Who do I still think I am??

This one's about those dare words.

30DBC PROMPT: "June 1: (Dare Day) A Challenging Day"  by Prosperous Snow celebrating

Good morning kind readers! Welcome to an "unofficial" round of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" ...where 30DBC Creator/Founder is once again runnin' thangs and an esteemed veteran of The 30DBC, Snow, has cranked out an excellend lead-off single to start the rally this month. Anyone else going over to Brother Nature 's festivities this month at "Invalid Item" ? I dare you to join me down there for some of my personal stash of Fivesixer's Magical Elixir...I'll be the ominous-looking dude at the corner of the bar with his hat tucked low, trying not to start my face on fire from a fresh pack of menthols.

In case you haven't gone and done the work to see what today's prompt is, let me save you a few steps (while judging you silently for being lazy): "I Dare You to write about a double dog or triple dog dare you accepted. What happened? If you have never encountered either of those dares then I dare you to accept one of the writing.com challenges listed above...[Ok, here's where you have to actually look at Snow's entry to see what she's talking about.].

I'll get the easy part of the way...I took The StoryMaster 's "A Trivial Challenge"  because I like trivia and I'm already writing this entry as part of a challenge (don't tell me it's unofficial; I'm not hearin' any of that). Give me a minute and I'll tell ya how I did...oh man. Terrible. Five out of ten. I was impressed with the ones I got right though...and I can't say much more about it because if you were to take the quiz now, or tomorrow, or next week, the questions wouldn't be the same. I should just try to take the quiz over and over 'til I can score eight or higher, so I can tell you I'm smart or something. Maybe another time.

But the point of Dare Day is to also relate an experience, and I'm gonna be honest...I'm not sure I've been prodded to do something in a long, long time with the words "I double-dog (or triple-dog) dare you!" This is probably because you don't have to tell me twice usually to do something crazy/outlandish/borderline unsafe, merely for the sake of the entertainment of others. If there are laughs involved and I'm convinced what you're asking me to do is remotely possible, chances are I'll probably do it. Now, I'm not stupid; if I know something is absolutely outrageous enough to the point that death is an option, I'll pass. I'll risk safety and legality and sobriety, but death isn't something you should toy with. I'm human, not a daredevil, and there's probably not more than pride or a few bucks on the line, so no, I won't swim in a pool of sharks wearing a dress made of meat. [Fun Fact: The "blood" you see in a package of raw beef you get from the butcher isn't actually the animal's blood...it's a chemical used in the processing of the animal to preserve it for sale. Or so I heard.]

So what have I done? I can't remember if jumping over the bonfire the night I broke my ankle was actually a dare or just an attempt to prove my athleticism at age 37 (which I still had, and should've quit after the first few successful passes). The last time I dropped trou (which is not French for "unfastening your jeans in public and letting them fall past your knees") in a crowded bar was definitely not a dare. And I don't think I ever asked a girl out on a date because someone dared me to. No...wait. I did, once, but that was a bet more than a dare (and I did get her phone number, which won me $50, but we never actually went out on a real date...good enough money to hide my disappointment).

Everything else is kid's stuff...throwing snowballs at cars or rocks at trains, ringing a doorbell and running, swearing at the nuns who're trying to kick you off their lawn when playing football. Things mature responsible functioning adults don't bother with. Why? Because these things generally end badly when you're a grown-up. I've seen people lose jobs and otherwise healthy relationships over choices made to satisfy a dare, which to me isn't worth the risk anymore. The words "it was just a prank" don't absolve the feelings of ill will perpetrated by the actions. Sure, when you don't have much to live for other than the repercussions, it doesn't matter as long as it's a fun story to reminisce over weeks and months later. But even then that gets old when you're known as the guy who "chugs your friends' drinks when they go to the bathroom" or "draws phallic symbols on your passed-out friends". Not that I personally ever was that guy, but maybe you should take your drink with you next time we're out actin' like fools chillin' over a few at the bar.

BCF PROMPT: "'There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.' ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Write an untold story that you think needs telling."

I know it's Sunday and there's no Sunday activity going on in the "Blogging Circle of Friends " , but too bad. I'm blogging, and there was a prompt yesterday, and today I feel like talking about it. I used my "rest day" up yesterday. You'll have that.

It's hard to come up with a story of my life that's been untold for a long time. My blogging history is littered with at least a hundred of them in the 700+ entries I've created over the years...enough to write a suitable biography if one really wanted to comb through all of the pieces and craft a narrative out of them. Even now, I struggle to try and think up something I've never touched on before, but I also don't remember all of what I've put down over the years and seldom do I reread my posts after they've gone up and I've done the last-minute edits on them. I see some prompts and think, "Damn...I'm gonna hafta tell that story again" and figure out how to make it interesting enough without bullshitting so that you can say, "Hey! I remember that!" without rolling your eyes like you've heard it a million times already and can't possibly bear to hear it once more. That's more the struggle I face these days than anything else when I'm puttin' these joints out for public perusal.

"Agony" is a strong word too, in this sense. If there was something I was burning to admit that I haven't already, well, I probably already would've spit it out there by now. My secrets? I've done it.

And that's where the dance on the fine line starts. I don't write fiction; everything, even if it's slightly tinged upon, is drawn from experience. I know I've made people uncomfortable at times- you don't put out the volume of work I have and expect it not to find people troubled or upset- but it's that much harder I imagine for people who know me to understand the depths of what I've been through, especially when they only see a side of me that doesn't lend itself to emotions or perspectives other than what they're accustomed to. I'm still trying to make peace with information versus perception and persona. Another aspect is that people only want to hear so much before they've made their judgments, and don't care about the finer details (even when they're more important and can provide a clearer picture of certain situations as a whole)...they know what they see, they process that with their own filters of reality, and everything left over at the end gets shoved into a box they no longer want to deal with. And that's fine. I won't beat anyone's head in with the truth if they don't want to deal with more than first impressions.

So I blog. I deal with life the way it has dealt with me. It's the supplement to the handbook people make when they come across me, and it's there if you want to see it. And if I have to be concerned about what you think, then I probably shouldn't trust you enough to tell you more than what our obligations in front of us need in order to get through another day together. If there is something you need to hear from my voice, you'll hear it in my words; if I wrote something concerning, and I think it matters enough for me to expound on it more in person, we will...until (if) the biased nature comes out. If something in my past offends you, and my initial reaction/discussion about it doesn't satisfy your curiosity enough, then I'm comfortable with where the situation isn't heading. You'll think what you think and if my explanation isn't good enough, we'll move on amicably. But talk shit about me without the facts, and we'll swiftly see a resolution to your quote-unquote problem. I have better things to worry about, even if I have nothing to worry about, than how we'll play out. My concern has moved on.

Sorry for getting way off the course (even if the is up over at the BCF). I'm more focused on rebuilding life and having more opportunities to share new experiences. I know the past is in the past and that's where it belongs...dwelling on it now only brings up the group of negative feelings associated with anything that didn't fit in my recollection of the previous points in my life I may have passed over. That's for me and my therapist to work through...he's gotta make a buck somehow, right?

MUSICAL BREAK!!

If there's one thing I'm sick of talking about (and even thinking about) it's past relationships. I don't do it much anymore because even I get sick of myself rehashing details and the past. Some girls, even friends, you can't say certain (or simple) things to without them getting all upset about or flustered about them, even with the simplest of intentions...and that's given with the understanding that they pretty much initiated the train of dialogue. It's maddening. But just because I think I've said all I ever needed to say, doesn't mean that I'm immune to the occasional pining for an ex (whether I come out and say it or not). And in the instance I'm thinking about, I had an exchange recently with a friend (yeah, there's a history there) where she said something, I echoed the sentiment, and she sorta flipped her wig on me about it, so I backed off because I don't need that trouble in my life. And the ironic thing is that I was thinking about someone else longingly and lovingly while having the conversation, so maybe I subconsciously tainted the proceedings. Either way, it doesn't matter. If someone loves you, and you love them back, I believe you say so (whether it's "mutual friend" love or otherwise). But that's absolutely not the point I'm not trying to make, because I really don't have a point.

The only first musical example I have that was inspired by Maya Angelou (which on one level is sad, because I know she inspired so freaking many people) is a bitter diatribe about how a woman can wrong a man and yet he doesn't say anything until he unleashes something so violent and encompassing about his feelings, and then he's perceived as a misogynistic psychopath without feelings, but you don't know the back story or what led him to be so full of anger and disrespect. We always feel for the victims, but nobody cares about why the offenders made that move. And I'm not advocating violence at all, in any respect. I feel like men make mistakes, learn and suffer through the systemic patterns of dating, make changes, and meet another woman who changes the rules of the game to make the past failures obsolete enough to open up a new set of things men are now predestined to fail at when failure is all they know up to that point. They're hit with something else during the relationship- something they maybe haven't dealt with before, and while the pain of the last set of mistakes is still fresh- and either the men become more damaged from learning to internalize everything, or the whole thing just falls apart because they're too worried about not making the same mistakes that the new mistakes become more pronounced, and then panic sets it. I don't know. I'm not a relationship expert (thought I probably should be at this point)...and that whole last few sentences will probably need some edits once I get away from writing this and start reading it for those purposes. I don't think this is what Maya Angelou had in mind when she wrote it, but she inspired someone to do this, and in part made others aware of her work. May she rest in peace.

Clearly this was not her intentions, this bird
nor Ms. Angelou's.
And just because I promote this song here that shouldn't make me anything.

THE DAILY BOX SCORE:

I nearly dropped RZA's Unspoken Word   on this entry because because the poetics   nearly fit my narrative on a whole, but I couldn't keep Atmosphere out of this entry either. What a life when you can't decide what hip hop songs you're gonna include on your entry about untold stories, dares and (unintentionally) what I bring to the table and why.

I'm up next tomorrow in the "Follow The Leader" version of the unofficial 30DBC...and I don't know what I'm gonna do about it. As if I didn't already have a hard time comin' up with prompts for you cats to ball out on, I sure as hell know that even if I do come up with somethin' between now and later I'm not writing another entry today. And I've got stuff to do in the am Monday as soon as I wake up, so my entry might not be up 'til at least noon tomorrow. I nearly wrote an entry without Snow dropping hers because I didn't wanna wait and I was ready to get down to mine, whatever the topic was that ANN Counselor, Lesbian & Happy posted (it's "Invalid Entry" , and yes, I'll be reading that soon after I'm satisfied with this thing I'm trying to write). I'm kinda relieved that I didn't have to follow Ann's, because she's straight-up killin' her words and convictions (and I enjoy her for that entirely...as you should be too).

I won't go as far as giving you my phone number, but if you're so inclined you can follow me on Twitter at @fivesixer if that's your thing. I don't use it a lot but I do sometimes post blog entries there as well, which I'll probably do today (and hey The StoryMaster , since I tagged you earlier in this post maybe you can tell us again for the people who read this page why the Tweet option at the bottom of entries was removed? Via ShareThis. I think that's what it was called, and it was great for me...I've been less inclined to use it now that it's under the "SHARE" icon menu). I don't mean to bother you- we've been through enough together- but that was super convenient when I could edit an entry and then Tweet it out immediately from the icon below the words. Now I've actually gotta try (ok, maybe I'm being a baby about it) to use the Tweet feature. I promise I won't get all campaigny on you about it. Just sayin' I miss it and maybe people would use that feature like I did.

And hey newbies to this little internet nook you maybe haven't seen before...like A Song A Day   on Facebook if you want to see interesting songs or links to stories or pictures you might not be familiar with. Yes, it's a shameless plug for music I like, but you might be surprised by your next favorite artist.

Well, put it in the books. Day one of the unofficial 30DBC is complete by my standards and it's on to better things I could be wasting my Sunday away with. Let's see...I've already done some shopping, been infuriated by Candy Crush, and informed your masses of my reasonings. I'll call that a good day and stare out the window a little. Peace, my beautiful bird has gone away, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!

"You deleted expletive."
"All females make like that." "No? That's a pass."
Thank you, Alex.