Over Easy

I was always a very intense guy.

I was never nonchalant. I was chalant.

I was more intense than Kirk Douglas. Even in the movie Detective Story, when Kirk tells Eleanor Parker that he wishes he could cut off the top of his skull and hold his brain under the faucet so that he could wash away the dirty pictures she put there.

I was raised by intense parents. Dad was a former marine drill sergeant. So was Mom. We lived in an intense city in an intense state. Technically, it was a commonwealth, not a state, which only seemed to add to the intensity somehow.

As a child, I had an intense Shetland pony named Satan. Satan and I would ride like the wind, or at least like an intense breeze.

As a teenager, I ran with an intense crowd. We drank caffeinated soda and played Scrabble with a timer. The timer was set to seven seconds per turn, one second for each letter in one’s rack.