A Little Help

As so often happens, life serves up a steaming can of whup-ass when you least expect it.  And what suffers?


For one thing ... my blog.  So, over the weekend, I enlisted the help of one of my best, best internet friends to write a post for me.  If you're not familiar with Roscoe "Bic" Lighter, then you should be. "Bic" has written the very successful weblog "The Lighter Side of Junk" for more years than I care to remember, and I enjoy his wry observations of this crazy old world most times.  So please, give it up for "Bic" ...


You know, I often find as I grow older that the mind is a tricky thing.  Like an old engine, say, or a 1934 Packard, it has it's own quirks and you have to allow for them when you're making use of it.  It works at its own speed and it doesn't do to try and hurry it along as I found out to my chagrin the other day when dashing out to a Kiwanis meeting.  I returned home to find the pot roast I had been planning to eat halfway through the spin cycle in the washing machine and a crock pot full of boot socks simmering nicely on the stove.  Well, of course the roast was ruined and I had to get professionals in to clean the sock steam off of the kitchen windows.

People often ask me what I think of today's young humorists.  How do they compare to the humorists of my day?  Well, I told you the mind is a tricky thing and I seem to remember talking about that very matter with Will Rogers in the jump seat of a 1936 Lockheed Electra flying machine several weeks ago. "Will, what do you think of all the so-called humor that's going around now on the TV and the internets?" I said.  Old Will looked over at me and I could see he was of a mind to speak on the matter.

"Bic," he said.  "there's two kinds of humorists; humorists who say there are two kinds of humorists and others who do not.  It's these latter kind that seem so prevalent in your modern times, the most glorious and prosperous times in the world."

"They seem to believe that contempt of government is funny and that flouting laws against marijuana in public is smart.  They forget the fact that their rights are privileges that may be taken away.  You see, Bic, society is like a parent.  It has its little peculiarities.  But it also has a parental type authority; it can 'ground' us in a jail, or it an cut our 'allowance' by putting us on a blacklist so we don't get any work.  This is done for the benefit of the whole social family, though it is sometimes as hard for us as it is for children to realize society is only looking out for our future."

"That's why we shouldn't be smart assed or sarcastic about governments any more than we should about our parents, nor should we go around making cruel fun of our brothers and sisters, or fellow citizens, just because they spend good money on fuzzy toilet seat covers, or something."

"Bic, one of the wonderful things about America is that there is room for all different types of people. People who want to riggedy-rig A-rab elections or go to war against push-over third world nations. Other people, who prefer to be older, stay home and support those overseas.  Some people want to run large multi-national corporations, others prefer to work for these.  Some to make laws, some to obey them.  There is room in our great country for all these types of people."

"In our country now we have some dissidents.  Some are humorists, bitter and lashing out at the world like a drunk in a mirror factory.  Others are like the bumblebee, which science tells us can't fly. They believe the world has got itself into a shit-fizzer of mighty magnitude because they believe it can no longer fly.  We don't need them, Bic, we never did.  In my day, we wouldn't have stood still for it.  'If you think like that,' I recall one small town mayor saying to a rowdy running against him on the local soft-in-the-head ticket, 'why don't you go be a Mexican?'"

"In a lot of ways, it's the fault of your modern magazine publishers, and moving picture producers, who don't go out and look through the newspapers of heartland America to see what the people really want."

Well, Will had his say on the matter and I woke up in my back yard.  There was a bumblebee flying by and I remembered that some people said that was impossible.  Then I woke up again and I was in my bed and it was November.  Something to think about, isn't it, how the mind plays tricks on us?