A longtime family friend told me a decade or so ago over a couple cold beers we’re all crazy and it’s not our fault.
Blame it on science, he said. Or chemistry. Or both. I don’t recollect, exactly, there being a couple cold beers involved. Still, I recall the gist of it.
“Think of all the chemicals we ingest without giving it a second thought – in our food, our water, our medicines,” he might’ve said. “Think of all the pollutants we breathe in every day. All that is bound to do something to our faculties.”
In short, all that ingesting has messed up our brains in ways we haven’t even figured out yet. And he didn’t know because he’s been eating and drinking the same things everybody else has. He also fed his dog Vito pot pies, but that’s another story. The upshot is we don’t know we’re nuts because we’re nuts, and nuts don’t know they’re nuts. Nuts think they’re sane and everyone else is nuts. Better living through chemistry, right?
I don’t know if said friend’s theory holds water because I’m just a weekly newspaper hack and he’s a retired sergeant major who had a second career teaching college students how to program computers. I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, it would explain what’s going on in a nation such as ours, where people who have in abundance the necessities of life – food, water, shelter, and much more – seem always to be mad at or about something.
Whether that madness is centered around politics, education, gender, immigration, guns, masks, crime, it’s like life’s incomplete if we can’t find something to get our knickers in a twist over.
I, for example, get mad at Ohio State or Michigan car accessories on vehicles with South Carolina or Georgia plates. The Big 10 is way up north. This is SEC country. And it’s filling up fast.
Sure, getting mad isn’t exactly the same thing as going mad – a way of saying someone is losing their mind – but then again, maybe it is. And if it is, it’s time to fight back.
That’s why I’m considering covering important stuff while wearing nothing but a sombrero, partly because I like sombreros but also because I have good looking toes, according to my wife. I believe it would do the world good to see all 10 of them in all their glory, without socks or shoes or pants or shirts getting in the way. And if you don’t agree you’re violating my toes’ right to express themselves.
Editor’s note: As has been written about since the days of the ancient Greeks, toes are interesting. In fact, I went to Walmart the other day to buy someone a gift card and saw some toes.
It happened like this: while standing in line to pay for it I noticed a good-sized blonde woman in spandex pants, a tutu (maybe), glasses and flip flops who wanted to speak to a manager. Yep, she was probably mad about something. But what intrigued me were her feet, the tops of which were tattooed.
I have seen a lot of tattoos in a lot of places, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the tops of someone’s feet tattooed. Even better, her toenails (those things like turtle shells that cover toes) were painted a bright pink, and it looked from where I was standing as if she might’ve had seven or eight toes per foot instead of the regular five. Still, I’m reasonably sure she was a mammal.
That got me to thinking maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based on a true story. It would explain a lot of things, including several political campaigns and half of Congress.
And then I started thinking about how hard it can be to put out newspapers anymore, given our lack of staff and resources and my natural tendency to forget what I’m doing and start doing something else. It isn’t like herding cats, exactly, and has instead become more similar I think to capturing a burst of particularly energetic kangaroos.
No sooner do you get one under control when another goes bouncing off into the scrub, or wherever it is kangaroos hop off into with smirks on their face.
Anyhow, if anyone knows where to find some locally sourced kangaroos let me know. I might get a truckload and turn them loose at The Ford’s servant entrance in the middle of the night.
Just imagine the calls the gamekeepers out there – do they have gamekeepers on the Ford, as the few Fordonians I know call it – would get from disgruntled residents in loafers.
“Hello,” says someone in a Thurston Howell III voice. “I’ve just arrived by Land Rover and private jet from my summer enclave home in Aspen and the squirrels here are not only unpleasingly large, but they’re also leaping about and behaving rather oddly. Please have them removed, old chap. We don’t go in for that sort of thing here.”