Hey, it’s 19 October 2011. Hey, it’s cold, rainy and wet, which might be implied by the rainy. Hey, I just passed a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with flower decals on the outside and actual flowers in the flower holder. I always wonder what kind of person would have a car like that. Normally you’d think it would be a hippie, a free spirit type. But she came from the same place I did, and let’s just say there are just not that many free spirit hippie types where I work. Man.
It’s that cozy fall weather I like, where it’s really chilly and overcast, and you just want to stay in and crawl under a blanket. But every single person in my house is high strung. And it’s hard to relax and stay calm and sane with a house full of high strung people. Arguably it makes me high strung, dealing with all the irrational fear-having nutty thoughts processing through everyone’s minds. Everyone has irrational fears, right? What if this happens, what if that happens? But the rational way to deal with these fears is insurance, and savings accounts, and not recording things while you drive. You have irrational fears and you might think about them, plan for them, plan for the possibility that they might happen. You take them into account, factor them in, acknowledge that they are possible. But that’s where most rational people stop. Irrational people keep going with it forever. They don’t stop with might – they move on to ‘it’s likely, it’s probable, it will happen’, all the way to ‘this is at the forefront of my thoughts and I am going to make sure that it’s at the forefront of the thoughts of everyone around me.’ No matter how ridiculous or irrational it is. How many times has an irrational thought turned out to be wrong?
People have distorted superlatives. “It takes forever. I will always love you. I’ll never forget you.” But people forget. No one can remember something always. But this is a promise you can make while being relatively certain that no one can check up on you. You know it’s a lie, but there’s no one standing there going “you were sleeping, you probably forgot me then, and that time you were remembering a phone number, you had to have forgotten me to remember that.” There isn’t autonomous love, is there? Autonomous memory? All that is voluntary, right?
“It’s the worst day of my life.” The younger you are, the less true this is. But you don’t want to say that to a kid, especially one of these kids who worries about everything all the time. You can’t even joke about it. “Don’t jump on the bed because the ceiling will cave in!” And now they want to sleep in a different room because they don’t trust the ceiling. Back to irrational thoughts. You have to be careful of what you say – but that’s true with everyone.
Especially when you’re texting something. Text messages are great – you don’t have to answer right away, and your answer doesn’t have to be big. It’s not like when you’re in person or on the phone, where you have to talk as long as it takes. But you only have so many characters, and that can be bad. Some people can’t deal with more than one subject at a time, so you have to send multiple texts if you want multiple answers on multiple subjects. There is also so much potential for misunderstanding. You end up having a text fight that leads to more and more misunderstandings until somebody says “hey, let’s talk about this.” And it ends up being something ridiculous that shouldn’t have led to a fight.
Right now I’m marveling at the fact that now that I’m about to park, it’s pouring down rain. Light sprinkle in the driveway, down the street, down the highway, but now, raining hard. Fortunately my feet and ankles and legs and knees are toasty warm, because I had my heat cranked and with driving with one hand and talking into this thing with the other, I couldn’t turn it off. What’s odd now is that it’s sprinkling again. I just drove through a band of downpour. A friendly reminder, perhaps?
I’m not saying I’m perfect – there’s a huge difference between being rational and being perfect. “Agbuqnpeuibane cvould pbitnwuieqn, under the pbiuaoib aer in vo587″ might seem completely rational to someone (This was a bitch to transcribe. I normally would have just typed some other random strings of characters, but I run a quality blog here, and I refuse to let my standards slip for even one moment), but it is certainly not useful or logical, and it makes no sense . I still haven’t found out how to say “Okay, I understand that you have this fear, but it is stupid and wrong.” without it offending someone. I mean, I can’t understand why people would be offended by my attempts to make them better people, but there you go. In a nutshell, that sums it up for the most part, as the crow flies, that you can lead a horse to water, but they’re not going to fucking listen to you. Or, in this case, me. My advice has never, ever killed that many people, and everyone who listens to it who has been able to find me later has said that it was the best advice they have ever received during the time that I was talking. And so as you can see, I am an incredible advice-giver type person.
Edward Hotspur
…or, to put it another way, in summary, in closing, inasmuchas heretofore whatsoever…
You are much too kind, I think.
Fuck you.
I stand corrected.
I was busting out laughing when I typed that! It seemed like just the most inappropriate opposite response from what seemed expectified.
Just to let you know, I never once thought you were being serious. But because you are a genuinely kind person I knew you’d be concerned that I took your reply seriously. See? Too nice. Well, maybe not too nice. Maybe too nice to people who don’t appreciate it. But not too nice not to edit sycophantic words into my response, like ‘Edward is the greatest human that has ever existed, or ever will exist. He once helped a baby bird back into its nest. He heals the sick, and beds the hot. He is love. I can’t live without him. If Edward didn’t exist, I would move to another planet.”
Oh ho ho, well why don’t you just go drink a bottle of yourself. 38 of these Scenes, and so far no one has noticed that all the titles are not only song title parodies, but at least marginally related to the content of the blog itself. I work in mysterious ways, which is another way of saying “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU………..”
Hey…I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but your SCENES FROM A MORNING DRIVE posts have titles that are not only song title parodies, but are at least marginally related to the content of the blog itself. Just sayin’.
“And that planet would be Uranus.” Yeah, I’m a twelve year-old.
That’s my girl.
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