Joel Goodman very well may have made a mistake but it’s too late to go back now - I’ve said YES, the brochures are in the mail, Gimme.

I sure hope it’s a big trophy. Maybe it’s the biggest trophy ever….

I’m honored. I’ll receive this “richly deserved” recognition at the HUMOR Project's 52nd international conference on “The Positive Power of Humor and Creativity” held June 20-22, 2008 at the Silver Bay Conference Center on Lake George in upstate New York.

I’ll tell jokes and upbeat stories on Friday evening, participate in the panel discussion on Saturday morning with Luci Arnez, and host a workshop on Sunday morning.

I anticipate the resonant satisfaction that comes with time spent alongside Dr. Joel Goodman and Margie Ingram and with HUMOR Project alumni and first time attendees. To you new comers: welcome; you’ll love it here; there’s no other conference like it. CEUs for laughing, really now; Dr. Goodman has a way with an educational design documentation form.

Come for the clear skies and clean air; come for the history (Montcalm vs. Abercromby , Burgoyne vs. St. Clair, Benedict Arnold vs. Benedict Arnold); come for the geology (a rising dome, a dropped fault block) come for the fun (Lucie Arnez, Dr. Joel Goodman, Margie Ingram, Leslie Gibson, Jim Snack, the Rev. Bruce Tamlyn, John McPherson, and more….)

Just come will ya’?

The HUMOR Project's 52nd international conference on "The Positive Power of Humor and Creativity" June 20-22, 2008 at the Silver Bay Conference Center on majestic Lake George in upstate New York.

Word to Joel: the trophy needs to be big, my man. Big, I tell ya’. Big as in Lord Stanley big. I wanta’ bring it outta’ there on a barge.

A personal note:

Below I include under ‘a personal note’ a geology short list of the sights I’ve been fortunate to see.

It’s under personal because heightening the sense of seeing is part of what for me makes up ‘enough’. I’m a geo-tourist — when it comes to the satisfaction one feels simply looking out over the lay of land nothing I have found informs like geology. Plus, when I’ve gone to the trouble to see the landscape for the geology beneath it I have met in nearly every instance, others who think about it and others who care about it, too. I almost always return home with some lasting nugget of experience.

Geology has been difficult to learn even on the pre-101 plain I inhabit. In spite of its common-sense processes, its descriptive language - braided rivers, hanging valleys — the softest physical science, Rocks for Jocks, can be downright hard. Mohs scale of Mineral Hardness: 9 out of a possible 10 hard.

The athletes at my school must have been pretty sharp.

In 1998, I was leaving Knoxville, Tennessee for Louisville, Kentucky and the Comedy Caravan Comedy Club for an audition for Comedy Central when the night before the drive I came across Harry Moore’s block diagram of the Nashville Basin. Along with the rock types, ages, and inclinations it described ‘a structural high that forms a topographic low’.

Huh?

I had been to Nashville several times and maybe it was the mind numbing signage for the interstate (at the time to stay on Interstate 40 you had to get off 40 to get back on it) or maybe I was busy looking for a Backyard Burgers but for the life of me I didn’t recall a structural high expressing itself as a topographic low.

I don’t think I would have missed that.

And there in the block diagram was Interstate 40 running right through the middle of it. The gauntlet landed at the base of my Mitsubishi Montero, Stumpy.

The next morning I was on the road by six. I was rerouting my drive. Knoxville to Louisville through Nashville instead of via Lexington would take an additional 100 miles but I was curious to see what I had been missing.

It was the kind of damp mid-January day that can weigh heavy on my low calorie frame — the headquarters of the Muscular Dystrophy Association fled humidity as much as rent when it left New York City for Tucson — when curiosity’s candle began to flicker and burn away the gray and the drizzle. The ‘up until then unfamiliar’ rocks I was barely making out my windshield began to resemble the ones I kinda’ understood in the book; “Yes, that one does look like beach sand; the rubble at the bottom of the gray beds does pile up like bricks” and I felt lifted as I descended the Cumberland Plateau to the Highland Rim to the Central Basin where Music City sits low on a late Ordovician dome.

This would become as I think back on it one of the transforming drives. An interest in rocks I first felt in elementary school looking at the pebbles in my driveway reemerged in my late thirties: that’s thirty years later or in a single blink of the Holocene. It was the kind of drive that would later lead a girlfriend to point out how an eight hour trip to a conference would quickly turn into “real time geology tours.”

The travel that day on interstates 40 and 65 was a flight of imagination taking off from Walden’s Ridge, climbing the Sequatchie Anticline, reaching cruising altitude over the Pennyroyal Plateau, descending through the Kentucky Knobs and landing on the New Albany Plain. Learning something about the American landscape was to become one part unimaginable becoming imaginable — I have since seen the karst of the Dalmatian coast and Yunnan, China without leaving my desk — and another part familiar becoming unfamiliar again; the Nashville dome with its buttes of even more recent Ordovician limestone flattened out for me it’s cousin on the Cincinnati Arch, the Lexington Plain.

Ahh, the Lexington Plain: A structural high that is also a topographic high. Excellent. This is firmer ground. Why must everything be so hard? ”Well, my colleagues of the Not So Hot at This Geology are We Society, now this is more like it.”

Learning a smidgeon about what made a region of the country distinctive was making it possible to see past the Applebees and Targets that can otherwise make it look the same.

Others had thought and cared, too.

Not so much teaching others about this, though, I would, as time went by, find I was being taught: I was departing Nashville and its block diagram for Louisville, a drive from Ordovician to Devonian - “60 million years in 3 hours; not bad for the slow lane” — I was saying to myself when I climbed an escarpment and saw advertised on a billboard just north of Nashville: “Highland Rim Auto Repair.”

Someone had been smart enough to learn a little geology. I wonder if he or she lettered.

Bringing it home

I made the audition with ten minutes to spare - seemed more animated on stage than usual so I was told.

And the girlfriend that was: nice line....