Everyone and everything is a threat.
Different countries, different ideologies; I can understand it at a base level.
But within our own borders?
Threats of rigged elections, of government shutdowns.
Shut down what?
What have any of you entitled self-important dickwads done?
Divided our country, lessened our global importance?
Hey, thanks.
Yeah, why don’t you shut down?
Bet we won’t even notice a difference.
A lot of ink being devoted to the Uvalde massacre and the black eye given to law enforcement in general.
The threat of rain.
That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.
I dig rain.
A warm afternoon mountain shower is the best.
I’ll tell you a really weird feeling I got at this little dive bar I used to go to in Las Vegas in the late seventies. It was right where the strip met Fremont. It was about three in the morning when some kid, about 20 years old, white, and obviously very stoned, shoved a gun up to the bartender’s face.
In a second, you could hear at least a dozen cocked hammers.
The bar was the home base for many of the Las Vegas Metro and this young guy picked the wrong place.
I don’t know which freaked me out more: that there were so many guns pulled in front of me, or that some of my best drunk-ass friends were actually gun-wielding police officers.
Threats never were very effective with me.
Incentives.
That is much more effective.
Appreciation.
I’ve been accused of backward thinking on more than one occasion.
When I first meet someone, rather than start out with a blank slate, I go the other way.
I give you full credit from the get-go just for being here, at this point in time, and navigating whatever it is you did just to get here.
Today.
Now, all you can do is LOSE respect from me.
Be unkind to animals.
Be unkind to the planet.
Be unkind to yourself.
I have paid the price for my naivete, but I’d rather that than to become hard and unfeeling.
Emotions are the coolest part of being human. I love laughing just as much as I do crying. I find both to be at once joyful and cathartic.
But it takes a rare business mind indeed to come up with a scheme to bilk your friends out of all their money when you are seven years old. I came up with the idea of giving each one of my four best friends a split of my weekly allowance money, and in return, I would sell them things “on account” which I accurately recorded in my Big Book.
I would charge them for the Kool-Aid, soda pop, candy, and other goodies mom bought for our family.
Invariably, the kids would each have to pay me monies at week’s end from their own allowance. I ran this “operation” for about five months until this little nerdy kid came to my house when I wasn’t there and pleaded with my mom because I said I would murder his whole family if he didn’t pay me the dollar he owed me.
My “operation” came to an abrupt end at that point in time.
Stay well.
