Over the course of my life, I can’t count the number of people who have advised me to take up the practice of meditation. These well-meaning souls invariably insist that once they began setting aside an hour a day to clearing their minds, they had come to experience perfect peace and serenity.
Sounds great. For them, maybe, but not for me. The problem is that after vacuuming my brain, my desk would still be a mess.
You have no idea how difficult it is for me, a man who hates clutter with a passion, to be a person who is forever jotting down little notes to myself. Ideally, with my temperament, I should spend ten years writing a Russian novel. Instead, I spend ten years reading one.
My plan with these idle thoughts is to expand them into full-size articles. But after a while, I wise up and realize it’s not going to happen. What to do? Toss them in the trash? That would be criminal. Okay, if not criminal, certainly wasteful. Better, I think, to gather them up the way a clever cook deals with leftovers, and turn them into a stew.
So, let us begin with all those folks who insisted that we’d captured Osama bin Laden, and that President Bush was simply waiting until the eve of the election to tell us about it. So, now what? Do they think the Republicans will keep Osama on ice until October, 2008, and let Jeb Bush make the announcement?
Why do so many people insist that Sean Penn is a great actor? I’ve seen him in several movies, ranging from “I Am Sam” to “Mystic River,” and I’ve never found him convincing. As Dorothy Parker once said in reviewing a stage performance by Katherine Hepburn, Penn runs the emotional gamut from A to B. To me, he has never been anything but ham on legs.
Defense attorneys should be shunned the way lepers used to be in the old days. They should have to ring a little bell as they skulk through the streets, signaling their approach with the words, “Unclean, unclean.” For fame and money there is nothing they wouldn’t do. They will say absolutely anything in order to con a jury into setting their client free, no matter if the creep is a murderer, a rapist or a pedophile. As I see it, the lawyer is every bit as guilty as the guy who drives the getaway car.
The reason I am glad I live in Los Angeles is because of the climate. I think that those who rhapsodize about the change of seasons are lying through their chattering teeth. That’s like a man’s saying he has a wife who couldn’t be sweeter and nicer three months of the year, but the rest of the time she’s either pouting, nagging or flying into homicidal rages, and, by golly, he wouldn’t have her any other way! In L.A., we not only don’t get snow, sleet and sub-zero temperatures, but we are spared tornadoes and hurricanes. The older I get, the more I find I hate noisy weather.
They have little transmitters they can conceal in a car so that in case it’s stolen, it can be traced. So why don’t they stick them in kids so they can be tracked down if they’re lost or stolen?
Men think women are loco. Women think the same about men. News flash: they’re both right. They just happen to be loony in different ways. Men, for instance, actually think it’s important who coaches the Notre Dame football team. Women, on the other hand, will write to convicted killers. I am willing to wager that Scott Peterson, that smug, smirking sociopath, gets more mushy love letters than Brad Pitt and George Clooney put together.
There is a law on the books, in my hometown at any rate, against the use of leaf blowers, the only things noisier than espresso machines. But because 99% of the gardeners are Hispanic, the law is never enforced. It makes me wonder if, say, only Hispanics drove too fast, whether L.A. cops would stop writing speeding tickets. If songs such as “Feelings” and “Tomorrow” had their same pleasant melodies, but had cynical, downbeat, lyrics, would so many people still feel compelled to groan every single time they were performed?
Why did anyone believe that The Glove didn’t fit O.J.? For one thing, they first put plastic gloves on his hands. Then he flexed his fingers as far as he could before making that obviously phony attempt to pull the glove on. Flex your fingers that far apart and, believe me, you can’t get your hand into a baseball mitt, let alone a tight-fitting glove. (See what I mean about defense attorneys?)
The only time I ever see SUVs used the way they’re shown in TV commercials – as carry-alls for families of eight with a large sheepdog in tow or as transport for an entire Boy Scout troop – is in TV commercials. In real life, at most, I’ve seen one woman and two small children in these gas-guzzling behemoths.
I don’t get the appeal of reality TV. If you’re so crazy about reality, turn off your TV and step outside.
I think the reason that, year after year, the most successful movies are animated features is because we don’t actually have to look at all those annoying, arrogant Hollywood types for two solid hours. Walt Disney definitely had the right idea when he said he preferred working with his actors because, if worse came to worst, he could always erase them.
People should never accuse other people of being opinionated because it only makes them sound stupid. For one thing, they only say it about people with whose opinions they disagree. For another thing, it’s only their opinion.
If I could change only one thing about my fellow Americans, it would be to wean them off their infatuation with politicians. When you cut through all the flapdoodle, we pay these pompous clucks a good deal of money to do nothing more than decide how to squander our tax dollars. Gentlemen, you might as well pay homage to the ex-wives to whom you pay alimony. Ladies, you would do as well to lavish praise on your teenage offspring as they march off to the mall armed with your credit card.
The people who are entitled to our devotion are naturally those who so rarely get it. After all, between the politicians and the rock stars, the chemically enhanced athletes and the folks like Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith who are famous only for being famous, we have nothing left for the truly deserving. So, let us now bow our heads and give thanks to the plumbers who show up when our sinks and toilets back up; the members of the U.S. Coast Guard who risk their own lives to rescue us whenever there’s a flood or an accident at sea; the folks who go out in the middle of snow storms to clear the roads and keep the electricity on and the telephones working; the cops who run towards the shooting when every human instinct is telling them to run in the opposite direction; and, finally, those heroes who race into burning buildings to rescue people they know nothing about, except that they probably voted against giving them a pay raise during the last election.
With all that out of the way, I can relax…except now of course I have no idea what I’ll write about next week.
If you liked this article, perhaps you'll also
like Burt's collection from Scorched Earth Press, "Conservatives
Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco." Order your
autographed copy now from BurtPrelutsky.com.
©2004 Burt Prelutsky
DISCUSS THIS ARTICLE IN THE FORUM!
