It was quiet — too quiet — at 7:54 a.m. on Sept. 12, 1947, at Chicago's Lying-In Hospital.

That all changed at 7:55.

I've been making noise ever since.

My early years churned up much therapy fodder: vertically challenged, asthmatic, left-handed, no left brain to be found anywhere.

I considered myself an author as soon as I could read and write. My parents — both stratospherically literate educators — gave me a typewriter when I was 6 years old: a jet-black, vintage Royal manual, as big as a piano.

I put flame decals on it.

Under-achiever, soft-core prankster. Guitar-picking singer/songwriter. My parents' worst nightmare.

Graduated from Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Ill., in 1967. Became a standard-issue, flower-child troubadour. Went to Greenwich Village, and then to Hollywood, to become rich and famous.

Didn't happen.

I did cut an album, though: Ingredients, in 1968, for Mercury Records.

It went down like the Titanic.

To this day, references to Ingredients can be found at Web sites devoted to hard-core Sixties obscuriana:

• "A poetic folksinger with some light orchestrations and strange lyrics."
Borderline Books

• "Lovely delicate folk rock with that sunshine somewhat psych tinged image painter style. Dreamy and gossamer winged. Gentle and captivating. A fine LP!"
The Wild Places

I saw a copy of Ingredients for sale on eBay for $35. (Seller information: www.solidviper.com)

Weird.

Also weird: A song I wrote, Rhythm Guitar, was recorded by the Oak Ridge Boys and hit No. 69 on the country charts in 1980. Are you an Imus in the Morning fan? That song he plays a fragment of from time to time, to segue into commercials? You know: "Nobody wants to play rhythm guitar behind Jesus..."

That's me! Me!

Eventually I went straight, sort of. I became a peripatetic editor at newspapers in Vermont, Maine and Virginia — first as a writer/stringer/reporter, then as an editor.

Half a Bubble off Plumb debuted in 1980 in the weekly Aroostook Republican (which I was editing at the time) in Caribou, Maine. It was named Best Column in Its Circulation Class that year by the New England Press Association.

I freelanced for seven years during the eighties.

Lusitania.

All the while, Half a Bubble off Plumb darted around like a drunken ferret from publication to publication. It found a home for several years in 1996 at The Valley News in Lebanon, N.H., where I toiled at various editorial posts over the course of a decade-plus.

Oh, boy! More awards:

• 2003 and 2002: Second place in circulation class, National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

• 2001: Local Column Class 3, second place, New England Associated Press News Executives Association.

Meanwhile, over on the entertainment page: John M. Donoghue Award for Reporting on the Arts, second place, 2003, Vermont Press Association.

Life is good.

Long story short: Time to move on, roll the dice, jump without a parachute, seize the cudgel, subvert the dominant paradigm, etc. Time for a Web site, and a flying leap at the mysterious world of self-syndication.

So here I am in my wood-heated home on a gentle, wooded slope in central Vermont, with my brand-new Web site and desktop publishing software, waiting for the money to roll in.

I'm getting good at that.

Waiting, I mean.