Ok, you asked for it. Here's the clip of me on Touched By An Angel.

I admit now, having watched it again for the first time in almost ten years, that my reaction is not as dramatic as I recall it being. It seems now that my "what the hell?" take was not much more than an overacted shrug. Though I do recall clearly doing a "what the hell?" version of the scene, I guess it was not what made it into the final version.

Also, It was not the old lady who interrupted the ceremony. As you'll see, it was Roma Downey who pissed on the festivities with a dove-delivered message straight from Gawd Himself. I wonder if he signed it Himself or if he used an autopen. Linda Kelsey was the actress having trouble with her very short line... the one about the gas company.

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Normally, the week between Smithmas and New Years Day is a slow one in my industry. In fact, many companies just like the one I work for are shut down the last half of December. One year, at a now-defunct firm where I used to work, on the 20th of December, the boss handed out $4000 bonus checks and told everyone to go home until the 15th of January.

This year, everything seems to be out of whack. I've just logged my second fourteen hour day in a row. Nevertheless, the whiteboard I use to keep track of my active projects keeps filling up.

Oh yeah, and there was no golf tournament-sized check waiting for me when I got in this morning before the sun was up either.

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This Christmas brought an interesting first for the Dunn household. Our oldest, Megan, having been recently over-educated about all things adult, is now old enough that we felt it was time we had the talk about Santa.

"Tell us, Megan, what do you know about Santa Claus?"

"I know that you and mom are Santa."

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In our final installment of The Marathon Of Weird, I take you back to the days of yesteryear. Way back to 1996.

In November of that year, I appeared as an extra on the hit CBS show, Touched By An Angel. Hey, don't judge me. As an aspiring young actor living in Salt Lake City one did what one had to do.

My big break... Episode #308, "Something Blue". The entire episode revolved around the events on the day of a big wedding.

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Even weirder than the squinkie pinkie toe with the broken nail, even weirder than the complete compulsion to share the details of the lives of relatives to people who have never met them and weirder than the inability to buy anything more than the least expensive of anything... ever... there is one weirdest thing I inherited from my mother.

If I stop talking, just like my mother, my heart will stop. As a result, I talk, pretty well constantly. All the time. What I mean is.... always. There are plenty of times when it would be better to keep my mouth closed and enjoy the moment. Do I? Nope. too much to say, not enough time to say it.

Perhaps I'm just dim enough to not be able to pay attention to what others have to say but I just can't manage to realize that someone else may have something else to say.

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Have you ever wanted to see me vomit? No, seriously. There's an easy way. Feed me peas.

I can't figure out if this is some kind of odd allergy or simply a mental thing but peas are, without a doubt, the worst food on the planet.

I have an early memory of peas and throwing up. My brother and I were attending the Adventureland Daycare and Pre-School. The walls of which I spent a fair amount of time licking while I stood with my nose in the corner.

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As I write this, the house is filled with the sound of proof of my next weirdness. The phone is ringing but I'm not answering. Lot's of people hate talking on the phone, that's nothing unique or strange.

What makes me weird is that I simply do not answer the phone. Even at work, I usually let the voice mail screen my calls. The reason is simple. I hate my clients and think they are all stupid. Well, not all, but a high enough percentage that I don't dare risk the odds.

At home is another story. At home no one ever calls for me. I have a wife, a mother and four daughters living at my home. The home phone is never for me and I'm simply just not nice enough to want to take messages from, say, my daughter's LDS Young Women's advisor about the trip to the Temple to baptize dead Jews. "Make sure she doesn't wear colored panties!" Sheesh, enough with the underwear fetish, Mormons.

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I'm not above telling you. I like public restrooms. I'm not weirded out by sitting on a public seat and I don't have any trouble touching the handle. Oh, sure, I wash my hands right after and I don't have any interest in sitting in anyone else's filth but really, for the most part, I find the bathroom to be a safe place.

I say that because, at one point, I had a bad habit of passing out in new or stressful places. It started out as just doctors' offices and dentists but eventually I was passing out at amusement parks, clients' offices, ski lifts and other much less convenient places. After a while I found that I felt a little better if I took a moment to catch my breath and gather my wits before submerging myself in the new environment.

Now, as a habit, when visiting a client or taking the kids to the emergency room, I will excuse myself to the restroom. During my trip, I plan my escape route. If I know where the bathroom is, I always have a safe place to go in case the room starts to get dark and spinny.

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Though I mentioned this, very briefly, in passing the other day, it is weird enough to kick off the Marathon of Weird.

I can speak backwards. One friend and I do it so fluently that we regularly slip in and out of backspeak without noticing. We started doing it sometime around 1987 or so.

This all started when a few of us got the bright idea that we wanted to be able to talk to each other about girls without the girls in our Mormon ward knowing what we were saying. It doesn't take much thinking to understand now why I never developed any skill for speaking to women in a way that they could understand.

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Regular reader, poster and masturbator (I'm only playing the odds on that last one. I have no actual first-ahem-hand knowledge of anything specifically), Sideon "tagged" me over on his blog. In case you aren't familiar with tagging, allow me to explain.

Basically, tagging is like a chain letter... only worse. Worse because not only are you expected to forward the tag onto others or your toenails will fall off or something, but you also have to do something too. In this case, name six weird things about myself.

Pff... only six? Have you been reading my blog long?

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It is statistically proven by several reliable scientific studies that once you have children you spend roughly 67% of your time cleaning up vomit. Once you have more than one, that increases by 9% per child.

Truly, the only thing worse than cleaning up vomit is doing it in the middle of the night.

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"How old do you think I am?"

"I'd say... twenty-six."

His reaction told me immediately that I had guessed wrong. His giddiness at being mistaken for a wise sage in his late twenties was overwhelming.

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Tonight is the annual company Christmas party. There will be an open bar which, due to marital circumstances, I will not be taking advantage of. I'm hoping an anonymous co-worker may take pity on me and "accidentally" spike my Diet Coke... several times...

Here's to hoping.

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Donna has become very interested in whales lately.

"That's a humpback whale", she proudly announced. An advertisement on TV had just flashed a quick shot of a tail rising briefly from the water.

"Cool. How can you tell?"

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December 7th has been a landmark type day for me. On this day in 1991 I had sex for the first time. It was in my basement bedroom at my mother's house over Christmas break from school. Jennilyn Brockbank and I had been fooling around for a couple of weeks in my apartment, her car, her apartment, friend's houses and in any closet or empty classroom we could find in the performing arts building.

Earlier in the day she had just come out and said, "Hey, later on... let's fuck". I didn't need an engraved invitation. So later on... we did. The next day, she asked me if we'd really done it because she wasn't sure it had actually gone in. Despite being a little insulted, I explained that I felt that we had.

The next few weeks were filled with Bishop's interviews, pregnancy tests and at least one secret load of laundry.

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Thanks to our 39th President, Jimmy Carter, it is legal by federal mandate to brew up to 200 gallons of beer per year right in your own home. Even in Utah.

I've always been a do-it-myself kind of guy and brewing beer has always been of interest to me. Even as an active Mormon I secretly thought it was pretty cool that Brigham Young owned and operated a brewery in frontier Salt Lake City. Home brewing is the sort of thing that, for me, ranks right up there with restoring old cars and building your own log home. It's the kind of thing that is really required to even be considered a true renaissance man.

Today, at lunch, I took a little field trip to The Beer Nut to find out more about my would-be hobby. The manager, Jamie, could not have been nicer or more helpful.

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Sid Beverage was the name of my high school principal. He's been dead for a couple of years. One day, in the fall of 1990, he told me, "You have no chance for graduation. You simply cannot graduate. You should just drop out now and get on with failing in life."

Did I mention he's now dead?

I did drop out. That very minute, in fact. I walked right out of his office and out the front doors of the school. Before the end of the week I had arranged to take my ACT test and interview with an admittance committee at Weber State College.

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"Daddy, I love you all the way to those mountains over there."

"Baby girl, I love you all the way to the moon."

"Well, I love you all the way to the stars."

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Karma has not been kind to me lately. Just this week, as a matter of fact, Karma kicked me square in the nuts.

I left work early in the afternoon on Wednesday to meet Donna's family at the airport. About 20 of us, in-laws, nieces, nephews, siblings, etc met there to greet my brother-in-law as he returned to Zion from his two-year Mormon mission. I tried hard not to remind the loyal Mormons in the family of the request by the LDS church to limit gatherings at the airport for missionaries because, frankly, I don't give a shit what the LDS church has to say.

If they don't care either, well that's just super. Though it does make for a good time to see them both defend AND reject the advice of their church to me at the same time. Cognitive dissonance is fun to watch.

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