2xcessive

I am 69 and married to a beautiful young Dominicana. We share a 6 year old kindergartener and 4 year old preschool twin sons who were born 10 weeks prematurely. And those are the more normal things about my life. This is my fourth marriage. I was 62 at the time the knot was tied. At 16, I married a high school sweetheart then became a father and divorcee at 17. My oldest daughter is now 52. My second daughter (37) came during the second marriage and also lost a two day old infant. I have four grand children ages 14 to 29. Everything else in my life has been more like an exaggerated version of "Hells a' Poppin" though I somehow managed to earn a BS at age 20, two MS degrees in my twenties and a PhD in my mid-thirties. How I used all that education speaks anything but intelligence. I held a variety strange jobs while working my way through college; one seven year career as high school science teacher/coach; fifteen years of career ladder climbing from a Public high school principal to university professor/department chair in my forties; then taking early retirement to enter the private sector. I then spent eight years building my own small for eight years where I built a small rental real estate empire before walking away and "dropping-out". In the next reincarnation I travelled the length of the Mississippi, Alleghany-Ohio, most of the Missouri and and TransCanada to Hudson Bay; all solo in an open, aluminum canoe I called "Willow Sieve"; solely in the company of my springer spaniel sidekick, Shocker. Then while living in relative isolation within Shawnee National Forest I undertook my second career in public schools teaching high school chemistry and physics for another fifteen years. Near the end that time period I met and married my third wife as another one of life's accidents. During the summer and breaks we traveled to the farthest extremes of the North American Continent and offshore islands seeking to find what lay beyond the end of the road. That marriage ended shortly after we moved to St. Louis with my wife leaving. I still reside within the City of St. Louis with my young bride and our three children. I generally prefer classical music and creative wordplay while writing my own puns, limericks adages, metaphors and alliterations and composing vignettes by telling short stories the long way; my writings are primarily intended to be humorous while leaning toward satirical sometimes cynical, self-deprecating accounts of the numerous bizarre situations I have created due to unbridled spontaneity. Quite often the writings focus on my unconventional ways of surviving predicaments I found myself in as result of not thinking things through prior to diving with body and soul into the depths of the unknown while acting-out fantasies. Living in Excess as a Wayward Adventurer