Well ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to my eclectic collection of verbal brilliance, wordsmithery, unmitigated babbling, and what’s considered to be generally unfettered jibber-jabber.

At the time of this writing, it’s Good Friday, 2018. Because of the nature of my employment with a company whose operating hours are tied to federal holidays, I’m home in my StudyTorium composing what fails to promise to be the greatest thing I will write all day. I’ve just consumed an Everything Bagel slathered with cream cheese. A partially consumed coffee flavored energy drink sits at my right.

Planted firmly in my ears is a new, Bose flavored Bluetooth apparatus which has the ability to be paired to two devices at once. Wifey just saw me in them and compared the bolt like appearance of them to that of a certain movie monster that had bolts in his neck. I subsequently corrected her pronunciation of the name, to which she rolled her eyes and walked away. 

For what it’s worth, next week I’ll celebrate 20 years of cubicle occupancy with the company whose operating hours are tied to federal holidays. To mark the event, they granted me access to a portal filled with various gifts and goodies in which to select an anniversary gift. In previous anniversaries where the total number of years of servitude was divisible by five, I was given a pen (used it for a while), a candy dish (sits on the piano gathering dust), and a picture frame (still boxed and sitting on a shelf in the closet). This time, I was able to choose from an assortment of bowls, luggage, outdoor speakers, a watch, a ball gag, and a set of Bluetooth earbuds.

The new earbuds arrived yesterday, so I’ve been using them for a better part of the morning to pump copious loads of aural flotsam and jetsam into my wax caverns so as to shake loose the stuff the cotton swab and the bobby pin refuse to liberate.

Faith, my high-strung, kitchen counter jumping, lab-jack terrier is pacing the house trying to figure out why in tarnation I’m home and not planted in front of the bedroom TV streaming reruns of Breaking Bad in an effort to learn about the wonders of methylamine. 

Little does she know that she’s going to the vet in a few hours for the standard round veterinary shenanigans that she’s subjected to every six months.

Now that I’ve painted a picture of what’s going on right now, let’s jump into the subject at hand.

Did I mention that it’s Good Friday?

Of course I did.

That means I have two months and a little bit of change left to finish out this uncoordinated trollop through my forties. At some point last year just before my 49th birthday, I posted a threat that I was going to compose a series of blog posts reflecting on the events of the last 10 years. To some extent I’ve done that, however I don’t believe I’ve done it in the full (or fool, take your pick) spirit in which I intended.

All things being equal, I’m probably spent more time talking out the busy time I’ve had at age 49 than any of the other years in the last decade.

None the less, I still have about 62 days, so I’ll incorporate a course correction and move on.

Looking back to all of the events in my life since the day I turned 40, a few stick out as notable. I will look to highlight those in the coming 62 days in a manner that is at the very least interesting to me, the subject of those events and producer of the content.

You thought I was writing this stuff for you, didn’t you?

Ladies and gentlemen, after all these years of composing this monument to my solipsistic ego, I can tell you now that no one derives more joy from reading these soliloquies more than I do. Sometimes, I will go to the random post section on the site (as you should on a regular basis) and read five or six entries just to enjoy what is probably one of my favorite things to do. Every time I do that, I come away either chuckling or marveling at the material I endeavored to post on that given day. Obviously it’s more poignant to me because more often than not, I know exactly what was going on at the time I posted that material. My full knowledge of the context around the post serves to enhance it for me.

If I was trying to attract an audience, I would sound the periodic calls to prayer via social media more whenever I grace the internet with a new swath of verbal brilliance. My site would feature advertising in hopes of getting you to click banners about weight loss, hair growth, and sexual prowess just so I could recoup a few pennies of my hosting fees.

No longer interested.

All things being equal, if you really wanted to take a gander at the more impactful life events taking place in my 40’s, the first place I’ll point you to is TharpSter.org. It’s in that particular repository that you’ll find a recounting of various trips I took, concerts I attended, and crap I stepped in. It features some fiction that I’ve written over the years and plenty of opinion pieces to boot. It has some gag news articles which cast a light on some real life issues. It catches me griping about daylight savings time, my perpetually cluttered garage, and evils of Super Bowl half time shows. At the same time, it extols the virtue of guacamole and the number 42. Don’t forget about the rambling entries where Star Wars, Bloom County, and Def Leppard are prominently displayed. There are several entries out there in which the title has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the post. Instead, it’s derived from a song lyric or title.

The blog is reflective of the highlights and lowlights of the last ten years of my life.

For what it’s worth, I just read another 5 or 6 blogs I posted back in the days when I was trying to post one a day. It was in those little nuggets of my life that I found a perfect quote to wrap up today’s entry.

I hope you can enjoy the quote and put it to good use…..