I took the trouble to write my own idea down, off-the-wall as it seemed.

With physics as with Shakespeare, writing seemed to offer a way to deal with what I had sensed.  But with a complete lack of credentials, how could I get anybody to even consider what I had to say?

I ended up using the only drawing power I had—the chance that I might get somebody to laugh.

Acknowledging the humor of my audacity in challenging reputable college-level texts in this, the hardest of hard sciences, I compared my endeavor to the backyard space program that an ordinary citizen had announced some years ago, featuring a kitchen chair strapped to the top of a rocket made of God-only-knows what.

For my title, I chose the self-mockingly bizarre "Physicists, Please—Stop Me Before I Paint Again."   As a subtitle, I added "A True Confession (Mostly)." 

My write-up rambled through all manner of asides, if I felt they had humorously instructive value, including the confusingly awkward manner in which the "facts of life" had originally been laid out to me as a child.  

Still, between laughs, I simply kept coming back to my audacious thesis.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.