love

Happiness or Contentment?

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A recent conversation at our early morning Turning Stone Resort and Casino Fitness Center Meeting sparked an interesting idea: would you rather be happy or content?*

You can’t answer if you don’t know the difference between the two. You can google or Ai both words on your own time, but it’s worth noting “contentment’s” etymology: “From the Middle English ‘contentement’, satisfaction of a claim or debt.” Did you think being content had anything to do with financial stuff?

Jury’s out, but let’s look at examples.

I was the first to the meeting and as I sat on the couch in front of the fireplace in the beautiful entrance hall, it occurred to me I was content. I was pain-free, did not lose any money in the morning’s gambling, was waiting for friends, and had no current life-threatening medical issues. The fireplace makes navel contemplation easy and contentment was the result of a contemplation free of issues, free of doubt, free of discomfort. And it was warm. And friends were coming to join me. It was a time for a clear mind to get out of the way and just bask in the glow from both the fire and the “satisfaction of a claim or debt”.

Minutes earlier on the gambling floor, I had won big on a favorite machine. ** As the “one-armed bandit” ramped up its big-payout bells and whistles and sirens, I was happy. Out of this world happy. How much would I win? Could I take a trip to the Bahamas?

Eh. Not the Bahamas but as noted earlier, the win was an integral component of the ensuing contentment. It wasn’t The Big Win, but it wasn’t a loss. It was enough to not spoil the morning but not enough to change a life.

I’m a big fan of contentment but wouldn’t kick happiness out of bed for eating crackers, if you’ll pardon the immature, misogynistic comment. It appears contentment is also “trainable”. You can teach it to sit and stay, for example.*** Contentment is like fruit on a tree, it’s there anytime you want it if know how to get it. It might even be shareable(sic) with a close friend or someone in need.

Happiness seems to involve luck. Serendipity. Being in the right place at the right time and—again—being able to recognize it ****. And as my machine blared my success earlier this morning, a look around the gambling floor revealed faces not exactly happy with my happiness. They may even have been harboring bad thoughts, or hoping my final amount would not be enough to make me too happy.

One thing noted as this essay unfolded: contentment is readily available if we notice it and cultivate it. We can get it anytime. It’s like a small, ocean-rounded rock you put in your pocket.

Happines? Not so much, it is mercurial, it comes and goes on the whims and impulses of The Gods.

Can they exist together? No. Happiness can help cause contentment, and contentment—probably—can help inspire or attract happiness, but only contentment is a life-changer: once you know to find it, the world is your oyster…most of the time.

And if you can’t find contentment now, be patient. Wait. It might be around the next corner…lurking…waiting for you to say hi.

*Spoiler alert: don’t read this footnote first cause happiness is sometimes defined as a feeling of contentment, and this essay is attempting to reduce confusion, not add to it.

**As a 50-cent per play bettor, winning $5.50 is a “big win”. In Trump math it’s about 1,000%.

***Still working on “fetch” and “roll over”.

****Ever wonder how lucky you are to NOT be in a place at the Wrong time? Ever drive by an accident and Thank God you were not in that exact spot 5 minutes earlier?

Is It? Really? Don’t Lie To Me…

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It’s April in Upstate New York and it’s SPRINGTIME!

Wait. Be right back.

It is! Had to go look, again, because you can’t be sure about the weather around here but it does look like it’s time to put the winter clothes away. If you live in a temperate climate whose winter doesn’t challenge you, you might not appreciate Spring the way we do, here….especially if you are an “older person”*. Minus Zero temperatures do wonders for the joints, and howling winds certainly help to clear germs and viruses from exposed skin. And no bugs! Snow is a big help, too: it takes the worry out of planning your day when everything is closed or closing. Enjoy your time alone. Learn more about yourself. Look inward, grasshopper.

The worst part of winter in upstate New York, though, is the complaining. Fugddaboutit NY City people having a “bad mouth”, come to Upstate when the snow is…

Hmph. I’m complaining, aren’t I. Not directly but that other way people whine. Reboot.

Spring is here! My windows are open, and my apartment is full of fresh air and construction.** It is also full of something hard to explain. This something happens every year when Spring returns, and since it is only my third spring after being in The South for over 20 years, my mind and body feel “something” my brain and fingers aren’t helping me explain.

It may be my brain and fingers want me to do something other than this. They may want me to go outside, take my clothes off, and walk***around in the sun under the fantastically clear blue sky. Or sit on my balcony and silently respond to the shouts, orders, directions, and curses of suddenly light-hearted construction workers. Imagine how happy THEY are about Spring.

I’m out of here. No more talking about Spring in Upstate New York except to suggest you southerners, Californians, and Upstate NY Snowbirds**** come to visit or return. It’s time. Paradise is reborn.

Footnote: so far this day, every person entering my bubble of existence is as happy about Spring as I am. And thankfully, only one has reminded me of how soon winter will be back. Buttwipe.

Out, out damn gray slush-lover!

“Lay on, McDuff!”*****

“The April’s in her eyes; it is love’s spring, and these gentle showers bring it with them.”

*Good, neutral term. Old Man or Old Woman might turn the reader off, as in “Who Cares.”

**A personal bonus from the expansion of my apartment complex. Besides the normal sounds of hammering and sawing and grinding and high-powered tools, there are also some interesting words.

***Yes, as a young man I often fell victim to the desire to feel sun all over,…but at a higher speed.

****People lucky/unlucky enough to have the best of Upstate without the worst.

*****Actual quote, often mis-paraphrased.

Vexes and Exes

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Per the internet: “Vex is a verb meaning to annoy, frustrate, worry, or cause difficulty to someone, often through minor or persistent provocations.”

Is there any word better to describe our current President? He vexes us. He is vexacious(sic). A persistent annoyance. Why? Ask him. Ask him why his name has to be on everything. Ask him why he needs to make the 250-year-old seat of our government look like Mar-A-Lago. As the national debt climbs, wars rage, and government shuts downs are the norm, he has the time and the money to build ballrooms, gold-plate the White House, rename buildings, centers, and traditions using tax-payer money, and hire anyone to do anything for his Cabinets. DOGE, my ass. The OBBB, (One Big Beautiful Bill) is starting to take effect. That’s vexing. As Our President Plays Golf (OPPG), million-dollar drones are launched at minor but irritating enemies. And so many bombs have been bombed OPPG asks for $1.5 TRILLION….TRILLION in his new budget to replace the ordinances heroically liberating Iran and saving us from the nuclear bomb they have been “two weeks away” from since…1995? Can’t remember, but you can find 30 years of videos by hawkish politicians about how Iran is either two weeks away from a nuclear weapon or their nuclear capabilities have been “obliterated” by the previously mentioned bombs. Not only vexing but dizzying.

AI says I can use “vex” as a noun as long as I don’t mind sounding old-fashioned.*

So OPPG and my ex-girlfriend are Vexes, capitalized to make them Proper Nouns, a more accurate description than common nouns.** Why do I lump them both into the newly created Dustbin of Vexes? Neither of them give a shite about me. Or you, probably.

Our Vexator In Chief only cares about people who have money, mainly so they can give it to him, while my ex doesn’t care about me at all…for anything. If God offered the chance to get even with one Vex it would be a tough decision to let God rain his wrath on either of them, since it means the other might escape unscathed.  Yes, I should ask for World Peace. Maybe by the time God grants me the “The Option” my level of vexation will have un-vexated enough to be more magnanimous.*** And unselfish.

And there is another vexation: why should I/we have to be unselfish (and magnanimous) when our leaders and lovers won’t be? For 74 years I’ve been a model citizen, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous–and occasionally decent–politicians. Why am I getting this one, this vexator, so late in life, in my golden years?

Same for the ex. After 50 years of meandering, I settled on her to be “The One”, and truly enjoyed 20 years of stray-free monogamy until she left me with to suffer OPPG and loneliness in my mid-70s. It took her that long to realize what a terrible person I was?

I’ll be obvious for all who have trouble with nuance, or possibly passive-aggressive behavior: Any females reading this looking for a good-old-fashioned man?

I should have thought of this sooner and saved dating site money. Hope I remember to cancel the subscription.

A crappy final thought that literally just came to me: did I vex the ex for those 20 years?

Also, a warning. yesterday I stored a package of cheese in the silverware drawer.**** Let the games begin.

*There is no difference between “old” and “old fashioned” when you are—actually-old.

**Proper nouns are specific. Common nouns are not. No extra charge for the grammar lesson, but you owe me.

****And took an hour to find it, which included asking Ai if the cheese was still okay to eat. It was Extra Sharp Cheddar,

***Ai or google “magnanimous” and ponder the lengths you’d go to elect a leader like that word.

*****Footnotes out of order. It’s a cognitive test. How did you do?

Blind Finding the Blinds?

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God, through His subscription streaming service, Life, has interesting ideas about human existence and the years we spend on earth. For our senior years, for example, He has instructed the powers that be at Life to make our last years as challenging as possible. The point is to test us seniors and see which side of The River Styx* we end up on, and how high up in Heaven or how low in Dantes Circles we go. An example of this late-in-life testing is simply getting dressed. All of us remember jumping out of bed, throwing on some clothes. and heading off to work, play or party…when we were young. It might have been ten minutes from awake to turning the ignition key.**

If we tried doing the same thing this late in life, we’d eventually make a call to a close relative or friend to come get us up off the floor. And—because we get stubborn as we age–it would be a lot longer than ten minutes before we surrender all pride and get to a phone, even if we planned ahead and left it near us. Damn socks. Invent slip-ons, like shoes, dammit.

Senior life then becomes a life of leisure and disregard for the world’s major events, but with a close, annoying, aggravating, non-symbiotic relationship surrounding the Activities of Daily Living (ADL***).

As a younger old man****, my patience was lost on nearly every test thrown my way in my new Old Man career, with the resulting invective stream: “Dammit! WTF! Why me? Why now?” You may have read about some of these adventures in very old essays.

But a simple reading of the room—”commonly called paying attention” –revealed while annoying things were happening, they weren’t just happening to me. The pain is cohort-wide.

Now, with understanding and patience firmly tucked into the frontal lobe, I aspired to get replacement blinds for my apartment windows. This was going to be a long story, but the preface appears to have taken up most of today’s available space. The incongruous but—sadly–modern twists and turns of the War for The Mini Blinds will have to be delineated and explicated in a future essay. It’ll tug at your heart strings, whatever the hell they are.

But a warning, here, for anyone who thinks senior life is all napping, streaming, and ranting: It is, mostly, but we do face a life of paper cuts no younger person can imagine or would have the will to endure. We achieve patience by knowing it happens to everyone who gets the privilege of being “Aged”. We view it as a blessing. Ask any senior and they will tell you how happy they are to be so old. Ask, I dare you.

There isn’t much room left for anything but a quick joke. If I’ve told it before, sue me. And if you are offended, good. Its nice to finally get credit for doing something. Of note, my ancestors–and therefore moi–are citizens of the butt of this joke and do not mind you laughing, as long as its with us and not at us. We’ve come a long way as an Ethnic Group and are proud to be part of making someone else’s life a little brighter.

A Polish man locked his keys in his car.

It took him an hour and a half to get his family out.

Tomorrow, we pick on Italians! Another robust branch of the family tree.

*Yes, I know. I am Unitarian Universalist. Deal with it. Think “Literary License” aka “Poetic License”. Qualified immunity.

**We didn’t have push button start in those days.

***Real thing. Google it, especially young people. Best to learn about it, now, and be ready.

****You get that, right?

              What To Do With Old Memories

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Years ago, when mom died, you all read about the 20 plastic totes of memories in the basement of her house. Pictures, articles, obituaries, birth announcements, first communions, wakes, and simple stuff like when the girls were photographed jumping rope in 1973 and the picture was printed in the paper. IN THE PAPER! In 1973! The old paper stuff feels important, historic, even if it is just two little girls and a rope on Embargo Street in Rome, NY…in 1973.*

The “Sorting of The Totes”, a family tradition since the Middle Ages**, resulted in mountains of memories and momentos being distributed to each totes’ primary focus. Each child, grandchild or miscellaneous stranger had their own tote. Mom made two for me, her favorite.  At the time of the distribution, we all probably did the same thing: took a quick look and put the tote(s) up on a shelf.

Eight years later, in 2024, in preparations to move to NY and recovery, both my totes were front and center in the back of the car. In April 2024, the totes were picked up, carried to the door of the apartment house, set down in the elevator to the second floor, picked up and carried into the apartment, and put on a closet shelf. For two years. I can’t remember the reason for recently pulling them down and going through them, but the event was mind-boggling. The totes are both a Pandora’s Box*** of—

Ai says opening Pandor’s Box “released all of the worlds’ sorrows: disease, old age, famine, jealousy, and death.” They came flowing out and spread all over the world. Mom’s totes aren’t like that, are they? Maybe. Looking at photos of people from The Past, with most being complete strangers, can cause sorrow, and most of the subjects of the photos and articles are dead, so, there’s that, too. Look how happy they were, how joyous, how young, and how invincible…jealousy? Envy? Relief? Foretelling future deaths? Even seeing my 3-year-old myself bundled up for an afternoon of roiling in the snow inspired the question of why we have to grow old, can’t we stay young, forever? Then there’s the journal mom kept when she visited Switzerland, lamenting the cold while admiring the beauty. Her words in her time, now in mine.

Bet you don’t know the end of the Pandora’s Box legend. I didn’t, until Ai recited the entire story. After “The Sorrows of The World” poured out and spread across the globe, there was one thing left in the box. Ai says it was trapped in the bottom, under everything else, and Pandora didn’t see it, at first: One last gift from the gods.

It was hope.

When you look at photos of generations of relatives and friends and strangers who are no longer on this plane of existence, when you see how bright and alive they were, you begin to wonder, to imagine how much of your life will be in a plastic tote, and how soon will it happen. The existential question is normal, human, and helped a great deal by the The Hope stuck in the box, but it is still a question.

Unlike the original sorrows flitting away into the world, what do I do, what do WE do with the totes and their contents?  The Memories. What happens if we burn them, throw them away, or cut them up? Does it affect those no longer here? Does it make them “more gone”?

Screw it. Lunchtime. Everything back in the totes and back to the shelf. Life will take care of them somehow, sometime. Sorry kids, it’s your problem, now.

            *Yes. Repeated for emphasis. Please get the point.

            **Not really. But it should be.

***Really a ceramic jar, but it was mistranslated early on and the mistake stuck for all of eternity. Read the entire legend, it is a “theodicy”, “an explanation of why there is evil, suffering, and death in a world that might otherwise be prefect.”

Best Friend or Romance…Let’s Not Call The Whole Thing Off

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I am an older gentleman who has lost or misplaced many friends. Three best friends died before their times by accidents or disease, and one got swept away by the strong currents of a cult*. Others were lost to career moves, love, loss of love, family matters, and irreconcilable differences. Life had blessed me-at this stage of my life–with lots of “peripheral” friends but no Best Friend** (BF). Don’t view that as sad, and—in case you were wondering—I had nothing to do with the deaths. Stop watching Crime Shows.

It was age 50 when the rule only a male could be another male’s best friend went in the garbage bin with the Members Only jackets and loose-fitting jeans***. Females of our species as potential, non-sexual, long-time partners, possibly a best friend during the male’s mate-hunting prime? Um, no. Not in my life, anyway. If you don’t understand ponder the existence of blow-up dolls. Anatomically correct blow-up dolls. With names.

But at age 50 there was a life-partner change brought on by the miracle of the Right Person (RP) finally entering a location close enough to appear on my radar. With the excellent hindsight of 74 years, she originally entered as a love interest. She was smart, secure, independent and could care less about my problems, she had her own. As age helped the romantic fire flame out, there was enough in the embers to make staying together worthwhile and we were BFs (and occasionally more) for over 20 years, longer than anyone else. Male or female. BF or not.

And then she left.  

But now, the BF “hope” at this age is not limited to one half of the population, the potential pool is twice what it was at age 30.  Those who don’t urinate into a stainless steel trough at sporting events can now be considered for the exalted position BF.**** A true benefit of old age, and it comes at just the right time.

A new BF for this time in my life has been found. When you read about my UPer (Unidentified PERson), that is her. She needs to remain nameless. There may be some lingering criminal issues in other states she doesn’t deserve to get mixed-up in. Wonder if she has the same issue? The best thing about a BF is we can keep secrets…from each other. It’s a wonderful thing to have in your life. UPer: Thank you for the time investment, vulnerability, and the possibility of a “ride-or-die” loyalty. Long may we last.

            This post is written for all the males and females, senior males and females, lonely and looking for love. And romance. Look for something else. Look for friendship. Those other things may follow. And this applies to everyone. God really doesn’t care who you love as long as you love someone. Take a closer look at all your current relationships, peripheral acquaintances, and contacts. You might be missing something.

*It happened in 1978. He was a childhood friend and best man at my first wedding. His 24-inch by 24-inch self-portrait of how happy he was with Jesus was done in crayon and folded to letter size for mailing. Every year since the internet I’ve googled the return address. It still does not exist, even on google maps. Why not? And yes, I consider it might have been me he was getting away from, but he was running towards something, not away, so there’s hope for him. After nearly 50 years.

**It is assumed everyone knows the difference between friend and “best” friend? Per AI: “a best friend is usually defined by three main factors: vulnerability, time investment, and a ride-or-die loyalty”. But what does Ai know? It also says “friend” and “best friend” are often “interchangeable”. Nerd.

***Sleepwear, now, every chance I get. No, not pajamas…SLEEPWEAR. Public pajamas.

****There is no additional “F” for forever. Ever.

Civilization and People and God

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It occurred to me as I was reading the normal allotment of assorted news this morning, there may be a higher force involved in the rise and fall of civilizations. National Geographic once published a large, fold out chart showing the timeline of the major civilizations that have come and gone from the Earth. Incas, Mayans, Sioux, Ottomans, as well as Celts, Pics, Huns, and multiple Asian Dynasties. The information is too large for my own mental storage system, and too diverse to even memorize all the lost civilizations, but the graphic point illustrated is that civilizations have come and gone for all the time the globe has spun, making ripe opportunities for current civilizations to learn enough lessons to do better next time and last longer. But do we?

Most dynasties flame out after a few hundred years, an important fact as we begin to celebrate 250 years of the United States of America. It appears we haven’t learned anything as we are on the very cusp of a slope we can either go down or avoid. History often cites hubris and over-extension as a reason for a civilization to disappear, but no one can ever be sure. Imagine a population getting so big it outgrows not only sewer systems, but food delivery systems, health systems, and judicial systems. It’s a simple step, then, to infer a collapse of society and a descent into unstoppable chaos and decay. As our 2026 government focuses on external expansion, internal issues fester and multiply, all the while government hopes money, riches, wealth, rare earth metals, and other tangible things are the glue that will hold us together for another 250 years.

In remembering the chart as it was on my wall, and staring at it every day, it looked like a complicated system of trial and error, start and restart. If looked like a record of humankind  trying to figure out the best “style” civilization to ensure long-lasting survival, it tells a story. The main problem appears to be the generations of citizens populating those civilizations. Looked at this way, we (the Royal We) have tried one way, it didn’t work, we tried another, and we tried another, but we didn’t give up…for millions of years.

Unless you are an atheist, or a strong-willed agnostic, it’s hard not to see the hand of a Higher Power directing these actions on the macro (world) level, while we can also empathize with the suffering that must have been endured at the micro (person) level. One can hope, by the way, that the Higher Power was of some comfort to the billions of humans on that micro level who died. What else could it be to them? The sun didn’t just come and go, a god made it happen.

The conclusion reached by this writer is one he senses in life: there is a God, but He lets us work things out on our own. No fire and brimstone, no flooding, just live and learn and faith and hope. What else do we need? Over a few million years, and billions of lost lives, we will eventually get to a civilization that works and makes God…happy? Hard to say, since God being unhappy might, yet, yield Armageddon-ish consequences. But He is playing the Long Game and probably still holds out hope (faith?) we will get it right…. someday. The hard part for those of us existing now is, it may not be this moment, this very time, when we get it right. Should we take consolation in understanding we are just part of an incremental step in the establishment of a world where all can live in peace and harmony?

Maybe, but here is what God wants from His people in any civilization: Love everyone, and live The Golden Rule.

Sounds corny but think of your best friend and how you are when you are around him, her, or them*. Now imagine feeling the same for everyone else. In this day and age, your next thought will be about how you CAN’T live that way, and those thoughts are normal and necessary for micro survival but… what if they weren’t? What if micro survival did not even matter…in the long term? And what about the ages and ages and ages of life to follow? And when our macro leaders fail us, where do we go when we are no longer breathing? And what if, with each passing civilization, a larger and larger per cent of its people lived God’s macro dream and worked for the best we could be? Will the deaths of 800 billion others be worth it?

That National Geographic chart on my wall ended in 2009, but it is not the end of the story, just the latest update. Those of us alive, now, should see it as a start and imagine where we go from here.

Just have faith? Yes. Hope will help a lot, too.

Or not.

*A nod to pets, too, and other plants and animals. Our ancestors.

It’s My Fault, It Has To Be

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I’ve spent a good part of this afternoon “chatting”, talking, and inventing new words to help in talking with customer service reps both human and Ai. Ai is starting to be as disappointing as humans. Twice Ai warned me. Once a disclaimer at the bottom of a search result: “Gemini can make mistakes, so double-check it.” The second time, on a phone call it said “You are speaking to an Ai generated agent and my information may not be precise or accurate.” Guess how I responded. There are two unopened bars of 100% pure Ivory Hand soap in my bathroom and if my mom were here…

To be straight, I’ve never used the internet singular for research of importance. Much as I use Amazon as a “shopping idea and reference”, so, too do I use an internet “fact”. It’s a starting point. So imagine when the new, super-charged search engine called Ai warns me they might be wrong, what is the point and who is kidding who about the efficiency of Ai in our future? Oddly, who would I double-check Ai with, anyway? God?

Is the internet good for anything, anymore? Yes. It saves legwork and time. My research finds a starting point and then looks for back-up, confirming, and supportive facts from other sources. Most often, those facts come from BOOKS or writings originating someplace else that wind up in the realm of public knowledge. News “aggregators”, sites that collect news stories the reader might like, are a case in point. The origin of the site’s stories is the most important thing to check in this click bait world. As a journalist by training, I know stories and articles from “legacy” media will not just be some podcaster’s opinion, but a researched, reviewed, edited, and approved work. An organization with some sort of review and edit structure has a better chance of giving us the truth than one, single mouth. I look for the source and hope it is The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, even CBS, NBC, and CNN…and Fox.  These organizations’ stories may contain some bias, but it is obvious when it happens. Watch Fox for half an hour and see. If a news article is from The Czech Daily, or John’s Basement Tapes, or an individual mouthpiece like Limbaugh, Bongino*, or Grandmas Knickers, it is more than likely click bait. It’s easier to see this with Medicine where excellent websites are available from The Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins, and your own local newspaper. As a bonus these types of sites also include patient blogs which can be invaluable for your own unique situation.

The internet is still a wonderful place for pure entertainment. You can not only see a man get hit in his gonads but can also see The Benny Goodman Quartet at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1938.** But you are all aware of those neat things, already so it’s YOUR fault if you don’t find them and safely enjoy them.

It can be a neat, easy, and productive foray into the the nether world, out there, as long as you know who your guide is, and what they want from you. It isn’t always peace and love.

*Props for Mr. Bongino, the FBI Deputy Director. When asked about his false conspiracy claims from the past he said, truthfully and honestly: “I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions. …but that’s not what I’m paid for now.”

**A special performance, The first “mainstream” jazz concert.

The Thing We Should All Know By Now

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Since cancer altered my life, writing is one of the daily events adding meaning to life and helping me pass time.

Lately, I’ve noticed too much time being passed on our new president, opinions, and current events.

It is time to clear the air and let the world know something, maybe, about how to think? Ugh…this gets uglier and uglier, and when trying this subject in the past, it never came out right and the post never saw the light of day. Crap, let’s just pull the Band-Aid off and see where we go.

Americans have become stupid.

Not all of us. Most of us? Some of us? Stupidity is hard to explain without sounding like you think you’re smarter than everyone else when all you are pointing out is you know you might be stupid and others don’t know they might be stupid. * They are not smart enough to see it? Maybe, ignorance would be a better word. The best example is the locker-room guys last year who said America is “not respected” by foreign countries anymore. When asked what countries they’d visited to form their opinion, their answer was “None.” How do you measure disrespect, anyway? Or ignorance?

Hey, that got pretty close to the point. More: it’s irksome to read letters to the editor and online comments where people “know” everything about everything. No matter what their political persuasion or education. Is there really one or two people out there who know everything about everything?

Example: medicine. How many people (and ask yourself, too) know more about medicine than their doctors? Education: How many know more than the teachers? How many know more than “over educated, know-nothing, deep-state bureaucrats”?

In fact, one of our stupidest mistakes is believing because professional people don’t do what we want them to do, the professionals are the stupid ones. Recently a passenger in my car complained about a traffic circle interchange, exclaiming “What idiot designed this piece of crap?” I mentioned the multiple layers of state employees who did traffic studies, designed it, and built it. My partner’s response was a gleeful “See? Too many cooks spoil the food. I’d have done it different.” The supposition in this case was the professional engineers spent their time purposefully designing a “piece of crap” and my passenger could have done it better by himself, presumably in half the time and half the cost. To illustrate how complex stupidity is, what if he was right?

We will wrap up here, by adding stupidity isn’t really a problem unless it gets in the way of productive conversation, or wastes a lot of time with unproductive conversation. Either situation is a debatable value judgement made by either listener or talker, or both. All I, personally, ever know for sure is when someone talks and acts like they know it all, my first assumption is they don’t. Who gets to be the ass, then, you or me? (Ass u me.) As the good Dr. Wright says: “Half the people you know are below average.” And another from doc: “A conclusion is a place where you got tired of thinking.”

Let’s all do this: stop thinking we know it all. We don’t.

And don’t shoot the messenger.

PS There is an excellent October 17, 2025, opinion piece by conservative pundit George Will about “The Velocity of Stupidity”. Check it out online.

*Such a terrible sentence. Ai agrees and wants to rewrite it for me. But I know better so….

Questions for Concerned and Thoughtful Americans

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When you end your workout at your fitness center and go to the showers where there are three empty stalls, do you select the weird stall with the handrails, folding seat, water controls below waist level, and hand-held shower head?

Do you know the difference between an indictment and a conviction?

Do you now the “distance” between an indictment and a conviction?

Does the term “respect law and order” come up only when you’re talking about someone else’s actions?

Is the driver in front of you doing 10 miles per hour over the speed limit getting in your way and holding you back?

Do you believe in and repost things from your favorite websites to your on-line accounts and state “How True!”, or ask “How True?”

Is everything your political opponent says wrong and everything you say, correct?

Do you get mad when people use “facts” to make their point?

Do you think America is a place only for natural born Americans and there is no room for minority people or religions?

Is it okay to think anyone who doesn’t think like you has a screw loose?

Can you own a gun and still be Anti-NRA?

Is it possible President Trump is doing some thing(s) right?

Is it possible Joe Biden did ANYTHING right?

Do you feel better about yourself when someone agrees with you or disagrees with you?

Is a “tribal validation” of your opinions necessary or are you an independent thinker?

Is it really an insult to be called “sheep” by your political rival?

Should “leaders” of institutions be held to a higher moral standard than the bots and trolls who criticize or praise those leaders?

If you own an AR-15 what do you do with it?

Can we, the people, solve our own problems, or do we need a centralized form of government to make things work?

Do you know anyone who has no place to sleep tonight?

Do you have an idea where you will be sleeping at age 80?

Any relative already in Long Term Care?

Think you won’t need Long Term Care?

Think anyone has the answers to most, all or none of these questions? Life is “a tapestry of rich and royal hue”, said Carole King in 1970. But The Buffalo Springfield said it best in 1968: “We better stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

That was 57 years ago.