The wheels on my car, the wheels I rely on for the most important functions remaining in my retired, sick-all-the-time, but still-a-father-with-kids-in-school days, have recently been under assault once again. The back right tire has had a slow leak in it for three months because of some piece of metal embedded in the treads. And last week the front driver’s-side tire was cruelly popped by a piece of road debris, a hubcap that was left on the road to be run over repeatedly. Number two son and I had to be rescued from the roadside by AAA (and that is Triple A, not Alcoholics Anonymous… a fairly important distinction).
It meant I had to drive around on an emergency spare for a while and spend the majority of my Memorial Day holiday at Sam’s Club’s tire repair center getting two tires fixed.
And how do you deal with tires being damaged and needing to be fixed so often? Satire of course. After all, it has the word “tire” in it, doesn’t it?
The piece from Vox points out that satire is the way comedians are dealing with Trump news and Trump fake news and Trumpian self-satire usually administered to claim innocence over a truly horrible and self-damaging something he said. They are using satire to cut the crap and get to the center of the ridiculous dog-and-pony show Trump puts on and Trump supporters are constantly dazzled by. I point this all out because I satirically believe no one who looks at my posts on this goofy-danged blog ever watches the videos. And it probably is true, that thing you are thinking at the moment, that Mickey only adds videos to fill up space.
But if satire can be used to pop the tires on the political clown car, then why can’t it also be used to fix the tires on my little gray errand-wagon?
Of course, you will say, “You can’t fix a tire with satire! You have to have tools and patches and rubber cement for that. And you would be right.
But I have had three major tire-related disruptions to my little retired life in the last two years. A careless driver ran into the back tire of my little pony last spring and not only wrecked the tire, but bent the back axle and totaled the entire car. Then I hit a pothole on a carefully unrepaired Dallas street and not only destroyed the tire, but dented the entire rim. And now the new tire disaster fills my holiday with more sit-and-wait-and-pay-lots-of-money woes at a time when I really don’t appreciate such a long run of bad tire-luck. It drives me to satire.
So maybe satire can’t fix a tire, but it can make me laugh about it. And isn’t that better than crying, or a long string of cuss words so foul they would’ve gotten me fired before I retired three years ago? Besides, I already tried those. They didn’t work either. But satire makes me laugh about it and feel a little better. And, after all, it has the word “tire” embedded in it. And that has to count for something.
Facebooking and Birdwalking
This is my bird-walking illustration. I know that it is totally the wrong picture for the job, but it is a bird walking, isn’t it.
It is not a stretch to suggest that most of what you find on Facebook is not real. Especially when it comes to the endless posting and sharing of topical political memes. I had thought when Facebook came out with their reaction-emoji thingies, that there was at least one I would never find a use for.
Boy! Was I ever wrong about that. Now that the gold-plated pumpkinhead that got himself elected somehow is busy with his markers and crayons making executive orders, it is about the only one that really fits anywhere.
We made a big mistake allowing Trump to play Prexy and be the one in charge of making the rules of the game. You all knew he was gonna cheat before the game even started, didn’t you? And it won’t last long. He is making allies like Australia into offended enemies. He is banning burn victims, heroic Iraqi translators, doctors, and researchers from coming into the country with their entry visas and green cards and other proof that they have a right to be here. He is burning up any goodwill and patience and level-headedness that we have tried to afford him. He will be impeached, or worse, sooner rather than later. And then we will have to live with the irreparable damage he has done.
And we probably deserve it. We have made mistakes before, and if we live long enough, we will make more in the future. But this was a big one. And I don’t have to feel happy about it. No matter what my conservative friends on Facebook tell me… or what names they call me.
So that’s where the bird-walking comes in. The mind has to wander away down paths of lesser resistance. We need to go where the sandpiper would go, walking down the beach to look for new and interesting-looking seeds to eat.
You really should add this to your Bob Ross Bible if you haven’t already.
All of my illustrations in this article, except for the walking bird, which I drew myself, are clipped directly from Facebook. Facebook is sometimes the soul source of wisdom for Village Idiots, and I should probably make an effort to be one less of the time. But it is also an excellent source of bird-walking topics that get my mind off the terrible things and onto free-floating tangents that take me to places my mind would really rather be.
I would’ve liked to have attended Pillsbury’s funeral, but the meme only gave the time and length of the service, not the date. I fear that by now I have missed it. But I am sure the service was well done.
Nostalgia memes on Facebook are great. They make me feel all squishy and sad again about the times long gone and how terrifyingly horrible they were compared to how terrible they are now.
Remember John Wayne Gacy? Or reports on television about the Viet Nam War? With pictures? Full color pictures of the My Lai Massacre in living color on NBC, with all the blood in bright red. Yeah, that stuff on TV kept us outdoors quite a lot.
But Facebook bird-walking is a dangerous sport. If you let it, it will eat up your whole life, minute by minute, hour by hour. And I’m not sure it makes you smarter in any way. I know some pretty stupid people who are on Facebook quite a lot.
Bird-walking at its best, though, is to coddiwomple. And though you don’t know where you are going, you will get there sooner or later, so you might as well look at the scenery and appreciate the irony along the way. Life should be a leisurely stroll, not a rush to get away from gold-plated pumpinheads with executive orders in their tiny, tiny hands.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, clowns, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, irony, memes, Paffooney
Tagged as bird walking, Facebook, politics