I predicted Mizzou football had no chance against Kansas State in last week’s column. Last week’s column is a good reminder that I’m sometimes an idiot. Proceed accordingly.
Last week’s column also warranted a letter to the editor pointing out an error in my word usage skills and so I guess we can all agree that last week’s column was a turd in the punch bowl of newspaper columns. Again, proceed accordingly because I’m aging at a record rate, and I can almost assure you that I won’t get better at this as time moves on. I’m basically Joe Namath on the Rams without the good looks or ability to play sports at a high level. Or maybe I’m drunk Joe Namath on Monday Night Football trying to kiss a random reporter, either way, let’s just agree I’ve passed my prime and move on.
Foley pointed out that I utilized the word “opulent” last week that started this whole skid for me. Funny thing is the word has a long history in my family. My father, who was a lawyer, went to prison when I was 10 years old for stealing money from clients. The judge that sentenced him chided his “opulent” lifestyle in utilizing those stolen funds and so the word became a “mental marker” for 10-year-old me. I suppose we had an expensive dictionary that I looked it up in.
I’d love to tell you more, but I’m saving most of these stories for my eventual mental health counseling sessions.
Oh well, glad you asked. My father died on New Year’s Eve of last year. Most people that met him thought he was an entertaining and fun guy unless you got close to him. He was a born liar and narcissist and he never recovered from those afflictions, despite doing a couple of years in the Missouri penal system. I suppose they should have tried water boarding or something, but basic confinement didn’t seem to help. I quit trying to understand him or even talk to him the last 10 years of his life. His lies mostly were confined to Facebook during the later years, which I guess is more acceptable than stealing money from client’s type of lying, but it all seemed the same to me.
Honestly if me pulling the “Dad went to prison” card for this column does not get me some bad column immunity, then I’m throwing in the “proverbial soap.”
The positives of these experiences for me far outweigh any negative repercussions. I’m for the mental toughness that you see in single mothers raising kids, working and surviving. I’m for stepparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and a host of other people out there every day giving kids what they need to get forward in life when someone else drops the ball. I had all those things and I admire it when I see it being gifted to others.
My dad was quite the lady’s man. He liked them pretty or ugly, fat, skinny, whatever. We are not sure exactly how many times he got married, it was a lot. I attended a few of them. I just had nicknames for them to keep track. There was “Man Hands,” a former nurse from Arkansas and then there was the “Sun Dress Lady” that seemed to always wear sun dresses, weather be damned, and a host of others that I never got around to nicknaming. I suppose he just had a lot of “love” to spread around the state, or something like that.
That’s about all the damage I can do this week. Just always remember that this column is going to be slightly better than next week’s column, so that makes last week’s column better than this turd of a column, solving that problem.
(Guy Speckman cannot be reached as he is making sure next week’s column is slightly worse than this week’s)
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