Shooting the Schmitt
I hung out this morning with Schmitt.
Oh, you wouldn't know him. Even my brothers don't know him. I just met him this morning myself, and so far he seems like an okay guy. Quiet though.
John Schmitt has a bench under a tree in the cemetery next door as a memorial to him from his family. I took a short story I'm working on out there and walked around, sitting and shooting the shit with Schmitt for a while, and trying to figure out some things in the direction of the story.
Have I mentioned it's peaceful out there? If you don't get caught up in the whole "dead-bodies-underground" thing, it's a park... just with not so many people. Living. And there's not many girls out there in bathing suits suntanning either... or people playing frisbee with their dogs... but anyway, I digress. It's a peaceful place and easy to let your mind drift off.
Our time here is so short, it's amazing, and we're all faced with demands on it (time spent deleting spam offers for cialis, viagra, toner, hot horny grannie trannies, lower mortgage rates and how to sell shit on Ebay) and all of us have a ridiculous amount of choices to make.
We can do something worthwhile as long as we're here... something that makes us happy.
Or, we can sit around piddling our puds.
I know what a lot of people's mindset is. Hell, we were called the why bother generation.
Why bother? In case anyone hasn't noticed, our world is turning into a cesspool. We will not go out with a bang, but with a whisper, of this I am firmly set in my beliefs. Oh there'll be other 9/11's, you can be assured. If you think some guy with a towel on his head isn't going to blast some more stockbrokers or take out some celebrities if he gets the chance, (oh, and he will - look no further than that RIDICULOUS color-coded level alert that Homeland Security is using - we should be ALERT? PUH-fucking-LEEEEEEZ), then you're dead wrong. It'll happen. But one of these times it's not going to be a bomb. It's going to be a package the size of an envelope. A prescription bottle. And it's going to be emptied into a main water reservoir so it can feed into thousands... millions of homes... and the passengers it carries will be too microscopic to get filtered through that Britta water system. And you can damn well bet it'll be contagious to the nth degree.
That's how we're going to go.
Why bother? We live in an environment with a hundred different kinds of cancer. Used to be casual sex. Fuck that, put your dick in without capping it now and you may as well be playing Russian Roulette. Our culture is full of school shootings, overpaid entertainers and underpaid teachers.
Our generation will have no social security and one of the largest national deficits in history.
Why bother? it's easy to fall into this, and I live in a region where that mentality is not the exception, it's the norm.
Well, I'll tell you why bother. Because you're still here, that's why. Because we all have talents. Not God-given, sorry, I don't play that game. you have talents, many talents, and they're your own - use them, because if you don't, then it's a fuckin waste. That's why. Push yourself. Raise your own bar - not because of what other people say - because you should.
Because if you don't want to bother, then quit breathing my fucking air. If you want to just trudge day in and day out, waiting to die, then why put it off? Go wear a gas oven hat and get out of my way.
Contribute. Do something. Get off your ass.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go
to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
- Martin Luther King, Jr
Oh, you wouldn't know him. Even my brothers don't know him. I just met him this morning myself, and so far he seems like an okay guy. Quiet though.
John Schmitt has a bench under a tree in the cemetery next door as a memorial to him from his family. I took a short story I'm working on out there and walked around, sitting and shooting the shit with Schmitt for a while, and trying to figure out some things in the direction of the story.
Have I mentioned it's peaceful out there? If you don't get caught up in the whole "dead-bodies-underground" thing, it's a park... just with not so many people. Living. And there's not many girls out there in bathing suits suntanning either... or people playing frisbee with their dogs... but anyway, I digress. It's a peaceful place and easy to let your mind drift off.
Our time here is so short, it's amazing, and we're all faced with demands on it (time spent deleting spam offers for cialis, viagra, toner, hot horny grannie trannies, lower mortgage rates and how to sell shit on Ebay) and all of us have a ridiculous amount of choices to make.
We can do something worthwhile as long as we're here... something that makes us happy.
Or, we can sit around piddling our puds.
I know what a lot of people's mindset is. Hell, we were called the why bother generation.
Why bother? In case anyone hasn't noticed, our world is turning into a cesspool. We will not go out with a bang, but with a whisper, of this I am firmly set in my beliefs. Oh there'll be other 9/11's, you can be assured. If you think some guy with a towel on his head isn't going to blast some more stockbrokers or take out some celebrities if he gets the chance, (oh, and he will - look no further than that RIDICULOUS color-coded level alert that Homeland Security is using - we should be ALERT? PUH-fucking-LEEEEEEZ), then you're dead wrong. It'll happen. But one of these times it's not going to be a bomb. It's going to be a package the size of an envelope. A prescription bottle. And it's going to be emptied into a main water reservoir so it can feed into thousands... millions of homes... and the passengers it carries will be too microscopic to get filtered through that Britta water system. And you can damn well bet it'll be contagious to the nth degree.
That's how we're going to go.
Why bother? We live in an environment with a hundred different kinds of cancer. Used to be casual sex. Fuck that, put your dick in without capping it now and you may as well be playing Russian Roulette. Our culture is full of school shootings, overpaid entertainers and underpaid teachers.
Our generation will have no social security and one of the largest national deficits in history.
Why bother? it's easy to fall into this, and I live in a region where that mentality is not the exception, it's the norm.
Well, I'll tell you why bother. Because you're still here, that's why. Because we all have talents. Not God-given, sorry, I don't play that game. you have talents, many talents, and they're your own - use them, because if you don't, then it's a fuckin waste. That's why. Push yourself. Raise your own bar - not because of what other people say - because you should.
Because if you don't want to bother, then quit breathing my fucking air. If you want to just trudge day in and day out, waiting to die, then why put it off? Go wear a gas oven hat and get out of my way.
Contribute. Do something. Get off your ass.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go
to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
- Martin Luther King, Jr
posted by Bob at 8/29/2004
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