Ramblings

My wife wants me to tell potty training stories, but, alas, I’m not sure how to make those interesting. There was the time that our oldest used her crap to draw on the walls of my parent’s house, or the time just recently when our youngest came home from vacation and celebrated by taking a dump out in the driveway. The bottom line is that gross things come out of kid’s bottoms, and there are only so many ways to describe a rogue bowel movement. If Mrs. Cornell wants to make a guest post on the subject, she’s welcome to do it. All I can say is she’s far more tolerant of my children’s bowels than she is of mine.

She’s started a new yoga class and brought home the literature therefrom, which maintains that yoga clears out your colon and cures AIDS. Neither one of us has AIDS, so that’s lost on us. However, that colon thing seems promising. I’m still in my personal trainer hell, and I almost fainted on Wednesday in my first workout since my return. Exercise just blows. There’s no way around it.

I’m reminded of one of my old acting professors who smoked incessantly and mocked the people who talked about smoking ten years off of your life. “Folks,” he’d say, “it’s the last ten! What am I missing, a chance to drool into my soup?” I feel that way about exercise. So what if I live longer? If I subtract the time exercising from my extended life, I come out just about even, don’t I? Actually, no, because the quality of life improves. I have to admit I feel better and have more energy to do stuff. And smoking, I’ve decided, doesn’t just lop off ten years – it accelerates those years, so that you get to drool into your soup ten years earlier. I remember the guy we hired to move us from St. George to Sandy had the worst emphysema you’ve ever seen. We called him Gollum, because he had to painfully slurp in each breath and only seemed comfortable when he had a cigarette, and he smoked a pile of them. I’d bet a whole lot of money that the dude is dead by now.

Forgive me if I don’t shed any tears. This dude was scum. He’d hire black assistants to help him pack his truck, and he’d spend all day hurling racial epithets at them until they quit, so he wouldn’t have to pay them. He ran out of boxes while he was packing us and asked us to go to the dumpster behind the mall to get some more. And to top it off, when it was all over, we found out he’d stolen our television set. I’ve forgotten his name and the name of the company, so I can’t warn you away from using him. But as I say, he’s probably dead, so it doesn’t matter.

Tony Snow is dead, too, and that makes me sad. He was a classy, funny guy – easily the best press secretary of any president I’ve seen in my lifetime. I was listening to Condoleeza Rice praising him, and she said that Tony Snow will never be forgotten. And it dawned on me that she’s absolutely wrong. Everybody is eventually forgotten. Seriously. How many people’s names and accomplishments outlast their lifetime by more than a couple of decades or so? Even historical figures like kings and presidents get forgotten relatively quickly. All the great artists and writers like Shakespeare and DaVinci – they’ve only been dead for a few hundred years. They’ve beaten the odds, but will they still be remembered in another thousand years? Can you think of any artists from 1008 or earlier whose names ring a bell today?

The only exception to this rule that I can think of is religious figures. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha – these dudes have stuck around for a mighty long time. That’s why L. Ron Hubbard founded a religion – he wanted to carve his name into history forever. He’s succeeded in lingering for an extra couple of decades, but I’d bet a million dollars that he’ll be completely forgotten in less than a century. (If I’m wrong, I’ll be dead before it can be proven, so no one will be around to collect.)

I think there might have once been a point to this post, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it is.