds like I'm bragging.

This is good though. Cathartic. I'll do it again soon.