I’m excited to give you a less formal introduction…
Zazz
I was forced to sing the alphabet song everyday in preschool. Though I liked the tune of the song, I hated the actual alphabet. It contained tricky letters that were hard to say like “s” and “c”, and stupid letters like… well, they all seemed stupid to me!
“Why do we have to use this alphabet?” I asked my preschool teacher
“Because you do,” she said.
But her answer felt almost as stupid as the alphabet that she was forcing me to use! So I went home and created a more idiomatic, more logical, more zazzy language. I called it zazz. And the next day, when the other students sang the traditional alphabet song, I sang mine: “Oogo, boogo, doogo, zazz”.
The teacher smiled. But the day after that, she asked me to stand in the corner. And the day after that, she called my parents. They agreed that I shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the song sessions.
But zazz persisted, perhaps because of its idiomatic superiority or perhaps because I secretly taught it to students on the playground during recess. Eventually, it became the theme song for a disenfranchised group of preschoolers who knew no other way to assert their freedom from the tyranny of the English language and a domineering preschool teacher!
Though the adoption of zazz may have done more harm than good for the language development of me and my peers, it taught me that there are sinister forces that seek to stymie creation, but that there are also persisting forces that can help it to prevail.
The Big Brother Buster Club
By the third grade, my older brother had been tormenting me for years. He was bigger than me, and more accurate with a baseball. And after a religious school incident in which he stabbed me in the head with a lead pencil (I carry the evidence in the form of a blue mark above my right eyebrow), I decided that enough was enough. It was time to turn the tables!
For months I had been talking informally with several students who had also been tormented by their older siblings. But I decided to make the conversations more formal. So I started the Big Brother Buster Club.
We met to discuss battle strategies every Monday at recess. Those meetings eventually contributed to the synthesis of weekly Big Brother Buster Reports, which I wrote by hand every Monday night after my brother had fallen asleep.
The meetings and subsequent reports gave otherwise overmatched younger siblings the tools they needed to fight back. One report, for instance, taught readers how to chase their siblings into strategically placed obstacles, how to sabotage lunchmeat with pepper, and how to sleep with one eye open and a squirt gun under the pillow to prevent nighttime sibling attacks.
Over the next few years, I employed many of the Big Brother Buster strategies. Some were, of course, more successful than others; but all were fun to implement. More importantly, though, those meetings taught me that creative impulses are unique and individual, but the effects are potentially beneficial for everyone. And if we can find a way to effectively catalog and distribute people’s wisdom and creativity, we can improve so many lives in so many ways!
Hey Dan, I have been reading blogs for a year, and I can’t recall a blog as interesting as yours. You discuss all of the topics that I find most intriguing to me. I own over 200 websites and make a respectable sum doing internet marketing. Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with, discuss, meditate over, etc… I will do anything I can for you, so long as you keep making great blog posts. Thanks!
I enjoy your thoughtful posts. Why not add a photo of yourself?
What happened to the 50 Dates movie? Did you ever finish it?
enjoy the mindfulness that you exibit in your posts…
pklife.wordpress.com
-pk
my thoughts seem to form in the same fashion as yours, although you have made the leap i cannot find, and put them into words.
thank you
hey,
you write pretty well.
I am really impresed Sir.
I like your blog.very cool
haha
Hay, i love your blog. Cool man.
I totally side with John. Yours is one of the most intriguing blogs around. Your writing is simply beautiful.
Its been a really long time since I’ve been really excitted about reading a blog… and look forward to making this a regular visiting spot!
hi,
im from india and accidentally fell prey to your post!!It seems to me the most delectable reading experience iv had in a long time.
A striking similarity between you and me is the language of zazz…my group of friends started this …every 1st letter of every spoken word would be pronounced starting with’Z'as in : How are you ?
In our dialect it would be : Zow zar zou?
People had looks that read ..these are a crazy group of girls!Shy away from them..This was like some 9 years back!Id never imagined id think of the lost time now at this juncture with a person who is thousands of miles away.
Great blog of yours ‘M on M ‘.Im a subscriber and soon would email to you.
byebye
Dan,
for me, they’re right - I think you are an original: and as you probably heard, the Original (Homo originalis) has been designated an endangered species by the WWF
Visit me? Http://94stranger.wordpress.com
I absolutely love your writing. It is most interesting.
What a great read. Keep it up
I always look forward to what you’re going to write next.
Thank you.
I’m not sure if you appreciate the ramblings of a starstruck stranger, but I just had to let you know that your blog is just amazing. No, I wouldn’t even settle for calling it just that - there isn’t a word that can sum up just how powerful your writing is. Your stories seem almost unreal as if they come out of a novel, yet I can’t help but believe every bit of it that you narrate without questioning it for a moment. So far I’ve read only a few, to be honest, yet I found that I could relate to every single one of them on a personal level in some way.
I love it, and it’s inspired me to put up an RSS feed reader on my blog just so I can share your writing with whatever few readers that I have of my own.
Thank you, and don’t stop writing.
-Jean-Luc Portelli
dan, i really enjoy reading your posts - i’ve been reading you for just a few weeks now. the comments fascinate me as much as your writing. i have to say it’s interesting, because i haven’t read too many entries, but i get the feeling that your writing really comes from within you, and you’re sharing honest feelings, opinions and observations. i also get the feeling that in many ways, your blog doesn’t reveal who you are at all - just a thought.
It’s nice to see intelligent thoughts and a decent writing style online. Rare. Appreciated.
Hey Dan, i’ve been reading your blog for a couple weeks now, i subscribed, just so you know. lol. Every post is always interesting, and you’re a great writer…its nice to see that. Anyways, love your blog, never stop writing!
-mollie
About “What do women really want?”
When I was young, I too struggled with this question. By the time I was 20 or so, and thanks to the girls I’d known up until then, I realized that that question had no useful answer; rather, it was the wrong question. The right question is: “What does this woman really want?” And while you are sincerely pursuing the answer to this question, you will discover that the only satisfying answer is: “She wants me!”
And my girl, my woman, wanted me for more than 37 years, until she passed away this June after living gracefully with metastatic breast cancel for 12 years. Gracefully, but not without anguish, as expressed in her poetry at:
http://mric.net/~bpoppe
Herb,
I think you just defined growing up for me.
you wrote breast cancel - funny how the typewriter has its own mind?
Wonderful humor Dan - And thank you to Herb: Beautiful insight. Made me want to find out more about the focus of his devotion and the source of his inspiration.
- wendy
i like you.