Good Advice I Do Not Follow

If you have a brain, use it… every day. Especially as you get older and your mind’s most important gears are getting rusty. You don’t want Alzheimer’s do you?

I don’t want that. But thinking all the time is hard. I don’t feel well. I sometimes forget to do things. It is impressive to me that I now have 743 straight days of posting here without forgetting.

You should not believe in ghosts. You should Carl Sagan the whole topic, not believing in something without tangible proof. I do, however, keep seeing the ghost dog in the old house we live in. We have a little yellow and white dog. The ghost dog is bigger. And dark brown. And sometimes I only see his hind quarters and tail. So, sometimes, it is only a half-dog ghost.

I have dismissed the ghost dog as a mere hallucination. Possibly a symptom of Parkinson’s, which my father died of. I have discussed the matter at night with Douglas, the booger-man. He used to live in the attic when the kids were little. Now, he lives in the library, and when I have to get up bleary eyed in the middle of the night to go into the bathroom next to the library to pee, I see his buggy eyes and his amused grin with all the teeth in it. And he agrees with me. The ghost dog is definitely just a hallucination, and I should treat it as such.

And I shouldn’t know so much about conspiracy theories. It seems if you learn too much about the JFK assassination, or what really happened on 9-11, or who might really have written Shakespeare’s plays, paying the glove-maker’s son to use his name as a pen name, and building a theatre for him just so he could revolutionize English literature secretly, you will alienate all your intelligent friends… and a few of the semi-intelligent ones, and end up arguing with literal Philistines who insult you like trolls under the bridges of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

And you will accomplish nothing by it but misusing the word “Literal.”

And so, on a dark and stormy night in Texas on the second day of March, I have to come to terms with the fact that I like me the way I am, and I do not follow good advice.