About Tim Jones

Let me introduce myself

I’m Tim Jones. One of only 13,000 people in this world gifted with this unique name (but that was as of 5 minutes ago – by the time you read this, the figure may be substantially higher).  Recently I was privileged to join the ranks of a very exclusive club. The A.A.R.P. invited me to become one of their very first 50 million elite members.  You must be over 50 years young, have a pulse, and go to the bathroom on average at least twice a night to be eligible. Otherwise, you ain’t getting in – no way no how.  So how could I turn them down!  Welcome to my humor blog.

I live in Seattle, WA, the most politically correct city on the planet. But at least we’re polite about it. I am a white male, Anglo Saxon Protestant, and as such, I am a member of absolutely NO oppressed minority group – unless you consider men who suffer in quiet desperation from male pattern baldness to be an oppressed minority.

Let me introduce my family

I am married to a wonderfully talented portrait artist named Michele, who does incredible portraits of governors, captains of industry, as well as moms, children and their pets. Heck, I can’t do a portrait of a stick figure. I am also the proud father of two teenage daughters we adopted from China as infants, Rachel and Emily. We kept their Chinese names as their middle names just to drive them crazy when filling out forms for the rest of their lives.

Periodically in this blog, you may hear me natter on about them, as in “Emily recently said ‘Dad, why bother calling someone on the phone when you can text them?’”  They remind me on a daily basis how “so five minutes ago” my parenting skills always seem to be for the crisis du jour. But I love ’em “to the universe and back,” as I always used to tell them. They keep me humble and remind me how much I still have to learn about this parenting thing.

For years people have been telling me I should write. It was not until much later, however, that I realized they were not actually telling me that I had a gift for writing. It was more that they were trying to convince me I really should stop doing those other things I was doing for a living because “you’re really not very good at it. Perhaps you could write about it instead…” So in August 2009 I decided to start writing about some of those “other things…”

Let me introduce my humor blog

Why “View from the Bleachers?” Is this going to be one of those sports blogs? Hardly. While it is true, I do love baseball (there is nothing in sports quite as dramatic as an inside-the-park home run), this is not a blog about baseball or any other sport.  “A view from the bleachers” is my crude metaphor for the vantage point from which I see the world around me. Sometimes, I find myself taking it in from afar, from the bleachers, where the perspective can be a bit less clear and certain. But you also can get a great view of everything – and the odds of getting hit by a foul ball are pretty slim.

I decided to write this blog because I felt there was a glaring need for another voice to articulate the inner turmoil lurking just below the surface of the thousands of middle-aged minivan-driving soccer dads who quietly ask themselves since when did cell phones become a way to communicate like automobile license plates (“C-U-L-8-R”??) and men who can’t understand how two cookies could possibly represent “a serving size.”  Someone needed to be a voice for other men who are not ashamed to admit they actually still like the BeeGees (not that I would know about this personally, mind you).  Someone needs to speak up for them.  I thought, why not me?

And the timing could not be better. At last count, there were only 275,000 blogs on the Internet… no wait, I’ve been told that number is several months out of date, and the correct number is just over 5,000,000… no wait, I’ve just been informed that this number is already a week old and the real number is closer to 135 MILLION blogs.  Okay, my point is, there are very few blogs on the Internet. And clearly adding one more was not going to be the blog that broke the Internet. At least I sure hope not. So, I started this exercise in futility in August 2009. My very first column, called Hey, This Blogging Thing is a Snap, is still to this very day, the single worst article for this blog I have ever written. As of 2021, I’ve now written close to 500 articles. And in 2020, I launched my View from the Bleachers YouTube channel, which you can check out here.

So I hope you will indulge me as now and then, I share with you my perspective on parenting, work, neighbors whose lawns are annoyingly perfect, and my musings – and occasional whinings – on the human experience. I am on a quest to find the meaning of life. I am on a personal search for signs of intelligent life in the universe, beginning with my neighborhood. So far, the evidence is scant (in my neighborhood, that is).

That’s my view from the bleachers. I hope you can join me for parts of my journey.

Tim Jones

PS: Drop me a note with ideas, suggestions or complaints by filling out the Contact form. Follow me on Twitter or visit my Facebook page.

Let me introduce my editor

I also want to thank my intrepid editor and sister, Betsy Jones, who, sadly for her sake, happens to be distantly related to the author of this humor blog. While I have tried repeatedly to convince her that all my spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors were deliberately placed there for humorous effect, she refuses to buy any of my lame excuses. She patiently wades through every post I write, searching desperately for ways to turn what I have composed into something vaguely intelligible, and if possible, figuring out a way to reveal glimmers of humor.

Betsy is a really incredibly talented person who, I have found overtime, to have an enormous gift for being able to take what I write and pare it down to the key points for maximum impact and communication effectiveness. [Tim, ‘way too wordy. Try this instead: Betsy is a masterful editor. – Betsy]

See what I mean? So a big shout out to Betsy for her unique ability to translate my blog drafts into writing that’s marginally coherent.

[Update: My dear sister Betsy, who edited my blog articles for several years (through December 2020) passed away suddenly in March 2021. I will miss our collaboration terribly. She was a gifted editor and a wonderfully kind and giving person.]