Next stop, Cave Junction

Hi, Blogland Faithful.

If you're reading this because you suffer from acute insomnia, Congratulations! Sidle up and grab a pillow. I'll have you drooling on yourself in no time.

If, on the other hand, you live in The Future and have scoured the web to find dirt on me because you fear my bid for the presidency threatens you and your kind, I welcome you to tremble as you come to realize, with dawning horror, just what you're really up against.

Maybe like me, you're wondering why I've chosen to title my blog, "Snarling Bengal Tigers." Well, this whole blogging thing was kind of an impulse buy. I saw a blog that was posted by an old high school acquaintance. (A lengthy side note [get used to 'em]: Referring to this high-school acquaintance, I'd say "friend," but that would be presumptuous. Our only real contact came from the fact we were both enjoying our respective student-government sinecures at the same time. The main things I remember about her were her careful teeth and her free trip to Israel to hang out with people who seemed to my mind to have an inordinate fondness for embroidered pockets on their blue jeans. I may provide a link to this person's blog at a later date, but for the moment I am protecting her identity because it might hurt her street cred considerably if it were to get out that she once haunted the halls of high school student government.) I saw that her blog host made it easy to post blogs, so I up and clicked the button to do that. Five minute later, Voila! I'm published!

Anyway, signing up on the spot as I was, I didn't get much of a chance to think up a clever name for my blog, so I decided a good placeholder name would be Under the Sun, because that's what I'd write about: just about anything and everything that might occur to me. But guess what? We bloggers are sheep. Someone had already come up with that one. Baaa! So I went with Snarling Bengal Tigers and crossed my fingers. The inspiration for this comes from an article on page two of an early-80s issue of the Weekly World News. This was an issue that I decided to flip through while waiting in line at a grocery store with my stepmom. I think it's most likely that I was about 12 years old at the time, but I can't be sure (there's a complicated calculus to this). The article related a drug bust that had recently taken place in the outskirts of the small, southern Oregon town of Cave Junction, where I had spent several years of my childhood. The upshot of the article was that federal drug agents had difficulty making their bust because the place they were busting was guarded by a pair of snarling bengal tigers. Lately I've been revisiting Cave Junction in my mind--or it might be fair to say that Cave Junction has been visiting me. I have begun writing notes for a memoir project, and Snarling Bengal Tigers is a working title for that project.

It's pretty likely I'll be using this blog in part as a journaling forum as I continue to work out details of some of those really funky years of my childhood. At the same time, I'll try to keep things spicy by foisting my political opinions, movie reviews, and other mental spume upon you. So hang on, Blogland Faithful; we're in for a wild ride! And to all you fellow bloggers that tried to register Under the Sun as your blog name, watch out, because I'm pretty sure tigers eat sheep.

P.S. Happy birthday to my friend, Lance Dunn, who, for the record, owes me $1 million when he has reached the $10 million benchmark we set for ourselves at Antelope Lake, California, in 1985. Unless, of course, I get to $10 million first, in which case I owe him $1M. Yeah.