Ernie The Great

So I was reading a blog this morning and thought to myself, "What a pompous ass! All he does is say 'I'm so great. Look how fast I can win.' You'd think he had become a grandmaster overnight. Why do I waste my time reading his self-absorbed mental masturbations?" Then I looked up an saw that I was reading Soapstone's Studio. My blog.

I scrolled over my post again and thought, "Where's the witty stuff that would divert and entertain the reader? Where are the nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that I (great writer and teacher that I am) always impart to my audience?" Huh. Could it be that I've lost my humility and perspective? Or maybe I never had it?

In college, my friends used to tease me about my GPA and came up with a chant: I am Ernie! I am great! I have a 3.958!

I thought they were just jealous of my good grades, but perhaps, just perhaps, they were jokingly and gently pointing out that I'm really an arrogant bastard.

One reader castigated me for my paranoid rantings a few posts back. Chastened, chastised, criticized, censured. There are a lot of C words to cut people down to size. Here's one more: chess.