Peripatetic, Writer, Harbinger of Mirth
On following others:
School is following others. Culture instills following others. Corporations, countries, and organizations require following others. Following others is not for the individual. It’s for the safety of the herd.
On freedom and the individual:
I need the freedom to express. I need the freedom to explore. I need the freedom to create. These are only taught by the world’s best teachers. Learn to learn from yourself or risk living someone else’s version of your life.
“Fuck you!” yells the boy-child biking past. He pauses a moment, then adds, “And your mom!”
His comment fills me with Righteous Joy in these final moments completing my cycle home. See, I was once a Little Shit too:
As a reformed Shit, I now carry the mantle of informing Shits when they’re being Shitty.
In advising a youth group, I once explained to a high school senior the reasons it’s inadvisable to urinate in a public school trashcan. To get through to him, I employed the phrase “sex offender registry.”
I yell “Yo!” when it becomes first apparent this boy-child biker is being Shitty. He hurtles down the two-lane path at a rapid pace, clearly intent on swerving around the woman-with-dog and into my lane of the tight, dark tunnel. Upon hearing my yell, he slows, so I relax… but then the Shit passes her anyway! At the same moment as me! Dangerous? Yes! And also stupid as fuck! Maybe wait for half-a-second, Dumbass?
After passing into safety, I holler, “Don’t do that!” (admittedly as a schoolmarm would chide a child), so he delivers the epithet invoking my mum.
I was a Little Shit once, but now recognize my Shitness. One day, I hope this Little Shit does too. ‘Til then, fuck him! And his mom!
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when my faithful Roadtrip Companion challenged me. “Compose the opening paragraph,” he said to me, “of completely fictional history book chapter.” I did. Here’s what never happened:
Released from bondage, but no longer welcome in the land they once ruled, the exiled Klimbaugh people went west, toward present-day Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Their search for religious acceptance would frequently be met by hostility toward their unusual practices, most famously in the Great Hangings of Dushanbe. The Klimbaugh’s movements can be traced until 1400 BCE, after which most scholars agree that the pressures of their hostile surroundings, un-arable land, and lack of social acceptance drove the final vestiges of this once-great kingdom to assimilation or death.
Julian Wise 