That's Not Us

So we're sitting in this downtown restaurant when we see a couple across the street, a skinny guy walking hand-in-hand with an obese woman.

"Hey, honey," I say to my wife. "Look over there. It's us!"

My wife gives me a look that I'm pretty used to. I try to backpedal.

"Oh, you're right, sweetie," I say. "That's so not us. Her hair's too long, and I don't have a beard."

Book Quote of the Day

"I'm aware, more and more, that the only thing I'm going to miss are my friends. Apart from the deluge of terror that attends the prospect of turning carcass, what bothers me is the idea of losing the handful of people I can have a decent conversation with. It takes you a lifetime to acquire them. Losing life isn't so bad, but losing them is."

- from The Thought Gang, by Tibor Fischer.

http://amzn.to/1SmjHuc

What I'm Reading: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

“There was a way of working—it was hard for him to put this into words, but he knew it when he saw it—a perfunctory way that met all the technical criteria for how a job was supposed to be done. It would be above reproach should any supervisor review the work, yet lacked some essential quality of passion, determination, velocity.

"Checklist work and real work were not the same to him. You could get praise and a paycheck and fill your day with busy, important-seeming activities and never solve a case.”

• from “Ghettoside: a true story of murder in America,” by Jill Leovy.

http://goo.gl/eFR96D

About My Age

I would have acted differently if I'd known I'd live this long. I wouldn't have been so foolish & impulsive if I'd realized that I would have to live so long with the consequences.

All I can do now is the best I can, given where I am & what I have.

Never Surprised

There are 3 phenomena that never surprise me:

• Stupidity
• Cruelty
• Weather

In a certain sense, they are, in fact, all the same thing.

SOAPBOX: Shopping on Thanksgiving

Forgive my little editorial, but I have to say that I chuckle when I hear so many people complain about the "Black Friday bleed" into Thanksgiving that has retailers opening on the holiday.


I operate a small business, and my business will NOT be open on Thanksgiving. But I'm not going to act self-righteous about it. Although Thanksgiving is perhaps my favorite holiday, the fact is, if there were a lucrative enough reason to open on Thanksgiving, I probably would. But the chance to take a day off & give my crew some time with their families currently outweighs any benefits I would get from being open for business this Thursday.






Money talks. And money is the reason that many retailers & restaurants are open on Thanksgiving. For every person complaining about how commercialized the holidays are getting, there are dozens of people driving to malls & opening their wallets for perceived bargains.




I would love it if everyone decided to NOT shop on Thanksgiving. I would love it if the entire world would take the day off and just engage in some community fellowship under the rubric of gratitude & sharing.


But it's not going to happen.


And it may actually be better that we live in a society where you have the choice to shop or not.


Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. However you choose to observe it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

It is the anniversary of one of the greatest speeches in American history.

It's short & eloquent, more a poem than a speech.

The entire text:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address