Eight Days to Amish: Binge reading my blog in tree stand

Friday, September 19, 2014

Binge reading my blog in tree stand

Good morning, Dave A.! Had your breakfast yet? Seen any deer? And how’s the blog been lately?

I’m taking the unusual step today of directly addressing an individual reader because Dave, one of my more faithful blog constituents, informed me last week he’d given up cold turkey.

Why, pray tell? Had I become boring? Topics not to your liking? Have you found a blog that purports to be nearer to Amish than mine?

“Nah,” he said. “It’s none of that. It’s just I’m going deer hunting near Quincy, Illinois, for 10 days in November and I like to have big backlog of your blogs to read while I’m in the tree stand for 13 hours a day.”

It’s not the first time someone’s informed me they’re binge reading my blog, but it is the first time they’ve done it in a chilly tree stand while cradling a lethal weapon.

(Editor's note from Oct. 15: I've since learned Dave is an archer. A perfectionist would re-write this to correct the misconception. Not me. It's still a lethal weapon. Remember, bows don't kill deer. Arrows do. Or is it Dave?)

It struck me as very strange, but I prefer that image to the one most commonly mentioned as the best place to read my blog. That, of course, would be the crapper.

Some people are sheepish about mentioning this, others bold.

I favor the latter because it helps demolish the unnecessary stigma that some feel about reading in the bathroom.

Bathrooms are such great places to read I’m surprised they don’t each come with their own librarian. It’s quiet (mostly), well-lit and no one in your nebbie family will dare bother you while you’re doing your necessary.

And if makes you feel more comfortable, rest assured that while I always read in the bathroom, I’ve never once written in there.

In fact, it’s maybe the only room where I’ve never written even a single word.

I prefer to write in my office, but will sometimes write on the kitchen or dining room table and I’ve blogged from bed, from the porch and once when the girls were having a party from the canary yellow captain’s chair on my John Deere mower.

I’m actually writing this from the bleachers in the high school natatorium where my daughter is engaged in swim practice.

I had a friend once tell me he knew a writer who says he always wore a three-piece suit every time he wrote in his apartment by himself where no one to see him. He said it made him feel more professional.

Clearly, the guy was either an idiot or a skilled liar. Because only an idiot would bother to constrict himself in a neck tie when sitting down to write.

To write, I wear what’s comfortable. It’s what you’d see me wearing if you saw me at a family restaurant or ball game. I wouldn’t dream of trying to write something funny in church clothes.

Maybe I should dream up some kind of heroic costume to tell people I wear when I write, something with a cape. I could be SuperBlogger!

Dave’s told me he sometimes laughs out loud at something I’ve written. I love hearing that reaction so please tell me you, too, do that even if it isn’t true.

I like to think, for the sake of gentle woodland creatures, that Dave right now is guffawing so hard the nervous deer are scattering for miles wondering what all the commotion might be.

And having the rifle there is an interesting element.

It’d be great if he fired off a round every time he read a line that struck him as funny. Maybe the “last meal” story below has enough funnies in it that it’d sound like west central Illinois had declared war on Missouri.

Of course, best of all, would be Dave returned to tell me he was reading my blog and became so immersed that he was startled to find a bunch of wild animals reading over his shoulder right along with him.

You know that sarcastic rhetorical question about if bears do their business in the woods?

It’d be cool if, like so many of my human friends, they were reading my blog while they were on the squat.