Ted Bundy, Hoarders, & Fixing Your Life
A brief philosophical flirtation with relativity...sort of...
This posting is not a rant, in fact, I don’t care whether you read it and if you do, I don’t care if you agree with me or not. Sorta. Actually I hope you DO read it and agree with me, but if you don’t we’ll sort all that out some other day.
That said: as I age, something I notice more and more, not ALWAYS, but much more often, is that one thing is everything.
We rarely see people doing fabulously in one part of life, or horribly, and find everything in antithesis to that in every other part of their lives.
I know that there are episodes of Hoarders on TV which show normal/healthy looking folks, maybe a smidge overweight, perhaps a tiny bit unkempt, who, only as you follow them through their front door do you realize that they live in mountains of dead animals, and animal feces and old newspapers, and candy bar wrappers, and used paper plates from their kid’s birthday party 17 years ago all carefully scattered EVERYWHERE in their domicile —
But far more often, these people on these charming reality TV shows look, pretty much exactly like you’d expect someone living that out of control to look; wild crazy hair and eyes and filthy clothes and bad teeth and 8 inch long disgusting fingernails, their piss saved in cardboard milk cartons, and shit like that.
Ted Bundy was enigmatic and confusing because looking at him, you saw a handsome guy, a little on the conservative side, but with a great smile, clean teeth and fashionable clothing, turtleneck sweaters like he was running as a Young Republican for a seat on the School board.
The kind of guy most sane people want to hang-out with and it seemed impossible that he could be the excitable lad who kidnapped, tortured, & murdered young women then went back and had sex with their corpses for days or weeks afterwards.
These exceptions, Bundy and the hoarders, don’t prove the rule, but your ability to agree with or even simply understand my central premise, confirms my theory; that it’s always a surprise to find a crack-smoking, alcoholic, morbidly obese person or any other type of OCD lunatic, doing a bang-up job with their personal finances.
This is because often (not always, but often) once you learn to take care of one thing well, simply by paying attention and doing it right, often all or at least most everything else falls into place too —
This posting is not a rant and I don’t care whether you do one thing right or not. After all, it’s your life.
Sort of...
The True Danger of Marijuana
Keeping Pot Illegal
The increasing legalization of marijuana in the US is a dangerous trend that overlooks the many threats that made weed illegal in the first place. Pot's inherent risks should not be ignored, or the mistakes of the past are sure to repeat, and this poses an enormous threat to personal happiness.
In 1987, during a Grateful Dead concert at the Capital Center in DC, the true danger in marijuana revealed while walking through the caravan. While walking with a group of friends trying to find a good place to party, three joints burned between five of us adding to the giant cloud of smoke rising above the throngs of deadheads. The bright, sunny day filled with music from all directions as people milled about and lounged smoking weed, tripping, and sucking nitrous.
All seemed well as I walked with my friend Dylan beside me and other friends following right behind. Approaching a dirt road, I went blind in a moment of choking and coughing, but when the gagging ended, the smoke dissipated showing an old, slow driving station wagon. The car stopped before us and the windows lowered revealing six young, aspiring hippie girls who began yelling to Dylan and me, “Hey guys, want some sandwiches?”
Looking at Dylan and seeing his confusion, I turned to the girls. “No, we’re not looking for sandwiches. Do you have any buds or LSD?”
The hippie in the front passenger seat flipped back her long, silky blond hair uncovering a flower painted on her cheek. “No guys, do you want some sandwiches?”
The rest of the pretty, stoned hippie girls chanted, “Sandwiches! Sandwiches! Sandwiches!”
I looked to Dylan in confusion and he said to the girls, “What the fuck? We don’t want any sandwiches.”
The blond in the passenger seat leaned out of the window and pressed the fingertips of one hand to the fingertips of the other and began pumping her hands as though they were a beating heart while stating clearly and slowly, “Sand-wich-es.”
Hearing only an unintelligible series of hieroglyphs, Dylan and I stood confused shrugging at one another until finally one of us said, “We don’t want any damn sandwiches. Get the hell out of here.”
The girls drove into the psychedelic ether never to be seen again as Dylan and I stared incredulously. As they disappeared into the sprawling caravan of deadheads, the roar of laughter came from our mutual friends rolling about in the dirt behind us. We turned and Dylan shrugged. “What?”
Our friend Mike screamed, “You two are fucking idiots. SANDWICHES!”
The lamenting and cursing for the lost hippie love opportunity clarified the true danger of marijuana and why it should always remain illegal.
Don’t miss out because you’re high.
Image courtesy of Denny Muller, Unsplash
Copyright Vincent Triola & Terry Trueman
