Taking a break from treating my comedy seriously to listen to the sounds of this planet, feel it creak and groan.

Stepping aside from all the running narratives to be myself for a week.

I separate me from being the characters that I have inhabited to better write about them.

I know who I am.

I choose some characters who are discovering themselves in order to make the stories more realistic.

I’ve been essentially the same personality since I was five years old in Boone, North Carolina, USA.

Fifty years later, I visited Boone to assess my personality, scared literally to death that I had become a foreign entity of some sort, only to discover, no shock, that I’m still the inquisitive boy I was who sat in a Sunday school class questioning the wisdom of adults who insisted on telling children fabricated stories they themselves did not understand.

Has nothing changed in 50 years?

I want to tell myself it’s such a bad thing but it’s not because I know that humans are slow to change.

We’re also quick to adapt to change.

I passed through the latest identity crisis, panicking for nothing as usual.

But it generated a new set of narrative tales.

I know whom to thank for being there during this crisis, whom I love.

I know not all owls say “Who.”

I don’t believe any owls say “Whom.”

The vibratory roar of an internal combustion engine spinning a metal plate with sharp edges rolls across the inedible grass field called a lawn next door.  I know that the people who earn a living cutting grass want more lawns to cut but I’m happy I replaced my lawn with groundcover that doesn’t need mowing and wish more people would.

I am happy again, happy I was able to capture my identity crisis thoughts and put them into characters, happy seeing that I don’t change as much as I worry I will, cognisant that I’m more consistent than my independent streak believes I am.

What’s next in my life?

I’m not sure.

Something always happens worth thinking and writing about.

After all, I’m still an inquisitive five-year old who sees everyone wearing the emperour’s new clothes and laughs at the silliness of our pretense of hiding the fact we all have scars and blemishes, body parts that fall outside some artificial social norm, no need to cover ourselves with masks and subcultural taboos.

Will I suffer spring fever every year on Earth the rest of my life?  Why not?!