Pleased to meet you.

I am six feet one inch tall, 140 pounds. Being abnormally thin but not at all slight of build gives me something of a bony, awkward appearance, rather, I sometimes think, like an old, dead, mossy tree. I have exceedingly curly, sand-blonde hair which is most often frizzed and shaggy due to infrequent care or cutting. My face, overall, has often reminded me of a friendly, inquisitive dog of the short-nosed variety, like a Boxer or Boston terrier due to my small, somewhat upturned nose and heavy jaw. I have deep set, blue-green eyes, a heavy brow ridge, and a pair of dark, bushy eyebrows that are my favorite physical feature. My arms and hands are long and bony, my legs are exceedingly strong, my feet are huge and white. I have only a few stray hairs on my chest, but my arms and legs are well covered with thick tracts of reddish brown.

I have smoked a pipe every day of my life since I was sixteen. If I am able, I will always have a briar or cob pipe clenched in the far side of my jaw, speaking or breathing between puffs. The tips of both of my index fingers are cracked and grey from tamping tobacco and usually black under the nails. I always smell like tobacco, though I don’t notice it. By the end of the day I often have ash and soot around my nose and mouth. I don’t notice this either. I always carry at least two pipes on me, as well as two boxes of matches, pipe cleaners, and two or more tins of tobacco.

My clothes are all worn and rumpled and do not fit me very well. All of my trousers are olive-green corduroy and extremely baggy. I cannot find a pair of pants in my size, but do not like belts and so I am always wearing suspenders. I have several pairs and, I will admit, I do try to wear a color that I think matches what else I am wearing. I have tee shirts only as undergarments or to sleep in. I leave my shirt collar open during the summer and button all the way up starting around October. I almost always wear tattered green sweaters and tweed jackets. None of my jackets have elbow patches. I wear my oldest jackets the most and do not remember to put on a newer, fresher one even when going to important meetings or attending church. I like, but seldom wear, neckties. My wife thinks that I should wear argyle sox and so now I do. I have brown leather boots which are rather expensive on account of the size of my feet. I try to buy shoes as little as possible, but attempt to disguise their beaten up, worn down appearance with frequent polishing.

I like cold, grey days, log fires, long, meandering walks, and stacks of books. I drink excessive amounts of strong, black tea all the year round. My favorite tobaccos are heavy, thick cut blends that taste and smell like wood smoke. I enjoy eating boiled vegetables and unseasoned meat. I like pie better than cake, my preferred variety being wild berry. I like beer, specifically ale, and try to tell myself that I can drink more of it than I can or should. I enjoy picking my nose, but hope that I manage to avoid it when people are watching.

I have more books than I do any thing else. One month out of the year or so I will resolve to get them all shelved and in order, though this does not remain en force for very long. They are in stacks and piles in every room of my house and I am proud to say that I can usually know where any one is at the time. I am not what I would consider a diligent or disciplined reader as I am usually reading three or more books at any one time often not finishing any one at a stretch. Sometimes when I have to get up early and am too groggy to read, I will stare at them on the shelf or on the table to ease myself into the day. My favorite authors are those of Victorian England or of Classical Antiquity. I have instant and unreasonable respect for writers who employ flowery prose, long sentences, or allusions to Greek and Roman mythology.

I have a strange attraction to fat women. I avoid their company because I will become distracted and fixated by them. There is also the fact that they very often have unpleasant or abrasive personalities. They nevertheless haunt my dreams and my mind often wanders to thoughts of them eating excessive amounts of food or breaking chairs. I have never publicly admitted this.

The first thing that people always seem to notice about me, aside from the fact that I am unusually thin, is my deep, booming voice, which, I am told, is in the Basso profondo range. It can sound alternatively warm and comforting or dramatic and bombastic and has secured me a good deal of work on the stage or on the radio, though I find that I really do dislike performing. I do find great joy in reading Shakespeare or the Bible aloud to myself. I have noticed when I am up late with friends that my voice will gradually change to the point where I sound more raspy than anything else, like any working-class American male who is a heavy smoker.

I am strong, for my size, and have dug ditches and lifted heavy loads for a living more than once in my life. I abhor physical labor and mistrust people who define themselves by it all the same. I have shoveled garbage for eight hours a day, stacked crates, walked twenty miles to a hardware distributor and am ashamed to admit or recollect it.

I am extremely fond of religion and consider myself a Christian. I am uncomfortable with being sentimental or preachy about it and I sometimes wonder if this makes me bad. By creed I am an Anglican. This means that I spend every Sunday and major feast day in the company of old people. I very much wish that I could simply say that I am a member of the Church of England, as that is all that I have ever wanted. Most people would see me as being somewhere between a traditionalist Catholic and an extremely formal Lutheran. When I am bored, I will occupy my mind with liturgical minutiae and obscure events from English church history.

My one greatest flaw, the one from which all of my other flaws derive, is that I do not sleep enough. I have avoided sleep for as long as I can remember. My excuses for this change. It is truly a shame. My fondest memories have been in dreams.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I really should be ashamed of myself. Given that I often feel shame when it is not even necessary, you can imagine the agony that I am putting myself through now. Shortly after its inception, this log fell into disuse, in spite of all the publicity I attempted to generate for it and all the gasping, grasping masses of readers that I just know have ever yearned for a daily dose of me. I let it fall by the wayside and I have nobody to blame but myself. However I will now attempt to shift some of that blame onto the so-called Holiday Season.

I have always tried to maintain that I was largely unaffected by the “Holiday Season”, either in sentiment or in the pragmatic. I don’t even like the term Holiday Season. In the grand days of yesteryear when holidays were the province of the Church, as they should be, and not of advertising companies, there were all manner of holidays, feasts, fasts and observances no matter the time of year. At best, Christmas ought to be a mildly jubilant Day of Obligation with an intense period of fasting leading up to it. Truth be told, I found myself more excited by the third Sunday of Advent given that this day requires a color of vestments, a pinkish lavender, not seen any other time of the year. I was awed by an exquisite fiddleback chasuble that adorned the priest performing the mass that day; a muted pink it was, all covered over with gold brocade and with a hand painted medallion depicting the face of Our Lord in the centre of the back. Yes, it was glorious, but I digress. In spite of the conspicuously lackadaisical attitude that I adopt during throughout essentially the entire month of December, this year I found myself inexorably caught up in the whole mess. Having now two children as where I previously had none would appear to be the cause of it, so far as I can tell. I am proud to say that my two children seemed about as indifferent to the secular American holiday hoopla as I ever was. In their young lives, the closest thing they have ever experienced to holiday magic have been my yearly readings aloud of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. This, however, was not to remain the way of things. In spite of all of my efforts, I do have relatives; not a single one of the sharing in my beliefs or perspectives. The made it their mission in inundate my son and daughter with as much tinsel draped hullabaloo as they were able with an unending barrage of parties, Santa sitting-ons, and gift givings. Against the onslaught of so many tasteless Scandinavian-American customs, not even I could stand. I resolved to let my in-laws have my poor offspring, taking comfort in the fact that I had the rest of a new year to remold them back into my own stodgy image. Even then, I was not spared. I can’t merely expect my children to go to these things by themselves, though I did try to suggest that at first. No, I was the one to take them to all these damned functions. Worst of all when I was there, those jubilant troglodytes attempted to draw me into all of their carrying-on. As though my being there at all was not enough. The result of all of this ended up being that nearly all I managed to do over the Christmas Season was to celebrate, and not in the somber, scary, religious way that I prefer to celebrate things. I was left with little time for anything else, this log included. Nevertheless, that is all over now. My time is, mainly, my own again. Best of all, I have secured for myself a position in the reference section of a local library which seems to have, in the midst of answering all manner of wonderful book related questions, left me with more oppertunity to write than I have had in quite some time. My output thus far has been both surprising and gratifying and I see no reason why I should not redevote some of these energies to fulfilling the reading needs of my public. So let it be written. So let it be done.