A man told me once that you could get by well in life if you would talk 20 percent of the time and listen 80 percent of the time. Those who know me can attest to the fact that I am the poster-child violator of this advice.

What makes it worse is that I’ve been real lucky with friends throughout most of my life. I now pal around with some of the brightest, most well-educated, and competent people you might ever want to know, recognized experts in their fields. There even some PhDs in there, believe it or not.

So, what do I do when we have lunch, or share a libation? I run my damn yap. Can’t help it.

When I visit with my friend who’s a high-ranking Army officer, you’d think I wrote a bunch of field manuals or something.

When I’m with my contractor friend, I can build anything.

To a professor who teaches public administration, well, hell, I’m Max Weber’s third cousin.

I have my journalism friend convinced, or at least he’s polite enough to spare me rebukes, that I’m the best thing since H.L. Mencken passed. (Partially in my defense, at least I don’t say, “It’s a secret between you and I,” and I haven’t used the word “awesome” in a sentence since Barbara Jane Stubblefield quit wearing those bullet bras back in high school).

I even tried “experting” with my wife. That didn’t work out too well, so I quit.

With all that having been said and done, in the world of BS artistry, there’s only one person on earth who can hold a candle to these folks who offer advice on social media. It seems like, these days, that the basic threshold that must be passed to join the wonderful world of punditry and prediction is to know absolutely nothing about a topic other than how to find a nutcase website that can provide catchy sound-bites.

Simplify? Lord, but these folks can simplify. A nuclear war with a country full of psychopaths? No big deal. We’ll just bomb them in their strategic places.

A two-front war? As the Facebook pundit would say, “We pulled it off in World War Eleven, didn’t we?”

Financial solvency through spending more on less? As the Enron boys used to say, “The only reason it’s never worked is because we weren’t the ones doing it.”

Obviously, I’m an expert on such things and I could go on and on. Must go, though. Gonna contact my good friend for a lunch date, the one who can play a guitar like ringing a bell. Must be prepared to lecture him about Eddie Lang’s influence on Les Paul. It might enlighten him and me.

Just thinkin'