At the urging of several of my readers and my mother, I changed my picture recently on my column.

Actually, recently was last week.

This may be the best printed picture of me that I know of - isn't that sad boys and girls?

My mother reads this column every week, often complaining should I mention my father too often or not. She even told me the other picture was bad. She doesn't pull punches.

This time, I was clean-shaven, well coifed and ready when the flash went off, but then again, I always try to be.

What usually happens is a mystery of sorts: I have one eye closed, part of my hair sticks straight up or out, I look like I have just tasted an alum-lemonade or I appear to have just taken a whiff of a three-day old roadkill. I was voted, "Least likely to be photographed," in high school.

As for the old photo, I had one fellow, who is one of my more loyal readers out of the county, who told me that the picture of me in the glasses made me look like a nerd. I wasn't insulted really. I prefer honesty to partial honesty. If someone doesn't like something or someone for that matter, they should have the gumption to speak up rather than lie and stew.

However, lie is what most people, including myself at times, do. When someone wearing a pink flamingo shirt and a polka dot tie and platform shoes asks, with a sincere look about the face, "How does this look?" You usually would answer with something along the lines of, "What a unique outfit," or, "You will certainly be the standout at the party tonight or wherever you may choose to go."

You don't really tell a lie, you just don't tell the truth, exactly. When people don't have even a glimmer of what I would term "reality", then I just don't bother ruining their day. But we all have our own perception of reality, don't we' If someone gets a new hairdo and says, "Do you like it?" You would answer affirmatively whether you thought so or not. Therefore, I usually don?t take compliments too seriously unless they come out of the blue from someone with nothing to gain. I have a friend who is reading this right now and wondering, did he really like my new hair-do thing or did he just say that? The messes I get into...

On the other hand, complete honesty would ruin your life, so I just try to answer by dodging the question. No one really wants to hear the truth about themselves.

But on matters of importance, when I do speak my mind, I try to do it sincerely and honestly. Those are the best times to avoid me whenever even remotely possible.

Sometimes I find myself asking questions that perplex me. The other day, I purchased a wooded tract of land and was walking the boundaries, earlier hacked out by the surveyor.

I got to the lower righthand corner and there was a fence across the bottom of my newly acquired (actually still in the process of acquiring) land.

That really gave me a pause. Should I: A. Tell the realtor and the owner to get the fence moved or else; B. Contact the owner of the fence and ask him (or tell him, depending on how nice or big and mean he was) to move it; C. Forget about it and just let sleeping dogs lie (The fence blocked about a six foot by 30 foot piece of my land with four barbed strands).

I chose the first option. I really didn't want to start off by being a bad neighbor, but that never stopped me before. The way I saw it, I paid for every foot of that land and I wanted to be able to utilize every foot.

On the other hand, had it only been about 30 square feet, I most likely would have never said a word.

Sometimes it is just not worth stirring a stink. That is the big question, is this pot big enough to stir or should I just let it go? I have a tendency, as most of my friends and acquaintances realize well by now, to completely over analyze stuff. I think a question to death.

Having decided, I called the fellow up that I bought the land off of and started the conversation by saying, "Now, I'm not trying to be hard to get along with, but..." You know if someone starts off a sentence like that, you are not going to want to hear the "but" part. It turned out that the fellow built the fence prior to the survey by two or three years. He was agreeable and I offered to help him with the job and so did the fellow who is selling the land.

I heard on the news recently that most centenarians don't worry much, so I'll be long-gone way before then.

If worrying doesn't get me first, I'll probably be slain by an angry reader. You can't win this game of life, the best you can do is play your hand.

Unless, of course, you can figure out how to cheat. But that's just one more thing to worry about, isn't it?

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