LISTENING PRACTICE: START SOONER THAN LATER

Listening practice with Ernest Hemingway:

“We learn to talk by two, we learn to listen by sixty.”

That he was dead at sixty-one says something about his listening skills?

Nooooooo.

I like to listen. I do it all the time.

The next time you’re someplace you’d rather not be, tune into the sounds around you.

Like the time I went to the DMV for my Real ID:

 

DMV Clerk: I’m sorry, all of our cameras are down. We can’t help you at this time.

 

What I didn’t hear was, “All of our cameras state-wide are down.”

I learned that at the Lake Grove DMV after the Sherwood stop.

I would have heard it sooner, should have heard it, and maybe they first clerk said it.

But they didn’t.

In some instances workers think it funny to omit certain details to their customers.

I should have asked if every camera in every DMV across Oregon is on the blink, but why would I?

That never happens, does it?

Now you know. 

An important part of being a baby boomer blogger is avoiding the half-baked bullshit you read and register as ‘this is half-baked bullshit, but it’s just a blog’ response.

I take being an older blogger seriously enough to know excuses and ‘misspeaking’ don’t cut it.

If it looks like shit and smells like shit, then you’ve got two out of three major clues to what it is.

What is the third major clue? I’ll leave that up to you, but don’t chew your fingernails,

 

What’s The Problem, Pilgrim

When you’re around people who can’t keep quiet, that’s one thing.

But when they tell you to be quiet? That’s a whole other level of chit-chat.

We all know the Duke was an icon of manliness, a giant among men.

Movie men.

Some say he wore a wig.

Others say he wore lifts in his boots.

Since he was in the business, show business, movie business, it’s all good.

There’s a rule for actors, a certain wattage of movie star: People pay to see you playing a character, not disappearing into the character.

Maybe you’ve heard this: Politics is show business for ugly people.

But that’s changing, and you can see it happening with the crossbreeding of national figures with frozen botox faces trying to talk on television.

The TV people become members of a presidential administration and take time to look their best on TV, with sad results.

Dudes in bad makeup trying to be authorities in real life don’t quite make the grade; middle-aged ladies getting fixed up for their big break close-ups take away from the moment.

The bigger everyone thinks they are, the more pumped up they get with job titles and on-camera opportunities, the more they forget where they are.

We should all remember where we are.

 

 

It’s cold and quiet out there, as the astronaut Elton John reminds us:

 

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact, it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all the science, I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man
A rocket man

and I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
(Ooh) ’til touchdown brings me ’round again to find
(Ooh) I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no (ah)
I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burnin’ out his fuse up here alone

 

Whose A Quiet Rocket Man

PS: When to keep quiet?

 

PSS: When to speak up?