How to Be a Successful Blogger

#1. Have talent. If you don’t have any talent, use lots and lots of toilet humor. Hey, it works for me.

#2. Suck up to the popular kids.

So without further ado, seven more previously unknown bits of trivia about Ambulance Driver.

1. When I was a youngster, I could turn my bellybutton inside out. This talent placed me near the top of the social hierarchy in grade school, but sadly, still one notch lower on the pecking order than Bobby Glenn, the Apex Predator of the Playground.

In the battle to be BMOC, it’s just hard to trump talent like Bobby’s. Face it, what’s an inverted umbilicus compared to someone who can spontaneously invert his eyelids and fart on command? Only two words adequately describe talent like that: Chick magnet.

Unfortunately, I have lost the ability in adulthood. In fact, I haven’t seen my bellybutton in years. But if any of you should ever see it, tell it I miss it and wish it would come home.

2. I harbor a secret lust for country singer Sarah Evans. Oh sure, most red-blooded boys lust for blondes with pneumatic hooters like Anna Nicole Smith or Pamela Anderson, and I suppose they’re cute in a “body by Fisher, mind by Mattel” sort of way, but I’m a sucker for wholesome, pretty brunettes with winning smiles. Before Sara, it was Sandra Bullock.

The original brunette crush was Terri Clark. There’s just something about a six foot brunette in a Resistol hat that makes me get all tingly in my naughty places.

But we were talking about Sara, my current lady love. When she was on Dancing With the Stars, that marked probably the only time I have consistently watched network television in the past ten years. When she quit the show because her marriage was in trouble, I wept for her.

Then I got over it and set about plotting to be the next Mister Sara Evans.

I’ve been mulling a move to Nashville so I can be closer to her, but this pesky ankle bracelet starts sending out alarms whenever I get within 500 feet of her home.

I mean, break into one house, rifle through one lingerie drawer, and society labels you as a deviant. Now I ask you, is that fair???

DOESN’T SHE KNOW I LOVE HER???

In any case, I have resolved to be patient and wait for Sara to acknowledge her true feelings for me. I know our love is strong enough to weather this temporary setback, and soon we will be together.

Oh yes, we will be together.

3. I am a ringer at Trivial Pursuit. Give me any of the standard editions, and I’ll kick some serious boo-tay. The only time I have been beaten at Trivial Pursuit in the past fifteen years, we were playing the Lord of The Rings edition, and I was slow to catch on that the questions were based on the movies rather than the original book trilogy.

When I worked at Podunk Ambulance the very first time, we had a little crawfish boil at the main station one day, and I got teamed with our medical director playing Trivial Pursuit. Six games later, we were still yet to miss a single question. By the third game, all the other teams had combined forces, and it was Everybody Against Us. And still we dominated.

Some people say that just proves that I have a trivial mind.

Haters.

4. My truck is a rolling ecological disaster. I haven’t seen my passenger side floorboard in four months. If you ever take a ride with me and find that you can actually put your feet on vehicle carpet, that’s a sign that I really, really like you.

5. I once spent a night sleeping on top of a beaver house, huddled under an overturned pirogue, stripped down to my thermal underwear, spooning with a fat kid named Matt.

Hey, stop judging me. It was a survival situation.

We were scouting for a wood duck roost, and got a late start back to camp and found ourselves wading back through a flooded cypress swamp in the dark. Now normally, this would not have been problematic. We had flashlights, a compass, food and warm clothing.

But Matt stepped in a ditch and overturned the pirogue, dumping most of our gear in eight feet of water. I managed to retrieve our shotguns and one flashlight, but the food and compass were gone, and all the shells we had were what we carried on our persons.

Long story short, we ran out of shells signaling, Matt started getting hypothermic, and I decided it was better to hole up and wait for daylight than wander around all night in a cypress swamp in wet clothes.

So, I found a convenient beaver house, stripped us both down to our polypropylene thermals (Matt was getting punchy by then), turned the pirogue over on top of us to hold in what little body warmth we had, and settled in for the all-night Survival Snuggle.

They found us around 9 am the next day. We spent a couple of days in the hospital, but luckily we were discharged with all our digits intact.

The odd thing is how we each recovered from that night. Matt became so cold natured that fifty degree weather made him bundle up like Ralphie’s kid brother in A Christmas Story, whereas I could be comfortable buck nekkid in an arctic blizzard, as long as my hands, feet and talleywhacker stay warm.

6. I sold a copy of my senior term paper once to a dog training client. Yeah, I know it was unethical, but I needed the money and he was willing to pay top dollar. At the time, I rationalized that in the end, he was the one cheating himself of an education, but frankly, the $1,200 he offered was too much to resist. He was a spoiled rich kid who really needed an A, lest Mommy and Daddy take all his expensive toys away.

So I sold the damned paper, at $100 a page, plus all my notes and bibliography cards. And I still feel a little guilty about it, sixteen years later.

But cleansing my soul with this confession feels kinda good, so I’ll even throw in a freebie. For you English teachers out there, if someone ever turns in a paper entitled Cervantes: The Triumph of Madness Over Reason in Don Quixote, it ain’t original material.

But let me know what grade I’d have made on it, okay?

7. Although my taste in music is rather eclectic, from Hank Jr. to Nora Jones to AC/DC, my guilty pleasure is…

…Hall and Oates. I had every album they ever did back in their 1980’s heyday. Haven’t heard much of the new stuff.

Yeah, I know. Hall and Oates, you say?

Stop looking at me that way.

It could have been Air Supply.