Okay, so Justin Other Smith is not the name I was born with…I’m really David Martin Smith from South Shore, Ky…
The ‘Nom de Plume’ (pen name) of Justin Other Smith goes back to a cowboy comic book that appeared after WWII…There was a serialized story in that comic, featuring a Texas character by the name of Justin Other Smith…I, being a Smith, and being approximately ten years old, was impressed, enamored, uh….I liked the name and I appropriated it for my own self…and there you have the gist of it.
Somewhere around that same age, my Mother taught me that lying is really a dumb thing to do and results in unwanted consequences…and let me tell 'ya, being spanked and upbraided by my Mother was really an unwanted consequence…I’ve been a great believer in truth ever since…
However, there are moments, exceedingly rare, of course, when I agree with Mr. Mark Twain (nee Samuel Langhorne Clemens) that sometimes there is nothing quite so satisfying as an old-fashioned, honest to goodness lie…
That being said, as a young man, I wrote a couple poems that I basically didn’t want anyone to know that I had written and there were a few anecdotes that I put down on paper and likewise, didn’t want to take credit for them…so, in a burst of inspiration, Justin Other Smith began to form a life of his own…
It didn’t go very well for him for a long time as I tended to be a little embarrassed by my acquaintance with the admittedly somewhat raffish old fool and basically didn’t want to acknowledge his existence...
And then, as luck would have it, I got old...and not much embarrasses an old man…And Justin Other Smith, being a magnificent failure as a poet, a novelist and essayist, was still able to express his opinions in such a manner that David , well, David simply wouldn't say things like that...
When I (David Smith) was diagnosed with lymphoma back in ’06, daughter Kellye suggested that I write a blog to keep family and friends current with my progress and, to that end, helped me create my blog and also got me started on Facebook…under the psuedonym of Justin Other Smith…
And so it stayed until recently when Facebook, for whatever reason, shut me down…in order to come back to Facebook, I had to re-register under my birth name and show them a copy of my California drivers license…
So, friends and friends of friends of Justin (me) I am still on Facebook and I will post some things as myself but mostly I will continue to post as Justin Other Smith because I’ve come to like the irascible old fool and when you’re old and getting older (hopefully) it ain’t easy being green. Which is a direct steal from Kermit the Frog….
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