PERSONAL ENDURANCE, THE SECRET SUPER POWER

Personal endurance for Thanksgiving, 2022?

Give me more of that.

At least I’m not going to the store . . . yet.

And I haven’t had stuffing for breakfast . . . yet.

But I still have chopping to do, chopping with a cut finger, so I’m playing hurt. In fact it hurts to write anything that uses my right pinkie. Ouch.

How ever shall I endure this day? With thanks, that’s how. Enduring thanks.

And so will you if you’re doing it right:

My wife and I have lots in common, which can be an annoyance. At least to one of us.

We’re both interested in people, as in, ‘What’s Wrong With People?’

Her’s is a more practical question she’s asked throughout her medical career. She finds out what’s wrong and does something about it to help.

I, on the other hand, speculate on what’s wrong with people and write blog posts about my findings, which can also be helpful.

Most of the time I come up with a familiar conclusion: Maybe nothing’s wrong with people; it could be me?

And yet somehow I persist with personal endurance, the same thing we’ve all got if we look in the right place.

Personal Endurance Testing Starts Early

A young couple were worried about their new baby when it didn’t hit the same benchmarks as their friends’ kids.

Baby refused to crawl, so they took him in.

Doctor: I’ve done a battery of neurological tests. My diagnosis is that your baby is lazy. You’ve got a lazy baby who is fine going his speed.

I note this to encourage people to accept differences in others like I do, while criticizing everything and everyone.

The difference is not making a spectacle of every different thing.

This wasn’t a spectacle, but it had a chance:

I was pounding stakes into the ground four feet deep and contacted the locator service for gas and water lines.

I stood in my driveway talking to neighbors when the locator guy pulled up and parked across the street.

He was a black man.

Me: What are the chances he sees a gray haired white man in the suburbs as a red flag? Like I’m a racist republican.

Republican neighbors:

Locator: I’m here for this address.

Me: And I’m here to not chop a gas line.

Locator: Let’s get started.

Me: The gas meter is on the right side.

2

Baby Boomers, now the second largest demographic after the Millennial surge, have lived with the same problems as today, only longer.

Racism pushed by racist after racist, decade after decade, hasn’t changed.

Imagine George Wallace on social media in his prime hate years.

Better or worse than Alex Jones?

Okay Boomer has lived with the trauma of seeing a man die on television.

With Boomer years stretching from 1946 to 1964, the whole batch was caught in the spectacle.

I was in fourth grade, at the lunch table getting ready to run outside for recess.

We went home instead, sent by weeping teachers. Who even thought a teacher could cry?

Then we learned how.

Today we live with the concerns of having morons elected to federal office based on their ability to raise money looking like Fox News tramps.

Instead of pushing for funds to improve the lives of their constituents, they chase hot take cameras for special moments of sticking it to the libs to show at their next fundraising event .

Boomers tap their personal endurance to avoid turning into a good old boy who don’t quite understand why they cain’t spew the same stupid crap their daddy and granddaddy spewed around him.

And they want you to explain why. Don’t fall for it.

Even worse is the ugly Boomer who adds racism to their personality quirks without the family tradition of ignorance.

Don’t Make A Spectacle Of Yourself

Old people start feeling death creep up as they lose hope in the changes they cheered in their youth.

No one wants to live on a poisoned planet except Joe Manchin and the industrial magnates buying back stock with tax breaks instead of improving their environmental impact.

Reporter: I’d like to ask you about your pollution index.

IM: I don’t have one. Next?

R: You are a multinational polluter.

IM: Not true. Only in China. They have common sense pollution control.

R: They are the world’s worst polluter.

IM: Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette and we live in a hungry world.

Imagine this exchange filmed in a choking haze.

Pollution has become a controversial topic in China in recent months. In March, a hard-hitting documentary, Under the Dome, outlining the gravity of the country’s air pollution problem – which is estimated to cause the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of people each year – went viral online. The hour-long film, directed by journalist Chai Jing, has been compared to Al Gore’s 2006 film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and was viewed online more than 200 million times before being censored and removed.

Do helpful small things consistently. Do what your personal endurance will allow.

You don’t need to carry the world on your back, Atlas.

2

Start with a kind word to your husband or wife. I did:

W: Watch your drinking today.

Me: Honey, it’s five in the morning.

W: No slurring.

Me: I’ve got morning dry mouth.

W: I mean later.

Me: I’m drinking later, just like the other day when you said you’d drive and changed your mind.

W: Why do you need to drink?

Me: Because it’s Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, Oregon football, the Cowboys, doing yard work, cooking, cleaning, in the shower, in the garage.

W: Do you even hear what you’re saying?

Me: Do you? You asked a question, I gave an answer. It’s called normal conversation, or as normal as I expect.

W: That was some answer.

Me: Yes is was. Since you brought it up I wanted you to know I had my limits.

W: You do?

Me: I don’t drink with my girlfriends, your girlfriends, anyone’s girlfriends, with the fellas struggling to live up to their low expectations, with the dregs of society, the backwash of civilization, the cons, the slicks, the momma’s boys, or swinging dicks.

W: You sound like a rapper.

Me: So we’ll take it easy today. Cup of coffee?

W: Yes, thank you.

Me: You’ve never heard me slur outside the house.

W: But you have here more than once.

Me: You’re welcome.

W: What?

Me: Coffee?

W: Okay.