I am annoyed and nobody gives a rat's ass. Which is good, because we have way too many really annoyed people. And that annoys me... People are too easily annoyed nowadays. It seems if I open my mouth at a party, my wife will pull me aside and say, "lower your voice, your annoying people!" OK, I do have a loud voice, but in a room full of people like a restaurant or a large party, I have to be loud to hear myself think! But what is worse is when a small group of friends are talking current events, the news, politics, controversy, I have to be super sensitive about what I say. For some reason, I am always the one my wife thinks is "getting too political," or "making people uncomfortable," because I often point out stuff I have just read or seen in the news about government employees outrageous pensions, how some public agency just spent $43M to build a bridge over a pothole, or how the news constantly treats conservatives like they are flesh eating zombies. For me, these are just juicy topics of discussion. I am a conversation provocateur, so I throw a few bombs, so what? It gets people involved! I don't want to be ostracized for sure, but I will be damned if I am going to spend my evenings talking about the latest Starbucks coffee creation! Why are people so afraid to dig into our culture, to bounce their passions off of each other, to bring their mental electrons into collisions to generate some social electricity? This is what living is all about! My best friends dad used to challenge us as teenagers, "Use your think-thing you knuckleheads!" I took his advice about a lot of things and one of them was if "you are not thinking, your not living!" Of course times have changed....the most popular TV show is 'The Walking Dead,' so maybe I am barking up the wrong tree. I get the feeling that what bothers my wife is not how loud I am, or how my politics might offend someone, but that I am going upstream by suggesting that we actually use some energy to exercise our minds. Which reminds me, another thing that really bugs me is people at the gym who sit on exercise machines and play video games for hours! That annoys me on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin the conversation! |
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January 2025
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