Now, Where Exactly Did I Put My Trust?

This is my favorite time of year. I love the spring. The weather gets nice and cool, the grass starts to grow again, it tends to rain more, and the air feels clean. Of course, it isn’t all sunshine and St. Augustine. Because my birthday is always just around the corner in the springtime, I have to be on my best behavior in a futile attempt to cause people to forget that unfortunate event involving a cat, some aluminum foil and the best of intentions that happened in January. But I take the bad with the good, because I love the Spring. And I love my Birthday.

The biggest hurdle to my enjoyment of the Spring has to be April 1st. That day is isolated from my festive season. I think of it this way: Spring begins in March, is truncated on midnight March 31st, and begins anew on April 2nd, minus the time it takes to get the apologies out of the way for the most useless holiday we have during the entire year.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: “April Fool’s Day”. Or, as I like to call it, “National-Lie-To-Each-Other Day”. I’ve never understood it. We, as a nation, play tricks on our friends and lie to each other. Built up some trust with a certain someone? Lie to ‘em on April 1st and get a free pass. Got some integrity that you simply don’t know what to do with? Spend some of that hard-earned reliability by setting a bag of poop on fire. That honor and veracity bogging you down? Is it tiring you out to be so doggone dependable? Trade out someone’s medication for a placebo.

It’s funny! It’s only one day of the year! They won’t press charges.

Seriously. How useless is this holiday? I might not totally be on the same wavelength as some of the other holidays (you hear me, Valentine’s Day?), but I partially understand it. Christmas is about giving unselfishly as a celebration of an unselfish gift that can never be equaled. Thanksgiving is about tryptophan, parades and giving thanks that the Detroit Lions are paraded out once a year while everyone is groggy from tryptophan. Easter is about hats, eggs, ham for some odd reason, and the Resurrection. Not at all in that order.

I could go on and on. Each holiday serves some kind of function, but April the 1st doesn’t make the slightest sense to me. Let me give you an example of why I loathe it so. Some years back, I was trying my very best to be a fan of a sports talk show. I felt it necessary to learn a little something about what my buddies were talking about, it was something to listen to, it was entertaining, and I felt it important to know why it’s okay for athletes to slap each other on the bum.Sports radio seemed the logical solution to me. But on April Fool’s Day the deejays made a point of stringing the audience along, building up to some awesome, climactic announcement. Whatever the announcement was going to be, it was going to be of such monumental importance that if you heard nothing else ever in the history of mankind, you could not under any circumstances risk missing the announcement at the top of the hour, right after the commercials. The radio had been invented for this very moment. The radio hosts would be fulfilling their life’s calling by bringing the upcoming statement. Lose your job, be late for the birth of your child, put that realization of a lifelong dream on hold; do whatever you had to do to be around for the startling news. Seriously, it’s just around the corner and it will be EPIC.

There was no such denouement. An announcement was finally made, after agonizingly stringing the audience along, that there was no announcement. There was nothing at all to report. April Fool’s Day! Ha ha everybody! The jokes on you! Let’s all laugh together.

I felt like a moron for believing them. They lost an audience member that day, and I haven’t listened to them since. Sports in general didn’t really interest me that much to begin with, anyway. I gave up trying to impress my friends with my sports acumen. Operation “I Love Sportscenter Too!” was a failure and its funding was subsequently cut. And it took that moment of foolishness to realize it. I never did learn why athletes think it acceptable to slap each other on the fanny.

So I left in pursuit of other pursuits in a pursuit to pursue other pursuits. And I never forgot the lesson I learned that fateful morning in my car: April Fool’s Day isn’t about being a fool, it’s about making other people feel like fools. Isn’t that a nice thing to celebrate? Shouldn’t there be a holiday that acts as a counterbalance? We could place it exactly 6 months to the day after April 1. It would be on the other side of the year and it would undo the damage of all those lawsuits. Perhaps we could call it “Here’s-The-Dignity- I-Took-From-You-Back-In-April Day”. That’s a holiday I can get behind.

So, as I suppose you can guess by now, I will not be celebrating April Fool’s Day on Wednesday. Justice will be my sword and truth shall be my quiver. I will play no practical jokes on anyone. I won’t be setting poop on fire. I won’t give a lengthy setup for an announcement that ain’t there. If you are around me on that day, you will see no integrity being spent like tokens on a midway. The medication you had in the morning won’t be a sugar tablet in the evening. You’ll be safe from me. I hope that others will show me the same courtesy. If they do not, then I suppose we’ll need to celebrate a certain holiday on October 1, because I’ll want that dignity back.

What this blog is all about

When I was in the 5th grade, our elementary school put out a decree throughout the land. If you had an article, if you wanted to write a little something down, and it was given to the editor in a timely fashion, it could be published in the school newspaper. It sounded like a lark, and I thought I would try my luck. I spent a whole portion of an afternoon and wrote something poetic, heroic, epic. It was sheer genius. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember laughing with joy as I wrote it. I didn’t know what the Pulitzer was, but if I did, I would have considered it a foregone conclusion. It would be some years before I learned what Pulitzer meant. Perhaps it happened the same day I felt comfortable enough to use “foregone conclusion” in a sentence.

Of course, you know what happened. The article was rejected out of hand. I was told that it wasn’t “really what the newspaper needed at this time”, or some such thing. The taco bell napkin that held my prose was handed back to me and I was wished a “fare thee well”.

You might think that the loss of 5th grade prestige crushed my fragile psyche. It did not. It probably took a few days to put it behind me, because I’ve always been that way, but with time I simply moved on to something else. Perhaps as a 5th grader, all it took was something bright and shiny in front of me, since all 5th graders I’ve ever met have had A.D.D. in one form or another (I didn’t have A.D.D. because it wasn’t invented yet, but I had whatever we had back in the days before A.D.D. was invented. Perhaps it was B.C.C. ).

As an adult, I look back on those events and I am comforted by a few things: 1) the paper that rejected my article was an elementary school newspaper. 2) The editor that rejected my article was in 6th grade. 3) The school that rejected my article had asked a 6th grader to be its editor.

I also look back and remember that I had a lot of fun writing that article. I enjoyed spending almost an entire half hour of an afternoon writing something that made me laugh and I thrilled at the idea of sharing my odd and strange viewpoints. The whole experience was worth missing a “Hogan’s Heroes episode” to do, and it still makes me laugh that the article was rejected by a teeny, tiny, prepubescent editor.

That enjoyment hasn’t gone away. I still don’t mind in the least missing “Hogan’s Heroes” episodes, and I still enjoy jotting down thoughts that have others wondering what medications I’m taking or if I’ve recently stopped taking them. I don’t have to risk my quirks and odd observances being rejected. I do have fun explaining them, and this is what this blog is meant to do. I still write with the same purpose as I did back in the 5th grade: have fun, write in such a way as to bring a smile to the face of the reader, and avoid getting punched during recess. These are ample enough reasons for having started this blog.

So, here, for your perusal, are my thoughts and ideas. I don’t have to rationalize them, but I can laugh at them and with them. So can you if you feel so led. My advice for us all is to have fun. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my viewpoints, even to the point of feeling free to share a few of your own, while at the same time steering away from underage editors with no sense of humor and no idea what is Pulitzer worthy. This is sage advice no matter who you are.