I am becoming left handed

I may not be the best writer, but I’ll wager I’m the only writer who can do 10 regulation Army pull-ups and juggle.

Not simultaneously. Not yet.

It’s probably not the kind of boast you’d hear from writers like Stephen King or John Grisham, but it suits me.

If even hack psychologists diagnose I’m trying to compensate for so many professional shortcomings, so be it.

I like the fact that if I ever had to arm wrestle either of those two best-selling titans I’d have them both screaming uncle and racing back to their limos.

But that achievement will pale in comparison to my next great quest.

I’m becoming left handed. I’ve been willing myself to cease using my dominant right hand for all the menial tasks I reflexively summon it to do.

It dawned on me years ago the laziest part of my whole ever-loving lazy body was my deadbeat left hand. The right hand did everything and when it came to doing even the least of motor skills, my left hand never bothered to lift a finger.

It was unfair. It was like a marriage where the one spouse good-naturedly does all the work while the other one sits around and schemes of doing things like becoming left-handed.

But I digress.

So now I brush my teeth, shave, work the computer mouse and do things like button shirts with my left hand.

I  still wouldn’t trust the southpaw to toss darts when there’s a pregnant woman within 10 feet of the cork, but it can certainly lift a 12-ounce beer mug every once in a while.

Our over-reliance on our dominant hands throws our whole bodies out of balance.

It’s true. Ask any tailor. They’ll tell you our dominant hands are as much as an inch longer than the ones that do little more than dangle. Can you imagine how the progression of such natural atrophy could effect people who make sleeves?

My goal is pure ambidexterity. 

It’s just so cool not to mention, well, handy. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were ambidextrous and would paint with both hands, switching when ever one got tired. British artist Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was famous for drawing with both hands simultaneously -- a horse’s head with one hand, a buck’s antlered head with the other.

Benjamin Franklin was ambidextrous and signed both the Declaration of the Indpendence and the Constitution left-handed. That he didn’t think to sign one right handed and the other lefty is the only intellectual blemish on America’s greatest rascal.

This isn’t purely theoretical. Painful misadventure will result in many of us one day winding up in slings. Worst case scenario: What if during one of my midnight strolls I stumble into a bear with a palate so discriminating it consumes only right arms?

Much of my motivation comes from being a really bad writer -- and not the occupational kind, although skimpy professional accomplishments heave the subject into question.

It’s my handwriting. It is atrocious. Elegant penmanship is something I so admire. It’s a vanishing art I turned my back on in about the fifth grade when I saw Jon Logue writing in little block letters and thought it looked really neat.

Today, it’s impossible for me to writing anything in cursive beyond my own name, a pathetic scrawl that.

So I’ve for years been resenting my right hand. Even what little I ask it to do, it does poorly. If it were a second baseman, I’d yank it from the line-up and give the new kid a shot.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my left hand.

My goal is to learn to sign my name left handed in a more stylish flourish than I do with my right. That’d be a good gauge of success.

Studies show a direct correlation between involvement in motor skill exercises and brain growth. Our brains sleep walk through routine tasks, but comes alive when we challenge it with unfamiliar tasks.

My ultimate goal is the increase my brain power to a density sufficient enough to differentiate between foolhardy tasks and ones that might lead to actual income

And I hope observers will one day be able to detect results more tangible than equidistant arms that look snazzy in sleeves.

Being known as someone who writes badly with both hands would be professionally unwise for an otherwise even-handed guy like me.

The King-sized Monster in Maine

We vacationed there as kids and it was where my wife and I enjoyed our last child-free frolic.

But I’ll never return to Maine. A three-headed monster lives there and his realm is populated by drug addicts, adulterers, cutthroats and a host of garden variety geeks and idiots.

And those are the good guys.

I already feel like I’ve met every single person who resides in Maine -- and I’m only on page 519.

Yes, God help me, I’m reading Stephen King’s “Under the Dome.”

King, 62, has sold more than 350 million copies of books under his own name and those issued under the crafty pseudonyms Richard Bachman and John Swithen.

He is the literary equivalent of an earth-devouring monster. Right now he’s killing my time.

I’d been looking forward to reading the 1,074 page book. I hadn’t read a King offering since “Needful Things” (1993) and thought this epic would be a nice break from the history and biography that so enriches my life.

Like most of the world, King’s left an indelible mark on me. For me it started with Pet Sematary, as horrific as anything ever conceived by Poe, Hitchcock or Sterling, the Holy Trinity of creative American horror. I remember relishing “Salem’s Lot” the night after my last college final was completed and I was free to read whatever I wanted.

I remember swapping “The Dead Zone,” “The Shining,” and “Misery” with my old man and sharing our exuberance of stories well told. My wife and I raced each other to book stores to get the monthly installments of the wonderful chap book series, “The Green Mile.” And we both loved his Bachman book, “Thinner.”

I guess I stopped reading King when he started writing books faster than I could read them. Some sources put his total at 73.

I can think of maybe five things in my life I’ve done more than 73 times. In fact, other than golf, reading good books, fun time with the kids, attending sporting events and lovey-dovey stuff with the missus, I have trouble thinking of things I want to do 73 times.

Lots of stuff -- voting, commuting to work -- just gets boring after 25 times.

And that’s what had happened with me and King.

He started losing me with “It,” an otherwise compelling tale that craps out when the villain is revealed to be -- spoiler alert -- a great big scary spider. Oooh! My 3-year-old on a sugar high could have come up with something more plausibly frightening.

Heck, my 3-year-old on a sugar high is more plausibly frightening.

So now I feel marooned halfway through a book that’s more dense than three stacked Bibles.

I need to find out if the people of Chester’s Mill ever emerge from the big dome, how it got there, who’s to blame and who’ll be slain without mercy or taste.

At this point, I hope they all do. King has made the entire population of Maine part of the cast.

And there’s something objectionable about every one of them. His books make the whole state seem like it’s filled with a bunch of reactionary jerks who, ayuh, confront each supernatural challenge with either dull-witted immobility or vigorous criminal mayhem.

I’ve lost count of the rapes, the murders, the assaults and criminal lawlessness taking place in the town -- and that’s just by the police officers.

The narrative is so plodding I’ve become distracted by casting which B-list actor should play the leads in the eventual miniseries (I say Ashton Kutcher as Col. Barbie and Dick Cheney as Big Jim Rennie).

I don’t think the dome book would have been published in its existing form by anyone but King. But no publisher or editor at this point can tell him he’s off track.

So he should take it from me. He needs a decade-long horror sabbatical so he can return with another series of timeless novellas like the four included in “Different Seasons,” his most satisfying read.

That 1982 collection yielded two of the best human interest movies any of us has ever seen: “Stand By Me” and the magnificent “Shawshank Redemption.”

Many people are often surprised but the outstanding 1994 Tim Robbins/Morgan Freeman prison flick is faithfully based on a Stephen King book.

He needs to get back to telling stories about people and daily struggles that make the supernatural seem so contrived.

Besides, what could be any scarier or more supernatural than what’s just taken place?

I just devoted about an hour to giving career advice to Stephen King.

R.I.P. Buster the 19-year-old cat

I was shoveling the last spade full of dirt on the dead cat’s grave when the 2-year-old said something eerily ominous.

“He’ll be back.”

Anyone familiar with Stephen King’s "Pet Sematery" knows what that means. The 1983 book, one of King’s most horrific, is about an Indian burial ground, a dead cat, a runaway truck and rampant evil so pure it kept me wide awake for hours on end.

And that basically describes our late Buster, the cat who’d have been be 19 in October. His incessant yowling probably cost me more sleep than either of my kids. Kids can be cranky, but they can also be so euphorically loving that it’ll erase hours of sleeplessness, sass and diapers foul enough to stagger veteran HazMat teams.

But a cat, even on his most sociable days, will never be anything more than a cat.

I never thought hooking up with Val would mean I’d spend the next 15 years of my life under the same roof as a cat. I barely lived with my folks that long, and them I could at least bum money off.

Standing over his freshly dug grave last night, I tried to muster some feelings of affection. Instead, I felt waves of relief. I’m not going to say I was giddy, but I remember feeling the same sensations when I’ve watched a few hillbilly moving vans pull away from the driveways next door.

I do remember one time when our first child was a baby I tried to train him how to use the toilet with a cat seat attachment the inventor sent me after I did a story for National Enquirer about it. Buster resisted with such ferocity that he rebelled by relieving in the kid’s crib, a Shakespearean sort of revenge for a cat.

The last four years were the worst. In 2004, he began having seizures. We said our goodbyes and Val tearfully rushed him to the animal hospital. Me, I settled into what I was sure would be a wonderful commemoration of the cat I never cared for by peacefully watching Tiger Woods win the British Open. A live Tiger and a dead cat seemed a fitting memorial.

But Buster revived ($800). The next day the vet cautioned, however, his demise was likely a matter of weeks, if not days.

Five more near-death experiences later, I said another final goodbye and was shocked when Val returned home with a tidy box full of Buster.

The cat who wouldn’t die finally did.

No more changing litter boxes. No more changing the sheets after another series of eye-watering accidents. No more being jolted awake by his disgusting little cat-food scented sneezes in my face. No more excruciating toe stubs in the middle of the night stumbling to respond to his otherworldly howls for food or water.

No more Buster.

Rest in peace, my smelly little feline friend.

I know I will.