July 4, 2002

• A bunch of you know that I’ve been walking around in an emotional minefield this week.  You know because I took you with me.

  
  

  hnybny1228, SealKitty & blankityblank:  I’m glad you liked the story.  Keep coming around for more.  I appreciate your feedback.

  
  

  HighDesertLola, Beek, cheshired, soul_survivor, krisinluck, Wilshak, oOMisfitOo, Imbi, Mystical2, compassion, exlog, chastityrose & Reynard:  Thank you for the encouragement that kept me going.  I could not have done it alone.  Whew!  What a breakthrough.  I’m still processing the memories and feelings brought up by that memoir from 40 years ago. 

  
  

  In the aftermath, one of Karen’s affirmations  has given me what I needed to release a lot more blocks.  If you read the memoir, you may remember several places where I said I didn’t recall what happened. I haven’t filled in all the blanks yet, (still don’t recall goodbyes in Mancos) but I recalled the next time the two brothers from the threesome came around, and a lot more things that were left out of the story. I plan to edit it and then post the entire thing again.  That will take a while, because I’ve decided to start at the beginning and publish my life story here on Xanga.  Some of the early years are already “in the can” on Schpeedy Trackbawl’s hard drive, and I want to go through it and do a final edit in the light of my new perspective.  Then I will begin telling my story here in installments with maybe a few breaks now and then for other kinds of blogs.

  
  

  Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller sitting here with a battered old hat at my feet.  Stroll through, pause and listen, and once in a while, if you like what you’ve heard, drop a little something in the hat.

  
  

    This could help motivate me to get more work done on the thriller, and to start the prehistoric epic for which I’ve been doing research.

  
  

  [Well, I never got the hat within the text here to work as a link to paypal, but I found a way to do it with the hat in the header. Now please let me know what you think of my idea.]

  
  

  Zaena asked in my guest book about my nic, SuSu, and it got me to thinking about nicknames.  How I came up with SuSu is, it’s short for Susitna Sue. I live in the Susitna (or Su, to us who live here) Valley. I gave the name Susitna Sue to a character in the thriller I’m writing. I made her a composite of myself and several of my professional colleagues around here, and then I killed her off in the first chapter just to get things started.

  
  

  I first borrowed her name to represent me on the “final proof” website where I sometimes do readings. After trying every form of my own name and all my usual monikers, and learning that they all had been taken already, I settled on Susitna Sue. The same thing happened to me when I came to Xanga, and I’d already gotten tired of keying the entire name, so I shortened it to SuSu. And that’s the tale of that name.

  
  

  The nickname above, “Schpeedy Trackbawl”, is what I call our old laptop.  It got that name because its trackball only consents to work if we give it occasional liberal applications of alcohol.  Most of us have probably been stuck with an uncomplimentary nickname, such as Fatty or Clumsy, or one that we’d just as soon not carry for one reason or another. Most of that type for me were based on my physical appearance: Red, Freckles, Carrot Top, Freck, Rusty (this at the time when Rusty Warren’s “blue” comedy records were popular), and for some unfathomable reason, in high school in North Texas, boys used to call out to me, “Hey there, Red-on-the-Head-Like-the-Dick-on-a-Dog.” I hated that name!

  
  

  My first ever nickname (except for “Kitten”, the pet name my father had for me) was “Sickie”, earned for the number and frequency of absences in kindergarten and first grade. A couple of other names the kids stuck me with bothered me some at the time, mostly because of the snotty tones of their voices as they chanted them. In retrospect, though, it wasn’t so bad being called Egghead or Brain.

  
  

  For a brief time a few people called me, “Gross”, but I didn’t mind that at all. It was an honorific in that crowd of Hells Angels and other One-Percenters. It came about because I became half of a sort of performance art duo called Grace and Gross. Grace got his name by tripping over his own feet, getting off his Harley and not setting his kickstand just right so the bike fell over, and other such graceful moves. He was big, blonde, good-looking and about 19 years old. I was half a dozen years older. We did our act several times over the period of a few months, but the first one was spontaneous improv.

  
  

  One night a pack of us on our way home to Vallejo from a big holiday weekend run walked into a cafe somewhere in the wine country. My blood sugar was in the negative numbers and I snagged a piece of toast off a plate that the bus boy hadn’t got around to picking up yet.

  
  

  Grace, still a growing boy, was hungry too. He picked up the toast plate and took it with him, circling the room looking for another table with abandoned food. Walking behind him, finishing my toast, I saw a couple getting up to leave, so I asked the guy, “Are you done with that?” When he looked at my companions and me, he gulped, kinda choked, and nodded. I picked up his water glass and handed it to him, then I reached for the T-bone on his plate and proceeded to gnaw the sweet, tender meat off it as we all trooped around to the big booth in the corner.

  
  

  In the Society for Creative Anachronism, such behavior is known as “freaking the Mundanes.” To us bikers then, it was called freaking the Citizens or the Straights, or fuckin’ with their heads. Originality and enthusiasm for the sport were honored. Grace and I eventually embellished our act right over the top and got the lot of us tossed out of a few restaurants, but not until after we’d gotten some pretty decent free meals through our scavenging.

  
  

  Would any of you care to share some of your nics and their history?

  • 7:23 pm
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