Pew! Pew!!

I've come to the conclusion, after an extended, vigorous session of future-tripping, that everything will go better for me if I can keep my head down and my mouth shut during my upcoming trip.  I suspect this is what I'm supposed to be doing all of the time.

"Seaweed," my sponsor used to whisper in my ear, seductively.  "Do me a favor and try not to talk today.  Whatever comes out of your mouth is just going to make it worse."

I've been told that army men used to practice for the fear and terror of actually being shot at by actually being shot at during basic training.  The exercise was to crawl across a field while machine gun bullets whistled over your head.  I guess the bullets were aimed well above the ground so that the exercise was being shot at and not being actually shot.  Keep your head down, keep crawling, keep moving forward.  If you get up you might be able to get across the field more quickly but you also might get plugged.  

Doesnt this sound like bullshit?  Maybe I saw it in a cartoon or as part of a hallucination in an LSD fugue state.  I can see Foghorn Leghorn losing tail feathers to an errant round more readily than I can see actual kids getting strafed.  Anyway, it's a great visual for me.  SuperK and I were discussing how I should handle a potential series of conversations with one of my relatives.  She kept making solid, reasonable suggestions that made a lot of sense, all of which I had tried at least 30 times in the past with the result being a round right in the middle of my forehead every single time.  I'm not smart but I'm old - I've tried everything more than once.  I have a bullet-riddle helmet to prove it.

I'm also not in the mainstream in my attitudes about political, religious, moral, and social attitudes in The Old City.  Like most places these polarized days no one is interested in hearing anything but their own opinions aped back to them and when the aping doesn't go down the default position is yelling out those non-reciprocated opinions more loudly.

"I'm not deaf," I say.  "I just don't agree with you."

The final insult is to be repeatedly insulted for having the non-aped opinion.  I don't think The Old City is particularly unique in this regard but that distinction doesn't make the insulting any funner to endure.

Whenever SuperK made another very reasonable suggestion I would pretend to be crawling on the ground.

"Pew!  Pew!  Rat-a-tattattat," I'd say, making my best gun sounds.

There's a great scene in the Simpson's where Homer has to connect a wire to a live electrical circuit.  He has two choices: blue and red.  He tries red and gets the shit shocked out of him.  He tries blue then with the same result.  "Hmmm," he says.  "Maybe I'll try red."

That's me.  That's what I do.