Green Hair, Spin Art, and Time

My college logic professor had green hair. This man--who said he swam in the mornings to clear his head (thus, the green: chlorine) and who stood under bright florescent lights in a large hall lecturing to a hundred undergrads for fifteen weeks about language, symbols, and reasoning--was, as far as I can trace back, one of the reasons I am here today, freewheeling in the blogosphere.

From those long, dry logic lectures on (I was so unlucky) Friday afternoons, I can proudly say that I nailed just enough knowledge of logic to keep my professors and my more practical-minded college friends (I had a few) from rolling their eyes at me during conversations, for all in all I was not prone toward logic. I appreciated Star Trek’s Spock. I just did not ‘get’ him, though his observation-heavy one-liners were zingers, as poignant as his ears were pointed.

I will not mince my words. Logic did not bore me. But I wanted to spend my time existing outside logic’s lines then.

So I did. And, from what I recall, I did pretty well. Venn Diagrams were one thing. My twenty-year-old spin-art brain was another.

With the help of my creative writing class notebook that semester and a gift for stealth (dear reader, read 'she hid said notebook inside her logic textbook'), I attended my logic classes regularly, to be sure, but I used the time as my own, if you will, to be really sure. Fait accompli: I became a faux student. And, I see now, a faux writer.

That semester, using my professor’s green-tinted man-shag image and professorial wide-tie coolness as inspiration, I sketched out a cast of characters for a novel I swore I’d write, about a corps of green-haired aliens planted on Earth as professors at Midwest colleges, programmed to take over the world in no small measure, including all overly-chlorinated college swimming pools, causing much mayhem, as you can well imagine, until a certain superhero--no need to name names, but he looked like George Stephanopoulos--stepped in.

Certainly, that was the beginning of my academic downfall though it did fully express my feelings then about the role of higher education generally. That a master plot for world domination could begin and end at the university level still gives me pause for thought. And goosebumps. Despite my poor studentship, I got through school, and I did a little writing. Then, after school, I did not much of either.

But now, thanks to the gift of many years passing, I feel the pulse of cosmos and my purpose within it shifting.

Rather than roiling its dayglo spin art ‘whatevs’ at me, my mind is chanting these days a little grown-up gray-tone mantra: “It’s time. It’s time. It’s time.” But time for what? The taking of toast and tea? No. The writing of an alien professor novel? No (I lost interest in green hair). A how-to book on how to write? Puhlleaze.

It’s time, simply, to write and--as they say in some assertive land I should probably visit some day—‘put it out there.’ No more hiding my notebook. What could be more logical than that, Mr. Green Hair Logic Professor Man?

May this blog represent what I should have been doing all along when I was in school: my homework.

Here, in my virtual notebook, we'll look at many things both real and imaginary, remembering that green hair is a reality depending on your perspective and (sigh) unfortunate Friday class schedule.

I hope you visit often and join in, scribble in the ol’ notebook along with me, so to speak. As the ageless, parental proclamation goes, ‘You can’t go out to play until you’ve done your homework.’ So let’s get it done.