Cake or Tortillas

 

 

 

I am not a personable person. I’m ugly, rude, and politically incorrect. But, as the Joe Walsh song says, “I can play that rock and roll.” Learning the chords to that song can take a lifetime, and there’s no guarantee of a hit.

 

My grandchildren are not a blessing. Not a day, or hour goes by that they don’t remind me that I’m an old man and all the problems in the family or for that matter, the world would just go away if I simply didn’t make it through the night. 

 

I know you’re waiting for me to wring out my crying towel now. Well, reality check! I grew up so poor I thought the people on welfare had government jobs because they got a check every month. At three years old God decided to kill me so I got polio, encephalitis and a touch of malaria. I didn’t die so my legs got mashed off in a car crash and I still lived so I caught religion. 

 

I graduated from Killeen High school in ‘69, which is as ignorant as you can be and they still let you drive a car by yourself. Texas was a hard pull in ‘69. The wind didn’t blow, it sucked. I figure that about 25% of my childhood friends are in the boneyard. The ones they found, that is. They never did find Dennis and I think Junior’s in an unmarked grave. 

 

Up front I’ve been married three times, Christian and legal and three under the table or contract with two divorces in there somewhere. You really smart people do the math there. I think the state of Texas allows you seven so I have one tag left on my Dear License. My therapist told me I have a problem with long term relationships. I’m great for about two minutes but everything falls apart shortly after that. Come to think of it that might be the problem right there. 

 

When you have such a life you become a drunk or a writer. Suicide is always an option but I’ve never been self destructive like that. I tried the drunk thing but gave up after about thirty years or so. Right before the hallucinations set in. My daughter in law reminds me that I’m not a “real” writer, but I can spell, mostly and that bitch can’t spell her own name. But here’s the rub. If you don’t drink yourself to death or blow what’s left of your brains out, and you can spell, you will eventually will find something to write about! All I know about writing I learned by the fourth grade! I Crappith Thee NOT! While watching films at Queensboro Elementary someone told me that songs were just poems with rhyming words on the end. At that I didn’t plan to be a writer, I WAS a writer, and I began to study rhymes and word associations which I continue until this day. I’m doing it right now in this article. What words mean is what I make them mean by the way I use them. 

 

Communication is the art of composition. If your reader cannot connect your written words with their inner thoughts, you have failed as a writer. And it doesn’t matter if you have a degree and use ten-dollar words or dropped out of school and spell cat “Kat!” Ron White said it best. He said he had a GED and if you knew what that was you probably have one too. Well, I actually have a high school diploma. I don’t know how. I darkened the door of college, and then sold my books and took off to Shreveport. 

 

Usually, when you read something like this on FakeBook, or any of the many clandestine dating sites on the web it ends one of two ways. A list of reasons life sucks or they find Jesus. Well, life sucks. Deal with it. And if you’d have found Jesus when your grandmother told you to it wouldn’t have sucked as bad. At any rate, here we are. Now, pull that pistol out of your mouth and listen. 

 

You are given life as a tutorial. If life were perfect, you would have never left the nursery. But life is like a country road. There are turns and intersections all along the way. Ever how you drive dictates the trip. But good or bad you must drive that car. And depending upon how much you learn leads you to the next intersection. It will never get any easier. There are potholes in the road and in the end you die. 

 

We all die. It’s how you live that counts. Psychologists invent new conditions every day. ADD, HDD, all the DDD’s with a touch of psychopathy here and there. We all have them. I had three MRI’s, and they never did find a brain! I’m blind in my right eye, deaf in my left ear and I’ve never taken an IQ test because I’m scared that I might be an idiot!

 

So why do we work so hard on this monopoly game called life? Because for all the DSM’s, MRI’s, COVID vaccines and twenty-dollar words there has never been a way to measure the human spirit. What made Joan de Arc lead that army? How did Steven Hawking keep astounding us with his head twisted that way. How in God’s name did Tiny Tim sell all those records? The human spirit! That little piece of God within all of us. That little flash of light when the sperm met the egg. 

 

I couldn’t change my life, so I wrote about it. God gave me the gift of language which, with my Texas accent, proves that God does have a sense of humor. Life’s experiences are ingredients, but you have the recipe. Depending upon how you mix those ingredients dictates if you get a cake or a tortilla. Not that tortillas are a bad thing, but cakes are better. But that having been said what ever you cook you must eat. If you don’t eat that tortilla today, it will taste better tomorrow. But at any rate you WILL eat it . . . or not. Bon appetit!