When I was a young and impressionable, nothing said manly more than a huge dip of snuff.  I grew up around cows and country stuff.  Men were men.  You could always tell if a person was a man by the dip in his mouth.  I’ve even met a few women that were men.  They could dip with the  best of them.  I know a guy that’s gay and dips.  He’s a man.  I started participating in rodeos when I was fifteen.  You could not rodeo and not dip.  Hell, they gave the stuff away at the rodeos.  You could get rolls and rolls of all kinds of smokeless tobacco.  I was determined to be a man.  Around thirteen years of age I took my first chaw of tobacco.  The world spun and I puked.  Being a man was tough.  I kept chewing and puking until the puking finally stopped.  I was a chewer.  Most days when I was outside I had a nice big bump in my jaw and was spitting perfect amber missiles through the air.  Life was good.  I even learned to like the taste.  Here’s the way things went.  You took a chew and you told a good story and you spat.  Yes, I said spat.  Of course you could get your ass kicked for saying a word like spat, but it’s the correct word and since I quit dipping three weeks ago, I don’t feel manly anymore, so yes, we spat.  Tobacco wasn’t good for just telling a story either.  It was good for doing hard work.  Spitting and pitching heavy hay bales up on a trailer seemed to go well together.  Of course you have to spit when you ride a horse.  Oh hell, I forgot, you hardly can’t fish at all unless you’re spitting tobacco everywhere.  I can’t quit fishing so I’ve substituted the next best thing, drinking.  It’s not the same though.  The drinking makes me want to dip. 

        So I’m chewing away as a young teenager and I noticed that a lot of the older folks were the chewers.  The younger hipper crowd were dippers.  I immediately gave up chewing for dipping.  The puking wasn’t quite as bad and I got over it pretty quickly.  I was a dipper.  Dipping and chewing are quite different.  When you chew chewing tobacco you actually chew it.  I know that sounds a little redundant, but I’m a thorough person.  A chewers chews the tobacco leaves and thus turns his, or her, teeth and lips turd brown.  You generate a lot of spittle as you chew so you get a lot more spitting action in.  Dippers place finely ground tobacco between the cheek and gums.  You don’t generate near as much juice but you don’t turn your teeth and lips turd brown either.  Plus the dip makes a much smaller bulge in your mouth.  Usually a bigger bulge, of course, would mean a person is more of a man but not in this particular situation.  A nice tobacco bulge slightly off center just big enough for people to see the top of the snuff jutting out of the lip, perfect dip.  You were a man and you were cool if you dipped.  It sounds stupid now I know but that’s the way it really was for me back then.  That’s the way it seemed to me.  My wife pointed out how bad it is for me and how disgusting it really is for almost twenty years now.  Recently I had a little issue with my heart and I decided to quit.  Yes I know it was disgusting.  Especially the spit cups everywhere.  Warm cups full of tobacco spit in the truck, in the car, in the house.  Yes I know it was disgusting.  I was addicted and it was part of who I thought I was.  Yes I knew it could kill me.  It still might.  It’s hard to give up something that you perceive as a symbol of what you are.  Add the fact that it’s a very addictive drug and you get damn near thirty years worth of spitting, and spilling spit cups everywhere.  I once volunteered to baby sit the three year old son of some close friends of mine.  I never told them that he took a big drink from my spit cup that night.  Yes I know it’s stupid.  I’m done with it.  I’ve quit.  I’m done.  I wrote this whole thing and never spit once.  It wasn’t as satisfying.

      I went to my first ever Oktoberfest this weekend.  I was dragged there kicking and screaming.  I was sure I wouldn’t like it.  I knew I wouldn’t like it.  We waited in the car for a while before we could get parked.  That’s always fun.  It was a long walk up to the event grounds.  Everything was going exactly as I had planned it.  It was sucking and I hadn’t even gotten in yet.  I could tell right off that these were not my people.  I’m a country boy.  I have been all my life.  These folks were city dwellers.  I could tell this by how so many of the men wore shorts.  My people don’t wear shorts in public.   We finally got in the gates and after my wife showed me where she would be performing later that evening I was free to wander about for a bit.  My first stop was a beer stand.   I had a pitcher of local beer that was really tasty and stout.  Things started to make much more sense to me after every swig.  Oktoberfest started to look like fun. 

     I wandered into a tent where dances were being performed.  Normally I would not have been very interested in dancing unless I’m cutting a rug myself which is usually after some pretty  hard drinking, but the beer put me in the mood to watch a little.  The dancers where  doing a hybrid form of dance which I have named tap-cheer dancing.  They very much looked like cheer leaders but were doing tap dancing.  The beer let me understand this odd form of Octoberfest revelry.  Without the beer I couldn’t have taken much more than thirty consecutive seconds of this tap cheering stuff, but with the beer I was really getting into it.  The tap cheerleaders did a version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  It was incredible.  The beer and I were thrilled.  The tap cheerleader’s Thriller had a lot of kicking and tapping and big toothed smiling.  No one grabbed thier crotch.  There was an attemp at a moon-walk.  It was Thiller River Dance style.  I’m afraid of what this may have looked like without the beer.  Thank god for the beer.

       After being thrilled by the tap cheerleaders me and my son walked over to the carnival rides.  My son rode a swinging boat while I stood and watched.  The ride didn’t look terribly exciting.  My son didn’t look terribly excited riding it.  It’s too bad he’s not old enough to drink a picture of beer.  That would have been the greatest ride of his life if he had been old enough to bring the beer with him on the ride.  I saw some older gents on the ride with him.  They had had beer.  They were really liking the swinging boat.  They had their hands in the air as if they were on an enormous roller coaster and were fixing to plunge off the highest peak instead of gently rocking back and forth.  I stood and watched as my son almost fell asleep rocking back and forth.  By the time the ride was finished it was time to go to the main tent and watch  his mother, my wife, dance her dance.  A thunderstorm had popped up by this time so when my wife finished her dance we high-tailed it out of there.  She drove.  I get German culture now.  It really doesn’t matter how bad what you’re watching is, good beer will make it better.   A  lot better.  I get it.  Give me a pitcher of beer and I’ll watch men in skirts walk around and slap their legs and think it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever seen.  I’ll need some strudel as well.  Cheers.

       Times are tough.  Money is tight.  It’s actually pretty normal for me, but I’ll take everybody’s word for it.  I’ve always had enough money to get by and have a little fun.  I don’t get to buy very many new things, but if you  buy used stuff that’s been taken care of it’s like new.  I don’t get to choose the biggest and the best or the latest and the greatest.  My choices are careful endeavors between adequate and just above adequate.  That’s my place in the grand scheme of  things, adequate.  I am adequate.  I have adequate means and things.  I am tired of settling for just adequate.  I’m considering a life of crime in order to obtain the finer things in life.  I must figure out what kind of criminal I’ll be and what kind of crime will be my specialty.  There is one major component to my future criminal endeavors.  They must make money and lot’s of it.  This crime must pay.

      The first thing that comes to mind is a robber.   A robber just breaks in and takes what he or she needs.  There’s a lot of danger associated with this kind of criminal.  While the idea of taking someone else’s superior stuff does appeal to me, I’m afraid I could never actually do it.  Starting when I was a pre-teen my  families house began to get robbed.  We were robbed five times in seven years.  We had our Christmas presents robbed on two occasions.  My mother took to keeping all the presents in the trunk of her car.  Needless to say we didn’t get anything too big or too breakable.  The robbers really wiped us out a few times taking most everything that was worth anything.  After the third robbery our insurance company dropped us.  After that anything that was valuable had to be left at my grandparents house.  They were retired and home almost always so really important stuff was stored there like guns and fishing equipment.  My Dad did have his revenge though.  After the third or fourth time we got robbed my Dad decided that anything he and Mom bought to re-furnish the house was going to be old, heavy, and mostly worthless.  He stayed true to his  task.  He and three friends brought in a T.V. that had to have weighed five hundred pounds.  It was one of those old ones that came in a pretty nice cabinet with a record player on one end and a radio on the other.  It was probably six feet long and three feet wide and the T.V. in it was black and white.  It  was a pile of crap.  He also bought kitchen appliances that although they worked either made horrible sounds or shook violently during operation.  One by one he filled our house with junk.  It was terribly satisfying when the robbers struck again.  They took everything but the T.V.   They had moved it but not far.  Luckily the economy got  better and the robberies ended as quickly as they had begun.  Dad finally worked up the courage to buy some new stuff.  We had a color T.V. again finally.  I can’t be a robber.  Those memories are still to fresh. 

          I thought about being a embezzeler.  I don’t think I’m smart enough to be one of those, plus you have to be in a position to embezel.  I’m not in such a position.  I thought about maybe running a scam or a con but those things take a a lot of planning and preparation.  Those aren’t my strong points.  I don’t really plan much of anything and forget about preparation.  I was just about to give up becoming a criminal when I had an epiphany.  I know now what kind of criminal I am.  I am a black mailer.  It’s perfect for me.  I already know a bunch of stuff about friends of mine that they don’t want told.  It’s perfect.  If they want me to remain silent I will be paid.  I want small bills placed  in  ziploc bags thrown into my yard late at night.  This will need to be done at least once a week.  Your initials better be on the bag.  If  I do not recieve the money I will begin telling stories on facebook about all those not leaving me money.  I better have some bags in my yard soon.  You know who you are.  You know what I know.  Hurry up.  I want a new flat screen T.V.

      I just happened to be thinking about happiness the other day.  Specifically, what makes me happy.  It’s  harder to figure out than you think.  It’s not if you give the normal B.S. answers.  You know, the non-specific “better life, happy kids, and the simple things B.S.  I  mean the stuff that really makes you happy.  More money makes everybody happy to an extent.  Too much money makes people crazy so it’s kind of a trade off.  Bigger, better toys can make you happy but what really is the point.  If you like what you  have what’s the point in bigger better?  It doesn’t necessarily mean bigger better fun.  In fact it may mean smaller crappier fun in some instances.  Say you want a bigger better boat.  OK you get a bigger better boat only to discover it’s too big to get into your favorite fishing spot.  Smaller crappier fun is what just happened.  I boiled my specific happiness list down to two things, music and laughter.  Music seems to be a necessary function of being a human being.  I don’t know if I could live without playing or listening to music.  I need it.  On  the other hand, laughter is in some respects happiness or it can be the outward manifestation of it.  It’s not laughter in that sense that I’m talking about.  It’s making  people laugh that brings me happiness.  I think this is true for all humans, but since I am only one partly human, ahem excuse me, I mean one fully human being, then I can only speak for myself.  Nonetheless,  I believe it is true  for everyone else and I don’t care what other humans say.  Humans lie. 

       For me music isn’t an art.  It’s too interwoven in our psyche.  We think in music.  That’s why music is so important in T.V. shows and movies.  You can’t have a fully human experience watching a movie unless there is music to set the mood.  There’s ominous music for the scary parts.  There’s uplifting classical music for the happy parts and hillbilly music for the chase scenes.  Music connects us with the events on the screen.  Our lives are the same way.  If I get mad at work I find myself singing “take this job and shove it.”  I can’t help it.  It just happens.  If I’m fixing to do something dangerous I might start humming the theme song to mission impossible.  I’ve even heard that Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavs hums David Hasselhoff songs while he shoots free throws.  Music makes us happy.  We get married to it and we get buried to it.  We even ride elevators to it.  Ever wonder why elevator music is so bad?  It takes your mind off of the chance that the elevator might malfunction and drop you to your death.  Music makes you happy.  Just admit it.  My argument is sound.  I bet you’re humming “we will rock you” right now.  My logic has rocked your world.

        Making someone laugh is the ultimate happiness.  It must be.  We all try so hard to  do it.  I’ve heard people say the most terrible, embarrassing, and perverted things trying to get a laugh.  If it weren’t so important to our happiness, why would we risk telling the bosses wife a lesbian joke only to discover her daughter is a lesbian.  We need it.  It’s validation.  It’s happiness.  I think we should allow unfunny people to carry a boom box loaded with laugh tracks.  They could say their terrible unfunny stuff and just push play.  The laughter would envelope them and they would be  happy.  We wouldn’t have to do that nervous half-assed forced laugh that is so hard to conjure sometimes.  We could just let the laugh track do the work and go about our bussiness.  I know I have personally offended basically everyone I have ever met trying to get a laugh.  Damn, maybe I need a one of those boom boxs loaded with laugh tracks.  I could give my friends a break (playing laugh track).  Thank you.  Thank you.  I’ll be here all  week (playing laugh track again).  I could get used to it.

     The world has always moved mysteriously to me.  I think it’s our conception of time that bothers me most.  My  brother-in-law explained to me once that there is no past nor future.  There’s only now.  An ever continuous now.  We only  live in the now.  I don’t like this.  I mean, on the surface it’s reasoning seems sound.  Yes I can only live in this ever present, ever continuous stitch of time which is right now.  I mean right now.  I mean now.  You can go crazy trying to keep up with now.  It doesn’t take a break for anything or anyone.  But I did live before now.  I have memories of happenings long before this particular now.  They don’t seem as real as this particular now but I know I was  there.  I remember one  particular now when I was around eight or so years old.  I kept hearing this hissing sound under my radio flyer wagon.  I thought a tire was going flat.  I looked under it and saw a huge bull snake curled up underneath.  He was hissing and looking right at me.  I’d never been eye to eye with a big snake before.  That particular now scared the hell out of me.  That’s probably why that now lingers in my memory.  Of course I had a better now with another snake.  This particular now was about five years ago.  It’s one of the last now memories I have of my Dad before he went into the hospital that last time.  That’s a different now moment.  One I hope I never forget, and yet one I would like to forget.  Sometimes now can suck.  Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.  This second now moment involving a snake happened when I opened the screen door to my house.  A huge bull snake had been creeping along the top of the screen door in order to inspect a Barn Swallow’s next right above the door.  The six feet long snake fell directly on top of me.  I screamed, jumped, and ran.  Dad and one of his hunting buddies happened to be walking toward the shop when this happened.  They thought something had happened to my wife judging from the high pitched scream I made.  They laughed at me.  I’m not ashamed of it.  You see what sound you make when a huge snake falls on your head.  It’s not a sound you have to think about making.  It just makes itself.  So go ahead and laugh.  Your time is coming.

       Those are good examples of things that happened in the ever-present now.  It makes it hard to stay in the now when so much stuff has happened in previous nows.  It’s a curse.  I would like to be able to go back and live some of those past nows.  Even if I did scream like a girl when the snake fell on me.  Even if I didn’t know I was actually living a re-run now and was totally unaware of what was fixing to  happen.  It would make that now much more fresh in my memory.  Those nows and this now are connected.  I know  this.  It’s still the same now.  The only thing that’s different is me.  The now is the same.  I’m different.  The more now wears on you the more you change.  Now doesn’t change.  That’s it’s power over us.  It never stops throwing a continuous stream of now at us.  You can fight it.  It will win.  The guy I  remember in some of those nows isn’t the same as this one.  I’m more careful in this particular now and yet I’m more desperate.  I’m much more aware of this continuous now than I ever was before this particular now.  Contrary to what you might think, you don’t get more used to it.  You get more aware of it.  Now drags continuously on.  It drags you with it.  The best you can hope for is to try and remember most of the good nows and some of the bad ones.  As soon as this particular now is gone another immediately begins and you’ve changed a little.  You don’t see it yet.  You will.

         The small town I live near is in need of a festival.  I can’t think for the life of me what makes us special.  You really need some special component to build a festival around.  I’ve seen where a lot of towns have an Octocberfest.  That’s a German thing.  My small town likes beer but I don’t think many of them have ever drunk German beer.  I don’t  think there’s a lot of Germans around here for that matter.  I know some people who fought them in WWII.  I don’t think they’d want a German festival.  They did serve us a lot of sauerkraught at school though.  I must research this a bit more.  Still, I don’t think an Octoberfest would work.  We wouldn’t get through the parade before a town-wide drunken fist fight erupted.  You really can’t get too many hillbillies drinking at the same time in the same place.  A car race or a fist fight will break out.  Usually both.  Let’s scrap Octoberfest.  I think Semptember is a better month anyways. 

        So what do we do, or what do we eat that makes us special?  Most of us work hard and don’t get paid much.  I guess it could be called The disgruntled employee festival.  That doesn’t sound terribly appealing or fun.  What would we eat, bolagna sandwiches?  How about a bolagna festival?  I would bet anything there is already a bologna festival.  Bologna is too versatile and too  good not to already have festival.  Wait, people  love welfare cheese around here.  How about a welfare cheese festival?  Man that sounds really politically incorrect.  I really don’t know why, it just does.  Scrap that idea.  Oh but I have more.  The ideas are flying  like sparks off a dragging exhaust pipe on an old rusty truck.  How about we have the first ever Car in your Yard Festival.  We could have a car in your yard judging contest.  The only rule will be the car must have been sitting continuously unmoved in the same place in the yard for at least two years.  We’ll have a car in your yard queen.  She’ll make out with you for a dollar in the car that wins the contest.  We’ll have a beauty contest for the little girls.  That’s the only time they’re sweet.   The older ones around here are mean in general.  There are degrees, of course, but a little mean is still mean.  We’ll crown a junior Miss car in your yard.  Her family will recieve a genuine car to place in their yard for future entry.   We’ll have a mullet contest for the boys and a best comb-over for the guys.  This car in your yard festival could be big.  The special food will be fried bologna and welfare cheese sandwiches with a side order of chemically cheese flavored corn waste turned into snack food puff.  It makes my mouth water just thinking about those tasty cheese chemicals.  We will have a stray dog show.  If you can catch one you can enter it.  My mind is racing with ideas.  Once the stray dogs have been shown we could have a tick picking contest for the kids.  There will be a prize for the winner of course.  Possibly a new dog. 

         Every festival has to have music.  The music has to have some cultural significance to the community.  This is probably the easiest thing to decide in the car in your yard festival.  You start early in the day with the gospel.  Put the gospel singers on the stage while the sun is shining.  Noboby wants to dance when everyone can see them.  We are a modest bunch until you put a camera on  us.  A  camera immediately causes us to shed clothing and fight each other.  I don’t why.  Jerry Springer does, but I don’t.  So the gospel music is going while the sun is out.  The older folks will enjoy this and they’ll be in bed by seven in the evening anyways.  You can’t stay up late when you get up at four a.m.  As the sun starts to go down the country music begins.  Most people will start to get a beer about this  time.  It’s getting dark enough to drink undetected.  The country music will go nicely with the first beer or three.  We haven’t drank enough yet to hinder our motor skills so we can still dance.  Here is where it gets tricky.  If  you allow the country music to continue people are going to start getting depressed.  The natural depressing effect of alcohol combined with the inherent sadness of a good country song will dampen the spirit of the festival.  When it gets good and dark and the people are just starting to yell out “play free bird” it is time to liven things up.  We will bring out the eighties hair band.  Middle aged guys in tight spandex and bandanas will whip the crowd into a fantastic frenzy.  People will spontaneously burst into robot dances amid screams of “hell yes, I freakin love this song.  Word up.”  This will be a successful festival.  The car in your yard festival.  I can’t wait.  I’m winning that comb over contest.

      When every day is over a 100 degrees you start to get used to it.  Well, not really get used to it exactly, more like you start to adjust your behaviour.  You push doing things into a cooler future.  You know it will get cooler some day, so you stay in the house and procrastinate.  This makes perfect sense and I think it’s perfectly reasonable.  There is a problem however.  A moral problem.  Procrastinating leads to more  procrastinating.  It’s a negative cycle.  You’ve gotten used to not doing things that need to be done.  The couch feels good.  The T.V.  eminates a warm fuzzy glow that sucks you into some exciting drama.  Those things that needed to be done are not dramatic nor exciting.  They are just plain work.  It takes someone with strong moral fiber to stop the procrastinating and get back to work. 

       I woke one morning this week to a nice brisk north breeze.  The air was cool, actually cool.  Unlike the furnace air that’s been blasting temperatures above 100 degrees for months.  It was like being in a dream world.  It was pleasant to be outside for a change.  I noticed a little frolic in my step.  I frolic-walked out into the pasture and was just standing around looking at cows and calves.  I didn’t have sweat running down  my pant legs.  I wasn’t plotting my immediate return to the indoors.  The calves must have felt the same.  They ran up to have a look and jump-bucked away just as quickly.  I was glad to see this.  I was sick of watching the glum down-trodden drag-step from shade tree to shade tree.  I knew they were sick of the heat too.  Now we’re all bouncing around and smiling.  Things are better.  We’re cool.   I guess my eyes started working better in the cooler weather.  I started seeing all the stuff I’d been neglecting.  There is no such thing as Utopia. 

       It wasn’t easy, but I did get started on things.  I didn’t like it either.  Yeah it’s cool and the work is getting done, but there’s also fishing right?  What about all the fun stuff I neglected to do during my procrastination period?  Doesn’t it count on the things to do list?  Yes it’s true.  You can see the four foot tall weeds growing in the yard fence.  I mowed the yard.  At least the grass looks good.  Can’t I trade one must-do thing for one want-to-do thing?  This is another moral dilema.  If you start procastinating,  you run the risk of pushing the must-do list into the too-cold-to-do procastination period.  You must do the things that must be done before any want-to-do things can be accomplished.  It’s the only moral way.  Yes you are cutting time from the want to do list but it’s a good trade off.  You’ll feel better about spending the day fishing when there aren’t pressing things to do.  You have to remember, the cold procrastination  period is just as dangerous.  Maybe even more so.  I mean there’s football.  Lot’s of football.  Almost every night on weeknights and then all day and night on weekends.  You can’t be expected to do much of anyting during the cold procrastination period when there is football to be watched in a warm house.  To avoid total moral decay and societal break down you must resume with haste normal to-do list things when it becomes cool and you must resume with haste when  it gets warm.  It’s easy to tell who has weak moral fiber.  Just look for weeds.

        I’m sick of funerals.  The older I get the more often I seem to be going to them.  They serve as a constant reminder that at some point that’s going to be us in the casket.  There’s no getting around it.  No hiding from it.  It’s the biggest thing we deal with as human beings.  The big D.  However, I’ve noticed a slight change in the way funerals are being done today.  The funerals I went to when I was young were much more somber occassions.  Quiet occasions with somber music.  The preacher would lay down the typical message about how the person wasn’t really gone and give a little talk about the person.  People came and tried not to weep.  Family members wept at will.  This is how they went.  Today’s funeral usually has a big screen above the casket with a barage of the persons pictures flashing by.  A few of the person’s favorite songs play during the photo montage as we watch.  I think  this is a good thing.  You get to see the person as they really were in pictures.  It’s the music, I think, that’s changed.  People are much more comfortable with all kinds of music these days.  So it’s resonable to beleive that any music is acceptable in a church at a funeral.  I think this is a good thing for the most part.   I don’t want to hear any gangsta rap at a funeral though.  I can’t image I ever will, but you never know. 

        The last funeral I went to is what brought all this to my mind.  It was a typical funeral.  Everything was going normally until the last song.  The song itself wasn’t the issue.  It was the good old traditional church song “when the saints go marching in.”  It was the singer that got me.  The singer was Jerry Lee Lewis.  Jerry Lee brings a lot to a song and I’m telling you he was happy that the saints were marching in.  He was ripping that piano to shreds.  I could just see him kicking the piano bench behind him and pounding on the keys.  I had conflicting feelings.  On the one hand the song was great.  I was digging it.  Me and Jerry were on the same wave length.  I felt like kicking off  my boots and dancing around between the pues  in my socks.  On the other hand this was a funeral.  A place to come and say goodbye and try to be a comfort to the family of the deceased.  Not a place for a sock hop.  No matter what any preacher says it’s hard to be happy at a funeral.  It’s nearly impossible unless you are the only heir to a fortune left to you by someone everybody hated.  I’m guessing this isn’t the case for many of us.  Nonetheless, I was conflicted.  I was glad that this song was playing, but I felt it made everyone too happy.  At least too happy for a funeral.  I don’t know.  I’m conflicted about what I’m conflicted about now.  Who says you have to be sad at a funeral— not me, I guess.  If that was the guys favorite song, then who cares.  Ok, I’m not conflicted anymore.  Any music is ok for a funeral.  There I said it.  Let it be so. 

         My friends I were talking a few days after the funeral and we were discussing our own funerals.  How we would like them to be.  The music we might want.  How it would all go down.  Most everyone’s ideas were similar except for Janice’s.  She said she would have all female pallbearers.  I thought this very interesting being that I’ve never seen a woman pallabearer.  I don’t know if this is a rule or something.  I’m sure it isn’t.  It’s carrying something that might be heavy.  That’s one of the few things we have on women anymore.  We can generally carry heavier things than they can.  It’s not much, but we’re still ahead of them there.  I asked her why she wanted this and she gave me the best answer to a question I’ve gotten in a long time.  She said that men didn’t want to take her out when she was alive, so she’d be damned if they take her out after she’s dead.  Beautiful.  You can’t really argue with that.  It’s her damn funeral.  She’ll have it her way.  That’s the way it ought to be.

     I was watching this woman psychic on T.V. and it occurred to me that it must be tough being married to a psychic.  She was sitting on a couch with her husband while the interview was in progress.   I got to watching the husband.  He looked like a man doing his best to keep his mind blank.  He blankly stared into the camera.  You could see right through his eye balls to a brain that was kicked into neutral.  There’s no way he could be having the usual guy thoughts.  Guys thoughts are disgusting.  I believe this to be true.  I’ve talked to some of my friends and they’ve told me of their disgusting thoughts.  We don’t mean them to be disgusting but they tend to gravitate in that direction.  We’re either thinking about beating the hell out of someone and taking their woman or we’re just thinking about their woman.  We’re disgusting.  It’s a fact.  This poor guy was making sure he didn’t have those normal guy thoughts.  I bet his wife has been tuned into his every thought since the day they met.  He’s learned his lesson.  Save the normal thoughts for when she’s asleep.  He did look a little tired.  It’s now our fault.  We’re modern cave men.  We have these thoughts as a reminder of our not so distance past.  We think them now.  We don’t act on them.  We’re modern man, HomoSapienSissy.  A general rule of mine is never marry a psychic.  You  really don’t want your wife knowing what you’re thinking.  I promise. 

        My next rule is simple-never say anything about anything that might make someone think you know something about anything.  Knowing something will always get you into trouble.  For instance, if you know how to fix something someone is going to ask you to fix theirs.  It’s just the way it works.   Pretty soon you’re wasting your time fixing something for somebody else when they should be fixing it or paying somebody to fix it for them.  If someone asks you if you know anything about something that might need fixed you better say no.  As a matter of fact you better say you’ve never heard of the thing they need help with.  It gets a little tricky if they say something that’s pretty common like a car or something.  You’ve can always claim you’ve never heard of that brand before or you can say something like the last time you tried to work on a car it exploded and burnt to the ground.  There’s always a way around knowing something.  Mostly it’s just pretending you don’t.  People may think you are helpless.  This can work in  your favor.  Maybe they can fix something of  yours.   General rule number two- you don’t know nothing about nothing. 

           The last piece of general knowledge gold is-never give advice.  I realize I’m giving advice here but you can trust me.  I wouldn’t lie to you.  If you give advice someone might actually take it.  You don’t  want that.  If it works out for them other people will want advice.  You’ll be wasting your time giving out free advice to anyone and everyone.   People get paid to give out advice.  They’re the ones that have to live with the consequences.  That’s why they’re paid.  You get no compensation for your advice if it’s good or bad.  Why do it?  I know it makes us feel smart and important to give out advice but it’s not worth it.  If your daughter wants your advice about the nose-ringed, purple haired, dofus she’s dating don’t give her any.  What if he’s the next Bill Gates or Jerry Springer.  You don’t know.  Let her find that out on her own.  She’ll be ok, probably.  Think about it.  Someone actually doing what you say to do.  That’s crazy.  That’s scarey.  I can’t be trusted with the things I tell myself to do.  Never give advice of any kind, good or bad.

       Is there a link between genetics and being a smart ass?  Surely there is.  I definitely know there’s a link between being a dumb ass and genetics.  That one is all too clear with examples galore.  I’m unsure about the smart-ass connection.  It’s the old nature versus nurture debate.  Or is it?  I wasn’t raised to be a smart-ass and yet here I am.  I’m a bona fide smart-ass.  My Dad was a mild smart-ass.  It’s  fine line.  He would smart-ass on occasion, but no more than the normal person would.  I don’t think that qualified him, or anyone else, as a bona fide smart-ass.  I, on the other hand, do a lot of smart-assing.  I can’t help it.  I have a few friends who also qualify.  I think the main trait in being a smart-ass is when you can only think of smart-ass replies to any comment.  Maybe everyone has these smart-ass thoughts and they have more self control.  I don’t know.  I can only speak about my particular smart-ass mind.  I’ll give you an example.

       I was online having a conversation with a group of people.  I had just met these folks so I was trying to not be a smart-ass right off the bat.  One of the first comments I read was this lady talking about feeding her kitten.  This sounded like a complete euphemism for sex to me but I refrained from typing anything.  I mean feeding your kitten, come on.  Then out of the blue this guy says he’s going to pet his puppy.  Pet His Puppy!  Come on now.  This is getting out of hand but I’m not typing anything.  I’m determined to not be a smart-ass.  Maybe these people are really doing what they say they are doing.  Then this other lady asks if his puppy is a wiener dog.  She says she loves wiener puppies.  I can’t take it anymore.  How can I just sit  here and just read this stuff?  Wouldn’t anyone have smart-ass replies to these things being said?  I finally couldn’t take it.  I asked the guy if he uses one or two hands  when he pets his puppy.  I told the first lady to let the guy feed her kitten so he wouldn’t have to pet his puppy and I told the second lady that the best way to pet a wiener pup is to use long slow smooth strokes at first then quick ones later.  Nothing was typed for a moment.  I was getting nervous.  These were pretty good folks because eventually they laughed and joined in the word play.  I was relieved that I didn’t offend anyone and yes they really did have pets that needed to be attended to.  It was me all along.  Me and my smart-ass mentality. 

       All would have been fine if I had dropped it right then and there.  Unfortunately, the first lady said something that begged for a smart-ass reply.  She said she hated wiener dogs and that she was going to train her cat to bite them.  Now please.  She’s going to train her cat to bite wieners.  Please.  How can I resist this.  How can any human resist the temptation to reply in a smart-ass manner.  Dammit.   I’m only human.  I said the only thing I could in this situation.  I asked her if she was going to teach by example.  I know this was nasty.  I know this was vulgar.  I can’t  help it.  My genes were vibrating  intensely.  See, right there, what I just said.  Can you resist thinking something bad?  Can you resist the urge to respond in a smart-ass way?    ”My genes were vibrating.”  I’m trying to resist.  I can’t.  It sounds like I need to go pet my puppy or feed the kitten.  There, I smart-assed myself.  Are you happy?