This Week in Rage – 2/15/15

This Week in Rage – 2/15/15

This Week In Rage – a blog about the top three things that pissed me off this week.

 

Bullying: I was talking to a listener who called into the podcast the other day about how he wanted to home school his kid. I pointed out that the problem with schooling is there are no bullies. You need that kid at school you’re a little scared of, the one hanging out by the lockers that you learned to avoid. We all grew up with a bully or two, the fifth grader who smelled like cigarettes and would steal your skateboard. We need that person because they exist as adults. They grow up to be the assholes you have to deal with on a daily basis at work or become your shitty neighbors. So it’s important that we learn to navigate them at a young age, it’s a key life skill. Think about it this way. Your fingers and feet have calluses on them. They’re tough so you can pick up a hot cup of coffee or walk around your yard barefoot. What if every part of your body was covered with the skin from your belly? Life would be painful, every time you touched a coffee mug you’d wince. These home school kids are protected too much, they have no emotional calluses.

 

So I thought it was time for me to start a service for all those home school kids who don’t know from bullying. You know how there’s Uber to find a ride near you? This is Bullber. You punch up the app on your phone and it will find the nearest bully to your home school kid. Then when you take him to the park the local chunky red-head bully will come over, take your kid’s candy bar and you get to see how he acts under adversity. You’ll be the parent there the whole time to intervene if shit gets out of hand but your precious home schooled snowflake will get a chance to butt up against the real world instead of sitting and listening to you read them the bible or the Huffington Post. It’s a perfect plan, the only problem is at the end when your kid sees you paying the bully.

 

My Rock Bottom Moment: I’ve bottomed out as a human being officially. It was the other day when was standing at my son’s youth basketball “picture day”. I was alone, Lynette was out of town, and I had to get there an hour early so I had some time to kill. I found myself watching a high school baseball game, leaning on the fence in the outfield a hundred yards away. An old timer shuffled up to me and said “Nice day.” I agreed that it was but I was thinking, “How long am I going to have to talk to this dust bunny?” He started talking about how he was from the panhandle of Florida and how he played a little ball back in the day. So I thought, okay, I won’t be an asshole and started telling him about my playing days. But then about a minute into that he said, “Well, there you go” then walked over twenty feet away from me and just stood there. I thought, “Wow, I bored the old guy.” He only has a few remaining moments left on earth and I guess he doesn’t want to spend any of them with the Aceman. The guy with no wife, job, future or plans, the guy who probably won’t see the 4th of July this year decided to meander off and stand silently alone like a statue rather than listen to me talk anymore. It was a sobering moment.

 

Speaking of rock bottom, sobering moments…

 

Modern Alcoholism: It occurred to me the other day that there has never been a better time to be an alcoholic. Historically, when I was growing up it was easy to tell who the alcoholics were. It was the guy in the army jacket drinking out of a brown bag while walking down the sidewalk. We all know there’s no Sunny D in that bag. He’s got a forty ouncer. Or a guy would reach into his inside pocket and pull out a flask and take a nip. There was no apple juice in that flask, it was brandy. Now everyone leaves the house every day with a water bottle of some kind. We’re so nuts about hydrating in today’s society that everyone’s carrying around a sports bottle, a Camelback or a thermos. So if you’re an alky all you’d have to do is put some of that EmergenC into a Fiji bottle dump some vodka or gin in there instead of H2O and voila, you go from hobo to hero.

 

-ace