Many of you may remember my blog entitled

Eight funky, freaky, and/or fun facts about me
(Click the underlined text to go there)

Well, I seem to have acquired a great number of friends since then who might not have read it.  I'll warn you now: I used all the most interesting facts about me in that blog.  So you might want to read it and skip this one.  But this time, to compensate for the uninteresting subject matter I've added pictures!

The first time, I was TAGGED by eclectic realist and Grant Bailie

More recently, I've been tagged by Valentine's Angel and ZG wandered off

They each had different rules for their respective games of TAG - but in order to reply to both in one fell swoop, I'm throwing out the rules and winging it.

Since I said I would do this (and I swear it's the last time...lol), here are

Eight MORE funky, freaky, and/or fun facts about me
(perhaps I should add "fantastically foolish" to the list as well)

They come with a money back guarantee. 
But fortunately (for you) nobody's paid me yet, anyway.
I encourage you to save yourselves the trouble...

So without further ado here they are....

1.  I was in the United States Marine Corps for 30 days in 1984.  I discovered I didn't want to...

2.  Though I am now kinda a vegetarian (I'll save the explanation of "kinda" for a future blog), I NEVER in my life ate salad until the night before I left for the Marine Corps at the age of 17.  Perhaps this picture was to blame:

3.  I delivered two Sunday evening sermons from the pulpit of Chestnut Ridge Baptist Church as a teenager.  For one of them, my topic was James chapter 4, which includes this doozie:

"Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that friendship with the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be the friend of the world is the enemy of God."

So that explains George W. Bush's environmental policy!

4.  My first car was a 1969 Dodge Coronet - except mine was much browner, dingier and rustier than the one in this pic - after all, I only paid 75 dollars for it:

5.  I played the organ at Catholic Mass (get your minds out of the gutter!) and the piano at Protestant chapel services in an Ohio prison for about a year.

6.  When I was 18 years old, having never drank alcohol before in my life, I downed 21 shots of Black Velvet in 21 minutes to win a contest at a party and then woke up alone several hours later on a frequently-busy set of railroad tracks.  Apparently my "friend" Louie had dropped me off near there because his mom was due home soon and he didn't want her seeing me and knowing we must've been drinking.

7.  I think I was EMO before there ever was such a word!  I recently looked through my teenage journals and found a lot of shitty so-called poetry.  Most of it will hopefully never see the light of day.  But here's just a small snippet of what I thought passed for poetry twenty-some years ago:

I climb a treacherous stare-way,
Watching, waiting, full of contemplation,
Empty of all but despair and elation,
Into a bunker from the choicest fairway...

Coming apart in the home of a seamstress,
Helping myself to the spoils of castration,
Enjoying life in anguished fascination,
I bench the world on a blood-red dream-press.

8.  In 1988 I looked like this (and yes, unfortunately, those are pink sweat pants, though I swear it was the laundry's fault!): 

I'm not going to tag back anyone in particular this time.  But if you really want to be tagged, you may feel free to consider it done.