Tag Archives: poison

Decorum

Decorum: (adj) dignified propriety of behavior, speech, dress, etc.

Underlings always consider rules to be unnecessary.

Those in middle management view rules as a way to lord it over the underlings.

And the actual managers of any endeavor consider rules the best way to avoid chaos.

Yet the question should be asked, how much decorum is necessary to keep us from falling into a great pit of meaningless activity?

How many restrictions are required to restrict us enough so that we don’t do stupid things?

How much freedom can be allotted to a person who spends all of his time doing nothing but screaming for freedom?

What does a human being need and what causes a human being to become needy?

I think it all revolves around the word invested.

If I have nothing invested in a project or a blessing waiting for me in the outcome, it will be difficult to convince me to maintain decorum or hit the marks just right in order to top dogs.

One of the worst things we can do for human beings is tell them that their part is not that important, and the result has nothing to do with their contribution.

It seems comical to me that the people who make the least amount of money actually touch our lives the most.

  • People who make fast food
  • Grocery store clerks
  • Those who handle produce
  • Mechanics
  • And even individuals who are in charge of driving here and there and are given “Uber” responsibility with minimal reward.

It would be intelligent to pay those who could poison us with more coins, and even more appreciation.

But instead, we ask for decorum without offering much incentive.

If you come and join me in a project, I will make sure you’re invested.

I will let you know how intricate you are to the workings, and it will be true instead of just a bunch of hype.

Because if I don’t need people to work, I don’t hire them. And if I do need them to work, I treasure them.

Don’t ask a human being to toe a line and maintain decorum unless at the end of that toe-job, there is an obvious prize.

 

Daddy-longlegs

Daddy-longlegs: (n) Also called harvestman, a spiderlike arachnid with a rounded body and extremely long, slender legs.

I had nearly decided not to do any research whatsoever.

I so enjoyed the old tale about the Daddy-longlegs spider.

If you’re not familiar with it, let me enlighten you.

The Daddy-longlegs is actually one of the most poisonous spiders in the world.

But because it has such a tiny body to accompany its long-leggedness, its fangs are too small to bite human skin.

Now, isn’t that fascinating?

That doesn’t take away from how scary it looks.

But if Daddio ended up being as poisonous as he is ugly, well let’s just say, our lives would be fraught with terror.

Yes, and it also makes for a great object lesson:

If it ends up that you have a little head filled with poison and you have too many legs to walk around and hurt people, just pray that God has given you a mouth that’s not able to spread your venom.

 

Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis: (n) A confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 over the presence of missile sites in Cuba;

I was two months from my eleventh birthday when I was informed that the world was about to blow up. I didn’t know much about what was happening on the planet.

My life was simple.

I was climbing in the bathtub every night, looking down at my pubic area for any signs of hair, since a rumor had spread that one of the guys in our class had some.

This was the most important thing to me.

But all of a sudden, my attention was temporarily nabbed by the news that those bad people over there on the other side of the world were trying to kill us good people over here—by blowing us up with bombs which seemed to be a lot more explosive than I could even imagine.

I was very angry.

Matter of fact, over dinner I expressed my rage by explaining that it was completely unfair for a bunch of old people to destroy my life just because they couldn’t get along with each other

The problem was that there were now missiles in Cuba.

I didn’t know anything about Cuba. When I heard the word “Cuba” the first thing that popped into my mind were cube steaks, which were some hybrid of hamburger and sirloin. So the way I remembered the word was to think of “Cuba Steaks.”

Therefore, people in “Cuba Steaks” were planning to fire bombs at us that turned our bodies into dust through fire.

I was not going to get to live long enough to kiss a girl or do any more hair-raising.

That’s what it meant to me.

And honestly, as I think back on it, having studied it, heard renditions of the story and considered the insanity of the times, my ten, nearly eleven-year-old objections seem quite suitable.

It would be wonderful to tell you that the Cuban Missile Crisis is a thing of the past. But now we have a whole new generation of leaders who apparently cannot remember what it was like to be terrified, living in a world of “duck and cover.”

Now they are trying to reintroduce these weapons into everyday thought.

If I had a poison in my cupboard and I knew it would kill someone if they drank it, the only sane solution would be to remove the poison from my cupboard, not expect everybody to remember that it’s lethal.

Perhaps we should all pray that logic will win the day and we will grow so weary of thinking about being destroyed that we’ll finally put the poison away for good—those weapons that snuff out all life.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

 

Credibility

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Credibility: (n) the quality of being believable or worthy of trust

I suppose the most logical suggestion for gaining credibility is just refusing to lie.

Seems sensible. Here’s the problem:

You can’t get anyone to believe that you’re not lying.

And the more you insist you’re telling the truth or emotionally distraught you become, the more you look like an even worse liar.

Credibility is achieved by allowing the ideas you’ve fostered to prove themselves.

To have this happen, you must be willing to silently let time pass. That way, when it ends up that the things you spoke were accurate, faithful and honest, the human race around you can slow up long enough to respond, “Hey—you were right.”

If you don’t gloat over your veracity, they will gradually—and I say, very gradually—begin to assume that you are some strange alien who has come to Earth to expose the poison of “fibbing.”

But gaining credibility is never something that can be claimed, insisted upon, lobbied for or voted into office. When people realize that your “yes” actually means yes, and your “no” holds firm at no, then maybe—yes, maybe—they will start giving you points for credibility.

 

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Crackhead

Crackhead: (n) a habitual user of cocaine in the form of crack.

Let me start off by saying that what I’m about to write on is not like I’ve invented the wheel. It has been a topic of conversation for some time.

But I do feel it is my duty to roll that wheel along.funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

We are a society that despises outward evidence of bigotry while encouraging—and even in many cases, promoting—internal methods. We mainly propagate these misrepresentations through our art.

The Law & Order series on television will happily and continually distinguish between its affluent and impoverished characters by assessing wealth and position to the use of cocaine, and denigration and crime to the crackhead. But as the definition has already told you, both substances are derivations of the same poison.

But cocaine is a “phase” that rich people go through, while crack is evidence of urban blight and proof that the inner city is perniciously flawed—and therefore continually dangerous.

It is a racism that continues because we feel that if we don’t have some release for our fears of color and culture, we might just go back to wanting to lynch again. So we become party to socially acceptable principles that have no basis in anything but bigotry.

If you take crack, it affects your head. That’s why we insist you’re a “crackhead.” But there is no such thing as a “cocaine head,” or a cocaine user who is going to break into your house and steal your television to support his or her habit.

Bizarre.

You fight racism by noticing the little places it crops up, and confronting them as simply as possible. If you wait until racism is actually in your presence, it’s too late.

I remember when I was renting my first apartment and I discovered cockroaches, I hired an exterminator, and when some of the cockroaches were still hanging around two weeks later, I angrily called and asked him to come back and “do his extermination right.”

After spraying one more time, he patiently turned to me and said, “I am more than happy to spray your place, but I must ask you to do something on your part.”

He walked over and pointed out dirt on the counter and food that was laying out. He looked me in the eyes and said, “If you want the cockroaches to go, you’ve got to stop feeding them.”

I will tell you—likewise, if you want the cockroaches of racism to go, you’ve got to stop feeding them with your quick smirk, your nervous titter or your frightened silence.

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Control

Control: (v) to dominate by giving direction

 It certainly doesn’t make me a genius, nor particularly insightful, to tell you that the greatest problem on Planet Earth is lying.

Once it begins, there is literally no possibility of anywhere to place trust.

You have to question everything. It is not only annoying, but impractical, because time does not allow us to cross-examine everyone we should be able to funny wisdom on words that begin with a Cbelieve.

Yet, rather than attacking lying, I would much rather point out where lying slips into our lives and trickles off our tongues. Basically, it occurs when we try to establish that we are in control—but circumstances contradict our assertion.

Once it becomes obvious that we are not in control, but instead, constantly need to evolve toward better choices, we can stop lying.

We can simply say, “Oops! I missed that one.”

But if we’re afraid we’ll lose status, value, importance or power by not touting our control, then we quickly draw out our lies and spill them, like poison.

It’s not really human.

This is why any reasonable philosophy requires the participants to be prepared to repent and change—or they will end up perishing in a lifestyle of deception.

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Break

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Break: (v) to separate into pieces

“He’s waiting for his big break.”

I’ve heard those words stated over and over again in my presence as I have stood idly by, knowing how errant they are, but remaining silent so as not to rock the boat.Dictionary B

There is actually no such thing as a “big break.” What you have are little victories and tragedies that come into your life, which break you up, segregating true ability from ego.

If every person in America were immediately cast into the role of what they thought they were worthy of doing, we would have nuclear war before the end of the day. Our perceptions are twisted by greed and arrogance.

Most of us have no idea of what we’re capable of performing in the cauldron of difficulty–because that’s where talent thrives or dies. No one gets to use their capacity in a vacuum. It’s always under pressure, criticism, lack or even fear.

So to a certain degree, it is Mother Nature’s job to break us. That is the true definition of our “big break”–when we are finally cracked open and the poison is spilled out, so we can rummage through … to find any gold that remains.

 

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Big Bang

Big Bang: (n) the supposed origin of the Universe.

“Choose your poison.”Dictionary B

I know that sounds like a cynical statement, but the truth of the matter is, if you were going to die by consuming a substance, it might be nice to be able to pick the one that was the least painful.

That’s what I feel about those who believe in Creationism, and others who assert the Big Bang theory.

Both story lines seem comically intricate and equally unlikely.

First, the faith it takes to believe in a supernatural Creator of the Universe is beyond the capacity of any living human soul. We are all perpetually in doubt that God actually exists, let alone holds a viable position.

On the other hand, the notion that some convergence of energy created an explosion which splattered matter across the darkened sky, to begin a festeringly long incubation towards life, which culminates with a kidney in a human body which knows how to regulate poisons out while maintaining blood pressure, is equally wild and wacky.

So for me it becomes a case of whether it’s all of one, a combination of both, or even the aggravating “neither.”

I do gyrate toward a belief in God simply because I am hopeful of seeing humanity grow sensitive to itself and one another, in order to prolong our stay on Earth instead of hastening our departure to unknown shorelines.

Yet I will never reject the discoveries of science, which help me to understand how our Universe came to be.

So when asked if I believe in evolution, my response is, “Evolution seems to believe in me. Thank God.”

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Besmirch

Besmirch: (v) to damage the reputation of someone or something in the opinion of others.

Dictionary B

I don’t often take the liberty of addressing contemporary issues in these essays, but I am greatly troubled by the way our society is handling a particular human being.

Yes, I may be the singular person in America who feels sorry for Donald Trump. He possibly is the only truly innocent person in this whole cavalcade of ridiculous parading around, while turning our Democratic system into a clown act gigging at a whore house.

After all, Donald Trump has always made it clear who he is.

One can watch three episodes of The Apprentice and understand the man. He has two personas: an entertainer who acts as a salesman, or a salesman who greatly enjoys entertaining. Therefore he has dual goals:

  1.  To garner emotion from you
  2. To get you to buy something.

Unfortunately, he has tapped a bitter well in the American culture which spews poison. Once he realized there was a great flow from this poisonous digging, he pursued it–being the salesman that he is. The fact that we are unable to cap it is our problem, not his.

Of all the candidates running for President, Donald Trump is the most transparent.

The problem lies in our own secret rooms, where we still maintain a vigil of prejudice, but try to act embarrassed because this New York billionaire thespian acts it out for us.

So be careful when besmirching the reputation of this awkward soul.

He is what he is, and by the way … that’s all that he is.

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Beet

Beet: (n) an edible root that is typically dark red, spherical and eaten as a vegetable.Dictionary B

We have a tendency to prefer things above ground to things that are in the ground.

In other words, we like apples better than beets. Apples grow on trees from pretty stems and beets dwell in the dirt.

It’s just the way we are.

Sometimes I feel that analyzing human behavior is an exercise in futility which can only make you feel desperate or self-righteous. So here’s what I’ve learned to do:

Since beets have a texture which is halfway between a potato and a pear, and they are as sweet to the taste as any plum, I just served them to my kids.

They were naturally frightened at first.

Matter of fact, they looked askance in my direction, as if I was attempting to poison them or make them outcasts from the general population of “kiddom.” After all, how would they ever be able to admit to their friends that they had consumed a beet?

I did explain to them that beets are used to make sugar, so that means they come from a sweet place. And I made sure to place the beets next to a hot dog dish of their favoring.

So to some degree, I think my children learned to enjoy beets, or at least tolerate them when they found themselves dining in my proximity.

For after all, you have to admire a food which has to dig its way out of the ground to land on a dinner plate. Many such organisms having humble beginnings just decide to die in their earthen homes.

Not the beet.

It is prepared to be consumed and relished by anyone who is willing to consider something … a little “off-beet.”

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