Tag Archives: throne

Aggravate

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAggravate: (v) 1. to make a problem injury, offense or situation worse 2. to annoy or exasperate

It takes two sticks rubbed together to create a fire.

At least, that’s what I hear. Having never actually used that method to generate the friction, I’m not certain it’s true, but I have no reason to question it.

I do get aggravated. When I calm myself down and think about what caused my aggravation, I realize it’s always one stick that I brought and another stick brought by somebody else.

The main stick I bring to create aggravation is always insecurity. It would be difficult for me to notice when I was being mistreated unless there’s a part of me that’s looking for it.

The people who aggravate me are individuals who bring their own insecurity my direction, and I begin to rub my stick of inferiority against them, resulting in fiery disagreement.

Why am I insecure? Here are three reasons:

1. I need too much. I have plenty, but rather than reveling in my abundance, I look over the shoulder of my benefactor to see if there’s more coming. What an idiot.

2. Part of me is not happy unless others have less. It hurts me to even write these words down–but there is a childish little boy inside me, who sometimes hopes that I end up with one more than my friends.

3. I believe in a God I don’t always trust. My prayers of politeness are not stimulated from my soul of belief. I am not always convinced that my “Father which art in Heaven” is willing to get off His throne and come to my house.

You put these three together and you have a stick up your rear that’s ready to be rubbed against somebody else’s inconsistency to create aggravation. And aggravation is the siphon that sucks all the fuel and potential out of human talent.

How can I stop feeling insecure? There is an old hymn which affords us an answer:

“Count your blessings                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Name them one by one…”

Every time I do this, I am nearly embarrassed by the bounty provided for me–by God, life, my friends and my own abilities. It chases away my insecurity.

At that point, it is very difficult for me to become aggravated because I have no stick to rub.

May I remind myself of this today … and begin the count.

Abdicate

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter AAbdicate: v. renounce one’s throne. 

I decided not to look up the actual names, because if I start being too accurate in my daily writings, I might get mistaken for an educational source or a fountain of knowledge. But memory serves me that some prince in England a long time ago fell in love with a commoner and because he wasn’t allowed to marry her because she . . . I don’t know . . . maybe was common? . . . they made him give up his throne for love.

It’s so silly. First of all, there’s nothing common about love. It’s a rarity–difficult to trap in a bottle and certainly should not be ignored to pursue some “crowning achievement.” And the question I have is this: what kind of dude would he have been if he had passed over the chick to wear the golden hat? I mean, I’m not trying to take away his props, but when you flip things and look at them from the other direction, some of the noble things we say we do are really just you and I, every once in a while, actually being smart and demanding they build a memorial on the site in honor of the special occasion.

So what’s he gonna do? Walk up to his babe and say, “Listen, dear. I just found out how common you are. I had no idea. Perhaps it would have been good of YOU to let me know the lacking you have in rarities. So here’s the scoop. Mum says I can’t have you and still eat caviar with the kings of the earth. You surely understand. We’ve had some good times, and in the future, as I boff my ugly queen of choice, I will remember your face.”

You see what I mean? We often think that we abdicate things we never actually had in the first place or weren’t that big of a deal compared to what we did pursue, which brought both some immediate pleasure and lasting satisfaction.

Just remember–there are two things that are ugly when touted by human beings: being pious and being stupid.

And generally speaking, they arrive in the same car.