Mental Jotto at 3 AM

The title of the blog -

"Mental jotto" from my friend Jack who got it from a Tom Wolfe book when we were in college.

"Yearbook" from the Oscar Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook, which only psychology majors ever had to learn about. (Timothy Leary had a psychological inventory listed in there, from his pre-acid days.)

My friends Jack, Gerry, and Bruce and I used to write things down and send them to each other. We used manual typewriters and carbon paper so we'd be able to have copies for everyone. My mom did the same thing later with her family letters. But the family letters were newsy, while my letters to my friends were just rambling observations about anything and nothing.

Early blogs, in other words.

Except now, instead of being kept in a musty file cabinet in my basement, my rambling observations about everything and nothing can be out on the Internet for any one of several billion human beings to see. As long as their Comcast isn't acting up, that is.

At work, I run a call center. Not your average call center, since we're all mental health counselors who are there to assist people who work for the companies my company contracts with for employee assistance. Some of them aren't happy about having to call us. Like those poor guys in Northwest Indiana in all those labor unions who were stricken with a mysterious outbreak of Cold Pee Disease. Rumor has it that it's caused by spider bites. At least that was one guy's explanation. But anyway, when they don't pass their drug test for whateer reason, they have to call us.

Now I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this country might be better off if we legalized cocaine and marijuana and taxed it like liquor. But I still think it's a pretty good idea to keep the guys who've been enjoying those vices from working on the piping at a steel mill or a power plant (D'oh!). Or driving 18 wheelers filled with a few thousand gallons of gasoline.

Besides, as long as people have to be seen by counselors for failing drug tests, I'll have a job.

But other people call us because they want to get some help with something. And we do help them most of the time. The pay isn't great and we don't get a lot of praise (mostly we get complaints when people have a hard time geting through), but it's good work and it feels good to do a good job at it. So that's it for work.

Fiddling is much harder. I started it last March by taking classes (and later private lessons) at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. I've played the guitar for 30 plus years, and recently took up the mandolin (and ukulele), but the fiddle is much harder. They forgot the frets, for one thing. And there's this infernal bow to deal with.

Oh, well, enough for tonight. Welcome to my blog.