Reader's Note - Columnist Maureen Valdes Marsh of Vintagegrace.com and I are doing a series where we voice opinions on the same topics, under the title, "He Thinks, She Thinks." (You can access her website on my links page). 

       Below is the second installment. We do not compare notes before writing these.

       What do I see when I look at myself, the face in the mirror? Usually, this is in the morning, the most wretched time of the day for me, because I‘m not a “morning person.”

       Then again, I’m not an “afternoon” person either.

       The natural aging process is not helped by chunks of sleep in the eyes, film in the mouth, bearded stubble at the chin, and the overall impression one would get….man I look tired!

       I have an Abraham Lincoln-type mole and a prominent nose and chin. In fact, I’ve been told I look a little like Lincoln (I hope they meant before the assassination).

       Everybody thinks I look like somebody.

       Believe it or not, I was once told I looked like these people.

       Peter Lupus (centerfold star of old TV show Mission Impossible).

       The imaginary illegitimate son of James Arness, star of an even older TV show, Gunsmoke.

       I also look like Joe, Fred or Tim, someone you knew ten years ago.

       I hear this a lot.

       When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a person with grave weaknesses, and a few great strengths. I like being this way, totally inept at most things, plausibly brilliant in a very few.

       I love and collect dogs, though I often complain about what they do to the yard and threaten to take them back to the pound.

       I believe life should be memorable, heroic, so I’m dissatisfied a lot by the small, petty, mean spirit of about fifty percent of day-to-day existence.

       Or, as Oliver North once put it, “I’ve always hated to be around cowards.”

       Sometimes, I’m a coward. But I’m capable of courage if I decide to work at it.

       I believe in a healthily naughty lifestyle, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. There’s an old Italian saying, “when you’re young, be full of the devil, when you’re old, give your bones to God.”

       I don’t know how to be old, and like high school geometry, I refuse to learn. I’ll hold the bones as long as possible.

       If it feels good do it, but don’t complain later if you wind up in hell.

       I’m incapable of holding down a cog-in-the-wheel-take-the-normal-amount-of-abuse-type average job. Because of my erratic nature, I’m virtually unemployable.

       This doesn’t cause me grief, because I have contempt for most so-called normal jobs.

       I have to be my own person, a unique voice, and not somebody’s underling.

       I have a child-like sense of naiveté. I’m easy to take advantage of, and to fool.

       I had a person one time who told me he thought I was “deranged.“

       There is some truth to this.

       I am quirky. For example, I believe in Hollywood-production-style, ritualized sexual encounters.

       I have genuine psychic connections, visions and inklings, something I would have once dismissed as “mumbo-jumbo.”

       I often live in a world of my own, and one time at a party, an acquaintance told others right in front of me, that with me, it was a case of, “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

       I took this as a compliment.

       I do have an otherworldliness.

       Now that I see my face in the mirror, I will get to work and clean it up for the world to see……for the remainder of this day. It’s not the real me, but what I think the world wants.

       My hope is to unmask the real face and say to the world, “here it is. Take it or leave it.”