Wit: My Text from Write Club
I know this isn’t part of the debate, but I want to get one thing straight: Our nations current elderly are neither witty nor wise. They are idiots. Having a deeper understanding of past events and being able to turn that into a palatable quasi-whimsical yarn is nothing but idiocy. Most people don’t have a deeper understanding of their own shits and when they think they do, they are just spouting about shit they heard about what their shits might be all about as they are playing tug of war with bean sprouts sticking out of their ass, saying, “I’m not going to tell anyone about this one.”
I am going to start this out by telling you about my Grandfather.
My grandfather used to hide from God in bars. When people used to ask him why he thought God couldn’t find him in bars, he would say,” I don’t believe in God, I am not an idiot.
“
My Grandfather didn’t enter WW 2 until he was 39 years old. He volunteered at that age because one of his relatives in Ireland owed him $2,000, and he owed a bookie in Chicago $2,000 and he told the bookie he was on his way to get it, and didn’t want to lie to the man. He then told us that it was really bad to lie. It was all a lie though. He continued the lie by explaining that he wanted to be closer to the money someone owed him and they made him an officer. When they stationed him in London, he said, “I’ve never been that close to that much of my money before.” As kids, we asked, “Wait, did someone in Ireland actually owe you money?” and he said, “I sure as hell hoped so.”
To change gears a little bit, I want to talk about science.
Almost everybody out there has some basic understand of how our world works, right? The biology, the chemistry, the laws of physics that currently dominate our planet. You all also understand the universe too, sort of, right? You understand the tides, the way the wind blows and also how and why you are able to make your current partner happy sexually when you did pretty much the same thing with the last one. You probably understand earthquakes too and what it really means when your back hurts. You also deeply understand why one left-handed pitcher is better than another and why Mexico is so beautiful and so fucked up. You also probably have a deep understanding of how and why people die and how your i-phone doesn’t work when you so badly want it to. And also, why do your own farts smell sort of good to you but bad to others?
A wise person could educate us on those topics. Doctors and scientists know a lot of stuff, really cool stuff about all those things, and a handful of them are capable of actually explaining them without spazzing out.
They could explain why, after eating White Castle, people not only fart but they anticipate the fart and put a hand down their own pants to best take in the steam of the fart and pull that hand out and throw at their nose. A normal person might say that they do this because they are in some way proud of the awful smell they produced, and another person might say that they are attempting to protect others so they test it out on themselves. A person that actually understands the science of gas release from an anthropological point of view might have a deeper understanding of the cultural significance and it also sounds like they have a deeper understanding of having a lot of fucking problems.
My other Grandfather once said, “Mountains are really high, and we are really low, but sometimes we are higher than mountains, if you know anything about Geography.”
When my interesting Grandfather was stationed in England, Germany was still bombing. His job was to make sure that civilians were off the street during bomb raids. On his first mission, he drove his jeep to a place that was probably not going to be bombed; a real quiet place, a quiet place that was so quiet that it turned out to be the best place to bomb. His job was to remain outside while bombs were coming down and bring people who were outside, inside. He met his wife, my Grandmother, while she was walking down the street, during an air raid. She said, “I have to get home.” He picked her up in his arms and threw her in the jeep. She hated him and fought every step of the way.
After 30 months, the war was over, and she was on a war bride ship back to the US to be my Grandma.
When I first heard that story, I asked him, “Grandpa, Isn’t Grandma from Columbus, Ohio?”
He replied, “Nobody is from Columbus, Ohio and if they are, they are long long long gone.”
“Like Grandma,” I said softly and then I looked out the window and watched a squirrel run across a cable wire. I started to cry and with tears in my eyes, I asked him, “Is Grandma in a better place?”
“Better than here? No.”
“Where then?”
“Your grandmother is right here” he said he pointed towards his heart. And then he pulled out a bag of ashes he carried around in his breast pocket and said, “Mostly, anyway. This is why I always have an umbrella. It’s not good to get Grandma wet. “ He laughed for a second but then her got really serious and put his hand on my leg and said, “Always carry an umbrella kid. People might think you’re crazy but you’ll have the last laugh. It’s also a pretty good poking stick.”
“Mostly” I asked devastated, still thinking about Grandma in a bag
He took a long sip of gin, swallowing an olive and a dying ice cube and he said, “It’s not that hard to understand kid. Cremation is not a perfect system. There is always a little bit of loss.”
Those were his last words. Not in the world, but to me, because my parents stopped letting me talk to him anymore. They thought he was a bad influence because he was a liar and a drunk and didn’t go to Church. They said it wasn’t wise.
When I asked my other Grandfather where my Grandma was, he said smiling, “She’s in the Kitchen.”
My mom corrected him and said, “Oh Dad, Mom has been dead for 20 years.”
My other Grandfather said, “She’s in the kitchen, of Heaven.”
My mother laughed and my other Grandpa farted so hard it looked like he was being lifted out of his seat and waved his hand in the air, trying to blow it over to me, so I could smell it. The whole family laughed.
And they let me keep talking to THIS fucking idiot?
The worst part of the world is when people who don’t know shit SAY they do.
Wisdom? Every person who has said we are going to be ok has always been wrong. Why? Because we are always wrong, we are never going to be ok.
Any sense of us being right about anything is going to be wrong.
We are always wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong
There is no wisdom.
Not when everything is wrong.
