If I HAD hair on the back of my neck...

This is supposed to be the year I get my mojo back. The year I turn back into the person I think I used to be, or was supposed to be, or maybe...I say in jest, all the time, "I think I used to be smart and funny, but maybe I was just always loud." (It's in my profile.) And with every passing day I get more and more convinced that...that's not a joke.

I have REALLY got to get out more.

So a while back when my friend (he of the construction company who's running out of Clinton money) called and told me he had just met my mental Doppelganger, I wasn't too impressed. So...what? He's hanging out at playgrounds now? But then he tells me about the woman whose condo he just bought, in Nashville. And he goes on to describe her as another Me...in the flesh. Well, maybe, maybe not. He'd probably just been out in the sun too long.

Then last week he called to tell me that one of the characters in one of his plays (said character is based on me, or who he thinks I am) had just done something somehow and he was checking to see how the story really went. And then he said, "I put you something in the mail today." I love this boy.

You HAVE to read this book. I would KILL to be able to make it flow like this woman does...and she hasn't done it on a smooth road. We brought the mail in at 6:30, ate supper and I finished the book at 11:03. I laughed and cried all the way through it. I'll have to read it again tonight, with a yellow highlighter to soak up the details.

In the foreward she describes waking up "around noon facedown in my front yard--which was a vegetable garden--wearing nothing but my underpants...I often found strange bodies in my yard and once even found a man passed out in my bathtub. Only two things were sticking up out of the water and thank God one was his nose...Once after a mint julep party, the yard body count was five by sundown."

But the part that made me a fan for life, particularly because of where my life needs to be, was this line, from the song "Going Away Party" by Cindy Walker, on a Bob Wills album:

"Dreams don't make noise when they die."

I have GOT to let my hair grow out...I'm probably missing out on 90% of life's moving moments because my hair is too short to stand up on the back of my neck.

The author/songwriter is Marshall Chapman. The book is Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller.