"Use All The Crayons!" ... War
This is the ‘17 video that hits all the highlights of my “Use All The Crayons!” talk, told here at a convention of senior care residency managers in Columbus, Ohio. It’s about 12-minutes so take the afternoon off, make some popcorn and invite friends.
I suppose I could make “War” the theme for every week, but it seems particularly apt today. Yes, war is hell, but you have to admit, the History Channel would be a heckuva a lot more boring without it. So…
War
• Pray for a day when one of our cherished military maxims about always fighting the last war is dead wrong. Pray one day there actually will be a last war.
• The war isn't even a day old and my naiveté has already emerged. The first big headline of the war is, "Russians Take Chernobyl After Fierce Fight." They're fighting over Chernobyl? It's the most radioactive place on the planet. It's like Columbus and Cincinnati fighting over Dayton. Why bother?
• I’ll never understand the voluntary insanity of busting your ass for 5 days straight only to wage war with nature on the 2 days you're given to relax. We've reached a stage where we return to our Monday toils in need of 2 precious days to relax. We're all weakened by our weekends.
• I wish there was a superhero whose power was the ability to call a square dance so seductively that battlefield soldiers would -- yee! ha! -- drop their weapons and commence to dosey-doin'. This would give Freedom Fighters the chance to swoop in and declare victory or -- boy! howdy! -- enlist in the shin dig.
• If you’d have told me 40 years ago that by 2024 every man, woman & child would hold in their hands a device that could answer any question, film & watch feature movies, instantly summon any song and that they were so simple to use a child could manipulate a photo so it appeared she was riding a winged unicorn, I’d have said, “Hallelujah! For that must mean humanity has conquered climate change, racial and class injustice, and the scourge of war in places like the Middle East. Because man would never pursue those utter trivialities knowing those issues that really matter were going ignored. Because, if nothing else, mankind understands the need to prioritize!”
• “Nights in White Satin" is a '67 song by Moody Blues. "Knights in White Satin" is a preposterous battle strategy doomed to fail.
• There’s something so unnerving about being engaged in a life-and-death struggle against an enemy our soldiers can't confuse or infuriate with a well-timed moon.
• I never dreamed I'd enlist in the War on Christmas, but a line has been crossed and I'm now on a mission to cancel a traditional Christmas carol for its blatant assault on heterosexuality. "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas ... Make the Yuletide gay?" Make it gay? The only sexual orientation Y.T should be coerced into adopting is the one with which it feels most comfortable. If Yuletide were my kid, I'd encourage it to make up its own mind on such a personal issue. And I'd remind it, gay, straight, L or B, G or Q, T or 2, it will always be welcome in our home. Yule see!
• Getting out of bed makes me feel like WWI soldier being ordered to vault from trench into No Man’s Land certain to face heroic annihilation.
• Because it would suggest modernization and would require the change of just a handful of letters, I suggest we change the name of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center to the Walter O'Reilly Army Medical Center.
• Q: If they fought a battle between all the FB friends you genuinely like and all the ones you secretly don't, who'd win?
A: No one. It’s a trick question. You should genuinely like ALL your friends!
RANDOMS …
• I believe 50 percent of the women and 80 percent of the men we encounter in our daily lives are simply older, less cheerful versions of the juvenile spastic morons we all were in high school. Proceed accordingly.
• Thinking of re-writing my history to say the reason I'm not more successful is I made a conscious decision in 2000 to de-prioritize income to be a stay-at-home Dad. Now if I can only convince wife, 2 daughters and dozens of eyewitness bartenders to back me up …
• Call me a snob, but I'll always prefer eating at restaurants that sell me food that gives me gas to places that offer food and sell me gas.
• Someone letting the cat out of the bag will become more impactful to me as soon as I start seeing more instances of bagged cats.
• For future reference, it's unnecessary for you to say, "Have fun!" after asking where I'm going or what I'm doing. Look, if it ain't fun I ain't going.
• It may be a vast over-simplification, but couldn’t global warming be eased if we simply moved Earth farther from the sun? I think if we synchronized our pushups on one side of the globe while everyone on the other side jumped up in the air …
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