Bessie-isms:
*Companionship is important and valuable. Even when you are mad at at each other, it is comforting at a deep level to know they are still near.
*Everyone has their own dreams. A marriage between people with no common dreams is doomed.
Quotable:
Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
Charles Kettering
Suicide Is Failure
The people who decide to end it all have come, in one fashion or another, to face a hard, cold, verticle expanse of stone that is a side of the mountain of life. They stand there, daunted by the imensity of what they face, and give up in despair. They don’t realize that if the turned aside, mover left or right, and went a distance either way, they’d find a pass, or stairs to climb, to get past the thing blocking their way.
All problems can be overcome, all mountains climbed or bypassed. Life is filled with many mountains, many seemingly impassable obstacles that challenge us. If you can’t find the strength or will to climb them alone, you’d be wise to find someone to help you, or at least to act as a guide. Yet so many feel unworthy of help, or too ashamed to ask for it.
You owe it people to always be looking for the soul who seems trapped, who’s too afraid to turn aside or to ask for help. Common decency demands that you do. If nothing else, selfinterest suggests that you yourself are destined to be stuck eventually. You’ll feel even more like a dunce, if you’re also suddenly guilty of not helping others when you had the chance!
Jack
Bessie-isms:
*Debt will ruin relationships between family and friends. It is much harder to love someone who owes you money, especially when they fall behind on the payments!
*The person who does nothing will only do one thing wrong; nothing.
Quotable:
I must be getting absent minded. Whenever I complain that things aren’t what they used to be, I always forget to include myself.
George Burns
Don’t Count The Markers
Do you remember how excited you once were when your birthday got close? You couldn’t wait for it to come, not just to get stuff and to have cake and ice cream either! You were excited to be a year older, a year closer to being an adult. You couldn’t wait to be grown up. Doesn’t seem quite so exciting now, does it?
Honestly, that excited feeling of anticipation got replaced by a subdued reluctance. Oh thank God, I made it another year! becomes your silent thought. You eventually came to realize that those birthdays are signposts on life’s highway, and as they pass, they seem to be moving faster and faster. Worse, you have no idea which one will be the last you see!
Oh yes, one of them eventually will be the final one. You don’t have to like it, and most people don’t. But here’s a hint; don’t sit watching them zip by. Get up and get busy, doing, loving, living and helping all the good people you can. If you do, you’ll be too busy to be watching the sign pots zoom by, or worrying about what’s left. It’s foolish to waste your time in worry, wringing your hands. Busy people never see the end coming, and that’s not a bad thing. Is it?
Jack
Bessie-isms:
*My children have given me the deepest loves, the most painful wounds, the greatest joys. I am a better person for having them, even though I am grayer and more tired than I would have been without them.
*Your first car is always remembered more kindly than it deserves, much like your first human love; your lust, your passion for it makes you overlook its flaws and failings.
Quotable:
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.
Theodore Roosevelt.
You Get More MIracles Than You Probably Deserve.
You get disappointed when you pray for Divine aid, for a miracle, and you don’t get squat, don’t you? It seems like God is pretty chintzy about miracles , yes? Oh, you have absolutely no chance of seeing one if you’re trying to violate the laws of His universe, or if you’re trying to negate your own laziness.
You aren’t getting one when you’re trying to avoid the hard work necessary to actually learn something either, nor to avoid the consequences of your own stupidity or poor choices! God isn’t letting you slide by as a shifty weasel. He isn’t screwing over someone else to do you a favor either!
Now in spite of this, you are accorded a lot of miracles on an almost daily basis. That creaky biological machine that you abuse and neglect wakes up each day, giving you a fresh chanc e to learn something, and not be a complete loser! He also doesn’t just strike you dead on the spot, for being the horrid turd you normally are either! That’s not just miraculous, that frankly amazing!
Face it, if you were God, you’d fry your butt in a second! If nothing else, you benefit from a truely miraculous amount of patience from God. Instead of constanty praying, (which mostly looks like begging, not prayer), for a miracle, you’d look a lot wiser to be asking for some motivation and guidence, to make better decisions and choices. If’d you’d go down that path, you’d be in need of a lot fewer miracles! Just a suggestion.
Jack
Bessie-isms:
*No one desires or admires learning as much as one who’s come to ruin for lack of it.
*The coy or inviting look of a young woman can stop the forward march of progress, if it happens at the right moment.
Quotable:
It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so!
Mark Twain
Why Dad Being Absent Matters To Girls
I am constantly amazed when I’m on Facebook, at the number of young women who are just begging for compliments. They post a zillion photos a day, some quite sexy and revealing, and make disparaging remarkes about their appearance, to get others, men mostly, to compliment them. It’s cute in a pathetic way.
One of the common denominators with many of them is the absent father. Either dad ODed, is in jail or ran off with some hooker, and moved across the country. This makes the young ladies in effect orphans, at least as far as getting any love and input from dad. You think that doesn’t matter? You are a dunce! As the father of six girls, I battled the “I’m ugly, I’m fat, I’m not as hot as everyone else” crap constantly, and mine had both parents living together with them!
Girls get their first affirmation of beauty and attractiveness from father, and if he’s not there, they go looking elsewhere. This explains the huge number of teen girls who get pregnant, when living with a single mom. Mom is usually too busy trying to find a new man to give the daughter one hundred percent attention. Even if she is, it isn’t the same as what dad hands a girl. When a dad tells a girl she’s pretty, cute, sexy, has a nice figure or smile, it has more credibility.
Girls know mom will fudge, not wanting to be too honest. Dad is a guy, and if he thinks a girl’s butt is cute, she’ll believe him a lot more than what mom says. It’s a sad fact that one generation’s failure impacts the next negatively, but with girls, it does! Guys suffer too, if dad is gone, but at least they can’t get pregnant! Girls give in to whoever promises to love them and will say nice things about their body. It isn’t that girls are shallow, it’s that they’re desperate to hear something nice and supportive. Too bad it isn’t from dad.
Jack
Bessie-isms:
* Flirting is a way for a woman to consider if she’d like a man to pursue her or not.
*It is amazing how much “antique” furniture is donated to charity in this country. Much of it ends up in the trash. Are we a nation filled with poor quality antiques, or a nation filled with sleazy people, with poor quality morals and much dishonesty?
Quotable:
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
How Did This Happen?!
I always enjoy walking around in public, where I can observe the odd and perplexing people that make up the human race. You’ve noted this too; lots of funny looking, funny acting folks out there! I have the worst urge to just ask some of them questions, but since I have a high deductable on my healt insurance, that’s not wise. Still, it’s there. How did these people end up like they are?
Now no one’s born a three or four hundred pound blob of misery any more than they’re born an illiterate idiot. I’d assume these people have to work at getting themselves into such a deplorable condition. Same with rudeness, foul language and a complete misreading of the social mores. You can only blame family and upbringing for so much!
Did these people actually choose to be such obnoxious divots? How? All at once or in tiny little steps. I’ve met some real losers in my time, but I don’t think any of them just woke up one day, with a new found determination to hit the road to hell, and at light speed to boot! If someone did this to them as children, that person needs to be beaten soundly!
I know, most would argue that it doesn’t matter how people end up like this; the question is, can anything be done to improve them? I don’t think you can separate the two. I’d bet money that an understanding of what went wrong would be germaine for fixing the current mess. At least it might engender some sympathy, or a good laugh, if all else fails. That sounds mean, doesn’t it? Sorry.
Jack