I would rather be writing about impact fees and Bryan County Commissioner Noah Covington’s luxuriantly commemorative Make North Bryan Great Again beard, since both should be hot button issues right about now.

After all, what are the impact fees going to be? Will they be assessed on new subdivisions moving forward or on those as yet unbuilt, but already in the planning stages.

But never mind this for now. That’s because the bumper stickers I just saw on a car in the Bryan County News parking lot have put me in a reflective sort of mood.

Somber, almost.

One bumper sticker said "Don’t Believe The Liberal Media."

Another: "Annoy a liberal: Believe in God."

As my co-worker Pat Watkins said, maybe the vehicle’s owner was bitten by a liberal reporter as a young child.

Pat, of course, is smart enough to apply psychology to things. I am not.

I also have long since stopped wearing my political opinions on my vehicles, or decals or stickers of any stripe.

In fact, as I make the push through yet another year on this planet, I wonder what to make of things that once seemed worth bumper-sticker-philosphizing about.

Other than family and friends, and cold beer, pretty women and the South Carolina Gamecocks, I admit I am no closer to knowing what is good and what makes the world tick.

Is it greed or is it God, no matter what language you say his name in? Is it something else? When I was younger, I thought it pretty cut and dried that there was good and bad, and you had to stand for something or you’d fall for anything (to steal an old cliche).

I thought I knew things I really had no clue about. But the years tend to take the shine off that notion, or at least they have for me. I’m now bending toward Socratic ignorance, i.e., "I know only one thing, that I know nothing."

These days, I often feel I’m the dumbest person in the room.

I’m not alone in that opinion, by the way, which is somehow reassuring. I am, as they say, every bit as dumb as I look.

Note: now that you mention it, maybe the liberal reporter who bit the guy who grew up to put bumper stickers on his car was Wolf Blitzer.

That would explain how Wolf got his name. He was a biter and turned someone into a birther. Then that person moved to Richmond Hill and parked in front of the BCN office.

Another note: Or maybe not. When I was a kid in grade school up in Columbia, S.C., while my dad was in Vietnam, I had a friend named Wolfgang.

I thought it the coolest name on the planet and often wondered why I wasn’t named Wolfgang.

Wolfgang Whitten. It has a certain panache to it. I’d either be famous or in jail. Or a general or movie director.

But back to the point. While I do not remember this particular Wolfgang’s last name, if I find out it was Blitzer I am going to look him up and ask him if he remembers the time we nearly got killed by an insane kindergartner off his meds.

What I am about to tell you is why kids should not be left unsupervised on summer vacation.

It is also an allegory (I think) about starting fights and then having them go vastly different than you think they will.

Kinda like what happens when you invade Iraq and Afghanistan, probably. One minute, you’re out there saving the world for democracy and Exxon, the next thing you know you’re full of holes.

Anyway, it happened when Bobby Sountris and I were wandering through our subdivision back in the early 1970s looking for something to do and we spotted this kid named Billy something-or-the-other.

We started teasing him largely because we figured he deserved it. In retrospect, he didn’t, but at the time he looked, and I’m being blunt here, sort of like somebody combined Gary Busey and Gov. Nathan Deal into one person, then stuck him in shorts and gave him both a crewcut and runny nose.

And Billy, a kindergartner, was probably only 5, this rather shapeless blob of a boy who was sitting on the curb looking at ants.

Anyway, Bobby said something and I said something and Billy turned this alarming shade of red. The next thing we know, he’s pulling up these bricks from some flower bed and flinging them at us.

It occurs to me now I may’ve told this story before, but I am out of time to write this week’s column so you’re stuck with the ending, or a variation on that theme.

Billy, who had a big leaguer’s arm, is tearing chunks of sod out of his yard (I think he also ripped one of those flags off a mailbox and somebody’s bike horn off their bike) while screaming "die die die" at us.

We’re running for our lives, and then Billy’s older sister — she was in middle school maybe and had freckles the size of cornflakes — comes out and starts in, too.

By then we’re halfway down the street with every kid in the neighborhood out watching while Billy’s sister screams at us "You’re in trouble! You’re in trouble! Billy didn’t have his medicine today and you’re in trouble! I’m telling mom when she gets home!"

Wolfgang wasn’t there, but we told him about it and then he told somebody else about it, which is kind of what reporters do.

I don’t know where I was going with this, but time’s running out.

So maybe I’ll go find me a "I love the liberal media" sticker and put it on Pat’s pickup.