Where I’m at presently:
- Working on my listening skills, not trying to solve, not waiting to talk, not trying to get down your pants, seriously trying to empathize, maybe make a connection, and be a better person
- Not drinking, not because I have a problem with it, I just don’t need it
- Still a vegetarian, started down the path to improve my cholesterol, it worked and I just stuck with it
- Blogging to improve my writing, feedback is much appreciated
- Trying to reconcile what I want with what I need. I need food, shelter, family, friends, and something to write/draw with everything else is just details. Why, why, why cannot I get rid of all my gadgets?
- What I do for a living is not who I am and that bothers me
- I believe in the idea of altruism
- Why do folks feel the need to justify their terrible behavior? You want to be a jerk, own it
- When someone starts a sentence with “I am not trying to be racist…” well guess what
So, I get a call this week from a kind gentleman informing me I won the publisher’s sweepstakes. Great news for the realistically challenged or those not too fast on the uptake. More of the latter for me, I guess I was aching for some good news and it was a particularly challenging week. It was a great spiel, he had me hook line and sinker very smooth operator. He even knew my address which was scary, when he asked me for my credit card the alarm bells finally went off. Here is a snippet:
“we need your credit card number so you can pay for the weekly subscription which will be 70% off cover price”
“I don’t like giving my credit card over the phone so I will just go to the website, it is publisher’s clearing house dot com or some such, right?”
“well no we don’t have a website we are a call or mail only outfit and it is American publisher’s”
“so it’s 2019 and you guys don’t have a website? Hmmmm”
“well no we deal in physical media so”
“what does that have to do with anything, you are this conglomerate of publishers and you don’t have a website?”
“if you just give your…”
“look man, you have wasted enough of my time…”
“your time? You wasted a lot of my time, you son of a bi—”
I hung up before he finished. It would have been great if I would have given him an expired card number and strung him along for a while longer. Well here is my shot at getting even:
I picture a lonely man in his 60’s chain-smoking while reviewing his targets for the day in his dimly lit one-bedroom apartment in his underwear and a torn, dingy, scurvy tank top two sizes too small for his man boobs. His wife left him years ago when she caught him making out with a stuffed animal he had kitted out in her underwear. She lights his beloved stuffed “Kiki” on fire before leaving the next morning. Soon after, he lost his job as an animal pheromone tester, which required him to slather himself with aforementioned secretions and be placed in proximity to animals to illicit and gauge a response. Unfortunately, a few times the handlers were not quick enough to extricate him from the enclosure and he received some aggressive amorous attentions. Falling on hard times he turned to grifting to make ends meet, without a conscience or moral compass to get in the way he made a decent living preying on the elderly. He picked on the wrong guy though, a Marine vet, who found out who he was, looked him up and had his 80 yr old wife film him breaking the guys legs. Threatened to be exposed if he didn’t change his ways, he was forced to look for different victims to ply his trade. He got online and researched this new Publisher’s Clearinghouse scam and decided to try his luck…
Impractical Application 