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.
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| Just thinkin' |
