Monastery of Mirth
So I’m down at the hardware store with my one item in hand. The guy in front of me at the register is transacting some sort of complicated purchase for his 3 plastic bucket lids that involves multiple credit cards, a void, new start, phone numbers (multiple), background checks, everything but a full body scan. After 10 minutes the cashier calls for backup. The new cashier takes the guy behind me … who wants keys made which will, believe me, take awhile. Doesn’t bother him to jump to the front of the line.
But unbelievably, the new cashier makes those keys before the 3 bucket lid transaction is completed. And then he takes the woman behind me again, although this time he says, “I’ll take the next one in line.” The woman who hustles over PDQ eyeballs me sheepishly but hey, it’s a jungle here on the South End and she looks like she’d eat her young if need be to get to that register first.
There are a dozen annoyances in any given day, is what I think, and I suppose I could blow them up to something BIG and ruin the mood of an Indian summer afternoon. My old pard, Guitar Bob and I, being of similar dispositions, meaning we’re a tooth or two on the gnarly side, often talk about why we let this stuff bug us. It’s not like we’re Zen Buddhist priests, but we are a couple of old codgers on the sunny side of life’s sidewalk in a country that’s rich, living on the paradisical South End. What, we ask ourselves, have we got to bitch about? And wouldn’t a sense of humor in these situations be the more appropriate response?
Well, Bob and I agree, life would be better if, instead of getting pissed off at these minor annoyances, we leaned back and found the humor in these situations. Trouble is, we apparently aren’t ready for the Monastery of Mirth.
Today two gentlemen in suits and ties jaywalked in front of me at the airport parking garage, popped open the door of their car next to the only open stall I’d found down 2 or 3 aisles, then opened their trunk, fiddled around, looked at me stopped exactly where their jaywalking had left me, glanced at the open door preventing me parking, then went back to their trunk reorganization. I waited a couple of minutes, then decided I would run out of gas waiting for these yahoos and drove on down the line … but NOT before I flipped them off. The mizzus, always a proponent of pacifism, asked if I was angry. What, me, angry?
“No, “ I said, pulling into the next available stall, “can’t I just give the finger to a couple of arrogant, discourteous suits?”
Needless to say, my funny bone may be too arthritic for remedial help.
Hits: 74
Have you considered the other possibility?
You may have brushed up against, and been prickled by radioactive nettle spines, which have left you with the superpower of INVISIBILITY!
As former Wisconsinites Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker said in one of their movies, ‘It’s a power so great it could only be used for good, or evil!”
Choose wisely should you (invisibly) enter the Monastery of Mirth.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t talk to jaywalkers.