Old People can be Jackasses Too

Hey, where you live do they act like 38 is
practically a teenager too? I was introduced
at a lecture I was asked to give at this church,
St. John's Lutheran, as a young man. I was 33
at the time. Gave me a good opening joke though.

"I was asked to speak about Council Bluffs today
and why I chose to come back and invest my time
and career here. Where else can you be introduced
as a young man at 33?" big laughs but seriously,
everyone where I live is like 80 and thinks everyone
who isn't 80 is supposed to give a crap.

Venerating the elderly back in the days when being
old was some sort of accomplishment made sense.
But nowadays, everybody lives to be 80. I went to
a 60th high school reunion for the class of '41 a few
years back and they had more people show up alive
and kicking than we did at my 20th this year. It was
a mad house. A MAD HOUSE!

Being old these days is like having quints. It's special
when it's rare, natural and the product of nature not
mad science. I've got two grandmothers who are 80-ish.
One's never worked a day in her life. It's no surprise she's
still kicking around. But she offers nothing in the way of
wisdom, kindness or even homespun advice. She's as
worthless as any 20-year-old I've ever met, maybe more
since she's burnt out her potential. I mean, she doesn't
even have any potential potential. She's a boulder at the
bottom of a lake, man, she ain't goin' anywhere. The other
one's not much better.

Our society today is fast becoming some sort of gerontocracy
of vampires living off the young and not so young. Our
national motto should be "I'm old, can you help me?" not
"In God we trust" because obviously we don't or there
wouldn't be so many old people about.

In my "career," I get these old people calling up all the
time because they sat on their remotes and hit some
button and can't figure out how to get there TV back to
the Golf Channel. I talked to this woman the other night
whose TV was actually just shut off. Screen was black.

"Please hit the power button on your TV," I said.
"I don't see why I should have to do that, I never turned
it off."

Six and a half minutes of this shit just to get her to turn the
TV on. Old is one thing, stupid is quite another. I mean, they
had TVs in many households in the 50s didn't they? And
they came with power buttons or knobs didn't they? The
freakin' light switch has been around since the 19th century
so the concept of turning an appliance on and off should not
be alien to ANY LIVING AMERICAN, should it?

And it's not just stupid that's the problem, it's what I like to
call vicious idiocy. It's like pride of ignorance on steroids.
Vicious idiots are like retarded junkyard dogs. "Rowr! Rowr!
I'm stupid, I'm pissed, and I'd rather bitch, piss and moan than
listen to anyone who thinks they are smarter than me just
because they are indeed smarter than me."

Then if they feel stupid they expect you to make them NOT
feel stupid. I can't make a tree feel like an armoire, can I? I
can't make a pumpkin feel like a pumpkin pie and I can't
make a dullard feel like they have normal intelligence.