Proverbs — The Remix

wise words

Old people are always making up stupid stuff to tell young people how to live their lives.  (Yeah?  If you’re so smart, how come ya got old?)  These “wise” old sayings used to show up on kitchen plaques and bumper stickers, but now they crawl around Facebook like ants at a picnic.  Most of them were thought up hundreds of years ago, when people had nothing to do but sit around and actually talk to each other.  Those days are gone.  So, as a public service, here’s a remix of just a few of these geriatric proverbs to reflect real life in the 21st century.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a credit card.

If you can change just one person’s life … that really isn’t good enough, is it?

You can’t tell a book by its … book?  Book?  What’s a book?

Beauty is only skin deep.  Is that “beauty shaming?”  “That might be “beauty shaming?”  Do you think that’s “beauty shaming?”

The meek shall inherit the Earth — until some ratbag lawyer decides to contest the will.
(This is not a comment about any particular ratbag lawyer, so forget about suing me!)

Cheaters never prosper.  They just win elections.

If at first you don’t succeed … there’s an App for that.

He who hesitates doesn’t have a Twitter account.

Money isn’t everything, but it’s sure as hell ahead of whatever’s in second place.

Do unto others — cuz eventually they’re going to show up and do unto you.

The early bird catches the worm.  But nobody ever thinks about the early worm.  What about the early worm?  WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE EARLY WORM?

History repeats itself.  Cool!  I’m totally getting a dinosaur.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names – now, that’s the real problem.  They can cause deep psychological issues that last for decades.  We need to have trigger warnings on names.

The pen is mightier than the sword.  This is a joke, right?

Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow – or next week, or sometime in the near future, or ….

No news is – uh – well, at least it’s not fake news.

The road to hell is paved.  That’s why so many people go that way.

Seeing is believing — unless your friends have Photoshop.

When the going gets tough, most people wander away and watch Netflix.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Out of sight out of mind.  Uh . . . I’m confused.

And finally:

What doesn’t kill you can put you in intensive care for six months where you become addicted to painkillers.  Then, when you get out of the hospital, you spend all your money on illegal drugs, lose your job, your house and your wife leaves you.  Finally, you end up living on the street, eating out of garbage cans and selling your body to buy crack.  But, wow, are you ever strong!

 

E-friends Are Best!

e-friends

One of the coolest side effects of our society’s relentless technology is Social Media.  It has allowed us to turn our world into one gigantic village — which means we’re all cyber-neighours.  Everybody on this planet is now one tap, swipe or click away from everybody else, and billions of us have taken advantage of this.  Think about it!  We all know someone we’ve never talked to, never touched, never smiled at, or even seen.  These are the strangers who are our friends – our e-friends – and in the 21st century, we all have them.  There is still some debate over whether these e-friends are as good or even the same as IRL (In Real Life) friends, but in a couple of generations, this won’t even be a question … because … and here’s the best bit – e-friends are way better than real ones.  Let me demonstrate.

E-friends never waste your time with long, boring stories.   Regardless of how drawn-out their particular tale of woe might become, you don’t have sit there and listen.  The truth is, most people just scroll down to the end, type ‘awesome,” and move on.

E-friends never drag you off to places you don’t want to go.  When you live on the other side of the world, this never comes up on the panel – thank God.  So you don’t have to sweat the oboe recital, the fishing trip or what’s-her-name’s graduation – just to be polite.  All you have to do is make the right noises when your e-friends post the pictures.

They’re never mean to you.  E-friends are notoriously good-natured, and if they ever do go off the rails, all you have to do is delete them.

When e-friends talk about you behind your back, you’re never going to hear about it.

You don’t have worry about cleaning the house when e-friends come to visit.  In fact, you can talk to them in your pajamas if you so choose – and people frequently do.

You never have to put up with your e-friends’ annoying spouse, or know-it-all sister, or idiot dog who peed on your carpet or any of the other baggage IRL friends always bring along with them.

E-friends don’t force you make hard decisions like “Does this dress make me look fat?”  Normally, those photos are deleted long before they ever get to you.

E-friends never give you the flu.

E-friends don’t make promises they can’t keep.  Ganjit, from Chennai is never going to volunteer to help you move and then disappear the day the boxes are packed.  (I’m looking at you, Sam Newton!)

E-friends always listen.  When you’re talking to them they never get distracted by their phone – cuz you’re the one on the phone.

E-friends don’t borrow your stuff and forget to give it back.  You never have that awkward moment when you discover your e-buddy Betty is serving cake off a plate that she borrowed from you two Christmases ago.

But the best thing about e-friends is:

Age, gender, race, religion, nationality, income, etc., etc., etc. don’t make a damn bit of difference to e-friends.   They are the most egalitarian groups of people on this planet.  So, while most of the world is shouting and swearing and calling each other names, there are tons of little groups of e-friends, kicked back in various small corners of cyberspace, trying to get to know each other.  And that’s totally cool!

It’s Spring — 2019

spring

Thank God it’s spring!  And this isn’t just another date on the calendar; this is the real meal deal.  Mother Nature is changing her clothes, and Father Time is watching.  We mere mortals are only a small part of what they both have in mind, but, like every year since this planet was a baby, it’s going to be spectacular.   As of today, the birds and the bees are back, and they’re feeling frisky.

Unfortunately, the spring solstice doesn’t carry the kind of punch it used to.  These days, it’s mostly living on its rep.  We all know it’s spring, but in a world of central heating, air conditioning, mega-malls and concrete canyon streets, how many of us really care?  In the 21st century, we generally ignore the world around us until Mother Nature gets pissed off and starts slapping the crap out of everything in her path – then we pay attention.  Primitive humans weren’t this arrogant; that’s why they treated the spring solstice with some respect.

Back in the day, winter in the northern hemisphere was nothing to be trifled with.  Our species never physically adapted to the cold the way some of the other animals on this planet did.  However, despite our natural tendency to freeze to death, we insisted on living in climates that were inhospitable for four (or more) months of the year.  The only recourse for this stupidity was to outsmart Mother Nature, using the tools at hand – fire and the skins of more practical animals.  Plus, our instincts told us to hide in caves when a hostile world starting howling for our bones.  This strategy worked and we survived long enough to understand that — even though Mother Nature spent a good amount of time trying to kill us — eventually she would relent and treat us like her special children again.  And this was cause for celebration.

As we evolved beyond beetle-brow tough to early-human clever, we must have realized that these constantly changing seasons were not random.  They had a pattern.  When winter was over, the leaves came out.  From there, only a Neanderthal wouldn’t put two and two together and realize, once the leaves started to fall, winter was coming back.  (That’s why there are no more Neanderthals, BTW.  Just sayin’.)  With that in mind, it wasn’t a Cro-Magnon leap of intelligence to figure out that, with a little planning, we could gather food and firewood during the good weather, store them away, and a smart cave family could sit out the winter in relative comfort.  Thus, instead of hanging out in the cave, shivering and getting skinny all winter, we had some leisure time to put that big brain or ours to work.  We watched the sun, we watched the moon, we noticed when the ice started to melt, when the birds came back and when the bear two caves over woke up grumpy, hungry and looking for a fight.  This was all important stuff, because the more we knew about the seasons, the more likely it was that we’d be around to see a few of them.

 

Unfortunately, climatology hadn’t been invented yet, and so humans simply filed all these various discoveries under “Mother Nature: Whims and Idiosyncrasies.”  But Mother Nature was real.  She made the flowers bloom, the warm breezes blow, and warmed up the sun.  So, when winter was over, it made sense for primitive humans to take a minute, be polite and say thanks.

These days, we don’t much care for Mother Nature.  After all, for the last two hundred years or so, we’ve been fighting with her for supremacy on this planet.  There are some who say we’re winning and some who say we’ve already lost.  Unfortunately, the majority of us don’t seem to give a damn, either way.  Our egos are so secure we no longer thank her — or anybody else — for our existence.  However, on a morning like this one, in the first sunlight of what’s going to be a perfectly gorgeous day, I tend to get a little caveman-humble.  I hear the birds putting on the brag, see an ambitious green sprig forcing its way through the sidewalk and maybe — just maybe — sniff a sweet change in the air.   And it all tells me something special is happening again this year — and it’s going to fantastic.

 

Thanks, Mother Nature!