Get yourself a big black magic marker. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Next, take Sunday's print edition of the Times Herald and turn to Page A4. You see my column there, under the heading "Going deep into the darkness?" Good. Use the marker and draw a big X through it.

Don't read it there. I'm not naming names. It was nobody's fault, per se. But, there was an honest mistake. Somehow, my first line was removed, which renders my ever-poetic and full-circle ending useless.

But fear not. This is what Web sites are for. It now reads the way it was meant to read here at TimesHerald.com. And if we ever get a search engine, the print version will be but a distant memory.

Got it? Go do it.

that I'm ... sorry?

To whom is this apology directed?

To the lad who WROTE a song with the same title as this post, Van Morrison.

I always like to say that the ears don't lie. If you like a song, you like it. If you're embarrassed to admit it, you're just weak. We are all guilty of guilty pleasures.

Van Morrison, though, is one of those artists that it was "cool" to like. I always rated him as overrated. It wasn't that my ears betrayed me. Some songs - namely "Domino" and "Crazy Love" - were as good as it got for setting a mood or changing a vibe.

It wasn't always that way. Up until the last decade, Van Morrison was in my second tier of favorite artists.

My vast cassette tape collection of yore had its share of Van Morrison efforts, including the universally lauded "Astral Weeks" album, but the record label did the Irishman a great disservice on the tapes by including no other information other than a cover with a picture.

That set me up for making an assumption that could now leave me wide open to a defamtion of character lawsuit.

One day, at The Times Herald, we took a break from rapping about sports to talk about music and I explained how I deduct points for artists who make a regular practice of performing songs written by others.

I really shouldn't. As an aspiring songwriter with a tone-deaf singing voice, I should be grateful such performers are still out there, but I'm a weird dude who makes no sense sometimes.

Someone - and I don't remember who, although I have some suspicions - asked why I like Van Morrison, as if they had me check-mated, and I swallowed hard.

"Why?" I asked. "He doesn't write his own stuff?"

Two or three people in the room concurred that he did not and I did no supporting research on it and pushed Van Morrison almost out of my Top 100 list as a result. I went about five years without even listening to his music and never upgraded his music from tape to disc.

Feeling humbled by not knowing a piece of vital information about a classic rocker, I took it out on Van Morrison by practically banning his music in Gordonville.

Regrettably, I had but two of his songs amongst the close to 6,000 stored on my iPOD (i.e. radio station WGORD). That's less than Journey. Less than Hootie & The Blowfish.

The other day, my wife and I were at Target - part of the same shopping spree in which I witnessed the shopping-cart horror mentioned in a previous post ("Just a song before I go") - and I wandered away from the better half while pushing Princess Sofia around in her stroller.

Invariably, Sofia ordered me to the music section of the store and I saw a Van Morrison "best of" selection for only $9.99. Although it was missing the brilliant song "Ivory Tower," I was pleased with the song selection. While I sullied my hands by also grabbing some Barry Manilow schlock - "sings songs of the 1970s" or some such tripe - for my mother, I held onto the Van Morrison disc.

It's part of my process, you see. I'll do that if I'm thinking about buying something. I'll hold it for a while and then see how I feel about when the moment of truth - the cashier line - comes (I don't believe in returns unless something is non-functional).

When my wife said she would just pay for everything, I slipped the Van Morrison disc into her cart and hoped she wouldn't notice. She did, but she paid for it anyway.

I took it home and opened it (no easy task for an oldhead in 2007) to find actual details about the songs -starting with two hits from his first band, Them, through to more recent releases - and I was struck with information that made me wanna break down and cry.

Van Morrison wrote, or co-wrote, just about everything.

All these years, I had taken the word of someone else as gospel and deprived myself of good music as a result.

Someone handed me misinformation and I ran with it, arrogantly, without searching for the truth.

It made me feel dirty, like someone who voted the wrong way in the 2004 presidential election based on flimsy terror alerts.

Moreover, I've sullied the good name of Van Morrison by including him whenever I acted like a know-it-all and mentioned artists - like Rod Stewart, for example - who I believe are too highly regarded for not writing their own material.

All I can do now is right a wrong.

It's going to be all Van Morrison all the time - at least for a week or so. This disc has been inserted in the leadoff spot in the six-disc changer in my gas-guzzling SUV.

It's not going to be much of a sacrifice.

The music sounds good.

And the ears don't lie.

I don't drink. Well, I drink for the sake of sustenance, but not to get drunk. Not even to get buzzed. I'm not sure about the stereotype about Jews not being able to hold their alcohol. I used to pack it away with any Scottish, Irish or Germanic drinking companion. I still know brethren who can. But I can't. Moreover, I can't. Doctor's orders.

Nonetheless, I was sobered up pretty harshly this morning. We were watching Season 4 of The Waltons (don't laugh, it's quite a wholesome show) and there was an episode about the family's hard-working father, John Sr., confronting the reality of age. His 25th high school reunion was upon him and he was using the marking point to evaluate his life.

Then it hit me: Twenty five years since high school? That's me. I'm in the same rocky boat as John Walton. I'm the same age as he is on the show. Heck, I'm older, at 42, than he was portrayed as being in the first three inspiring seasons (the show starting jumping the shark a little in Season 4).

Break out the smelling salts. Pick me up off the floor.

This was the guy I rated No. 1 on my all-time list of television fathers - ahead of the luminous likes of Mike Brady and James Evans - as if he was some old, wise sage. Turns out, he is a contemporary.

Ouch.

Is 40 really the new 30, like they say, or am I just a 42-year-old who still thinks he is 16? Do I need to grow up or did men from past generations need to grow down?

Help me out here.

I was sitting in my gas-guzzling SUV in a parking lot - listening to some tunes and keeping baby Sofia amused - while waiting for my wife while she was doing one of her alleged in-and-out stops in one of the many stores we needed to hit in preparation for hosting Thanksgiving when it happened.

I witnessed a great crime against humanity.

OK, it wasn't all that bad, but it does speak volumes about the human condition.

A normal-looking suburban woman, seemingly wrapped up in her own world, came out of a supermarket. After unloading her items into her car, she had two choices with her cart - 1) go 10 feet to the left and put it back in the place designated for carts or 2) go 10 feet in the other direction and leave the cart on an open parking spot in the lot.

Without a second thought, she chose the open parking spot. This meant that the shopping-cart kid had to retrieve it there and it also meant that another car would not be able to park in the spot until the kid realized someone didn't have the common courtesy to put the cart back where it belonged.

Why do people behave this way? I'm sure there was no malicious intent. I could almost forgive her if there was an axe to grind, but I highly doubt it. She was in her own world, working her own agenda, and everyone else can pretty much go to the afterlife down under (and I don't mean Australia).

It's the little things like this that lead to the medium things that lead to the big things that create the many figurative miles between each of us. In a world with cell phones, iPods, laptops and cars that give you directions ... well ... it's only going to get worse.

Arrogance may be rewarded in this day and age, but it is not a virtue. And it is no excuse for its first cousin, ignorance.

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to protect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now

Whether we are believers in the religions of others, most of us are spiritual souls with our own prayers and passages to get us through the game of life. The above passage was gleaned from one from one of my holiest of books -- Bob Dylan Lyrics, 1962-1985 (the old testament, if you will) -- and were penned in the year 1 BG2 (1964, the year before the stork played a joke on the world and dropped me here to suffer as a Philadelphia sports fan).

The "prayer" came to my mind when searching deep within myself on how to approach my latest mission in life, a launching into the place the kiddies like to call the Blogosphere.

Obviously, being a writer type who believes men like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and women like Stevie Nicks and Tracy Chapman walk on water, the printed word carries much weight in my world.

My written words -- at least the ones released into the wild as sights for sore eyes -- have found a sanctuary in newspapers. Writing for a newspaper, just like writing a screenplay or a poem, is a specific discipline. You are freed from the burdens of doing years of research before putting fingers to a keyboard, but you must produce responsible and readable copy when called upon in a short time frame.

Although I have several movie scripts and novellas ruminating in my inner-attic, and I long to one day play Bernie Taupin to another's Elton John, a newspaperman has been my calling.

I was sports writer for 13 years, crime writer for 2 1/2 and -- following a promotion to managing editor of The Times Herald -- a Sunday columnist for the last four years and change.

It has been a natural progression, as I doubt my regular columns would have been as effective if I began writing them earlier in life -- even though I harbored natural resentment toward those who were granted the space and freedom to pen columns sooner than I.

I laugh now when I read my first column. It began with the line "Bruce Springsteen is God." I followed up by explaining that the odd morsel of personal information was about the most the reader was going to get out of me, in terms of my own likes and dislikes. Additionally, I described myself as being an independent when it came to politics and promised not platform to preach on how others should vote.

Anyone who has read my columns since knows what a bunch of bunk that has turned out to be. The truth is that I was venturing into a new world and I wasn't sure where the road would lead.

As it has turned out, the ongoing trip remains long and strange.

But, if given the chance, I wouldn't change a word of it (except for the typos that have gotten through my team of volunteer proofreaders). I have shared a lot of myself with the reader, not to mention my increased disgust with the current president, whose name and formal title I refuse to mention in print (the policy will continue here).

Although only about one in every five or six columns decries what is occuring in the world around us, I have been labeled a political columnist who leans heavily to the left.

I prefer to say I lean heavily toward what's right, which -- in our times -- is the left, but enough of word games.

Maybe the damage is done. I could thump a Bible like a drum while wearing an "Ann Coulter Rules" T-shirt and people wouldn't be convinced otherwise.

Maybe this forum can be a fresh start.

Whenever a regular columnist begins his/her journey with our paper, I require an introductory column -- much like my own -- explaining who and what they are. The last thing a reader wants or needs is someone they don't know telling them what they should think.

Perhaps, for blogs, the first entry should be more of a mission statement than a "hello, my name is" essay.

We are slowly enlisting staffers to write blogs for us. We have, among others, a travel blog and an eating-out blog coming at you.

Me? I already learned the dangers of making promises. Expect anything; be surprised by nothing.

Best guess? My blog entries, I suppose, will be extensions of my columns.

Perhaps I'll expand upon a thought or anecdote I didn't have the space for in print. Maybe you'll see columns that didn't make the cut, sort of like when an artist releases a disc of previously unreleased material.

Perhaps I'll become like John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, who recorded his random thoughts on life as he drove through rain-swept Seattle streets.

Perhaps, like when I wrote my now-embarrassing introductory column, it'll be none of the above once I hit my groove.

It's not a mistake if you learn from it. I like to think I've learned.

The year 2003, or 38 AG2, was a long time ago.

And I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

I'm in the Blogosphere now.

I'm a kid again.