Tag Archives: department store

Curmudgeon

Cumudgeon: (n) a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person.

 

Throwing water on the fire of someone’s excitement.

Refusing to discuss an important issue because you find it inappropriate to the surroundings.

Asking people to take off their hat when they visit your church.

Frowning at a young mother in a store because her children are misbehaving.

Failing to respond to “have a nice day.”

Criticizing young people because you do not understand their culture.

Making fun of technology because, somehow or another, you think you were smarter with pencils, paper clips and glue.

Talking about your generation as being superior to another generation.

Refusing to let someone who has two items go ahead of you in the grocery checkout, when you have one thousand.

Acting confused about why young people are “so goddamn horny.”

Telling your mechanic that forty years ago, you got a fuel pump put in your car for eighteen dollars.

Asking the pastor of your church to turn down the PA system and not have guitars during the worship service.

Voting for a candidate you know will keep everything the same because change angers you.

Choosing to go down a different aisle at the department store because people of color are there, and you don’t know how to talk to them.

Yelling at kids because they don’t pick up their toys.

Yelling at the toys that you step on, wishing you could hit the kids.

Claiming that special occasions are not necessary for you because you don’t like all the fuss.

Watching a movie and insisting on talking about another one which you saw thirty years ago.

Sticking your nose up at a new food choice because you think it looks funny or the name sounds foreign.

Seeing old people and assuming they are mean.

There are many ways to be a curmudgeon.

Unfortunately, the list is growing.

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Cost

Cost: (n) the price paid to acquire, produce, accomplish, or maintain anything:

Every once in a while, when I get in a high-minded way, I start considering what I might share with God if He asked me where I thought there funny wisdom on words that begin with a C
could be improvements in the entire universal scheme.

Of course, when I get right down to specifics instead of just general bitching and put a piece of paper in front of me, I actually have very little to suggest—especially anything that would be tinted with consequence.

Yet I do think it might be beneficial if the entire Earth were similar to a department store. In other words, all the opportunities, temptations, doors, windows, possibilities and passing surprises would arrive before our eyes, with a price tag attached.

After all, that’s the nice thing about a department store. If you eyeball something you like, you can immediately forego an impetuous buy through gazing at the price tag and realizing that it’s just too much. Or, to your delight, you are overwhelmed to discover that it’s a bargain as you toss it into your cart and rush to the checkout counter.

Life doesn’t work that way. Life advertises, pushes, thrusts forward, teases, taunts—never forecasting or even giving a hint of what the price might be if you or I grabbed the item and made it our own.

In other words, if you’re obese and you went into a bakery and saw a twelve-inch apple cobbler, there could be a tag attached which would read, “Enjoy. It will cost you two weeks of living.”

That pack of cigarettes in the store that screams at the fifteen-year-old kid for attention because he saw someone smoking in a movie would have a little warning sign on the front of its logo, explaining, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em, but if you stay with ’em, you will die twenty years earlier than if you avoid ’em.”

Men and women who prance around looking for reasons to be unfaithful might be adorned with sandwich boards displaying words like, “Loser! Cranky! Really bitchy! Gonorrhea! Mentally unstable!” Or “Likes to hit women.”

No such cost is made available to us as we journey on, in a darkness of ignorance.

It is the reason that this simple author believes in the Spirit. Without that guidance from within, poking us in the ribs and telling us to either go forward or quickly step back, we are lions in the jungle without teeth.


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