It’ll happen to everyone else but me. I’ll be the only one that it doesn’t work for. I’ll buy a few more lottery tickets. Have a good one. Take care. Be good. Be careful. Have a good one. How ya doing? Everyone else before they do me. Watch your back. Life stinks, then you die. And on and on.
Everyday we’re subjected to the words from the mediocre. Why? Are they really that concerned with my well-being? Or are they more concerned about their own? Keeping me (and everyone else) on par with their lives in an attempt to rationalize their own beige existence. No thanks. Gave it up for the Lent of my Life.
“So how did Jim become a congressman? I mean, how did he decide (how does anyone “decide”) to run for Congress?”
I remember asking his chief-of-staff one day on the golf course. “Jim” was our congressman (had been for many years) and now he was running for governor. My family had known him for years because he and my uncle had started their respective legal practices around the same time. Over that same time, we had also become friendly with his “driver” and “chief-of-staff” (Jim’s former barber. An old Italian man who had known Jim’s family for years and needed something to do in retirement, so Jim asked him to drive him back and forth to this place and that so he’d have time to read all the papers he had to read once he had successfully won a seat in the House. Don’t be so impressed with what you “see” all the time. Sometimes it’s not quite as impressive as they’d like you to believe. I call it “The Zombo Effect” from The Munsters fame. In that episode, Eddie Munster- the young boy in the famiy- wins a backstage tour of his favorite show “Zombo” hosted by none other than Zombo himself- expertly portrayed by the incomparable Louis Nie, only to discover, to Eddie’s dismay, that Zombo is a made up character; that he’s an “actor” and not a “real” monster. It’s a sixties B-movie loss of innocence genre destroying episode).
So “Chief-of-Staff” Tommy told me how Jim came to be a congressman.
“He asked,” he said.
Thought about that line today. Have for quite some time actually. A lot.
