Random thoughts for an October day

Kirk Ericson | Oct 06, 20220

I often feel guilty when I stroll past someone who’s in a wheelchair, maybe because it seems like bragging.

Here’s a new, less judgmental phrase for suicide: Self-checkout.

The gut gets too much credit for making sound decisions.

There are more of us than there are of them.

When people decide telling the truth is better than lying, they become their unguarded and grateful selves.

Adolf Hitler wouldn’t have looked so evil if we had a picture of him sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner.

In the interest of language inclusivity, we should add “bogeywoman” to our lexicon. We should also add “sightscape.” It’s like landscape, but more expansive.

I know a fellow who’s a bore. He’s got nothing to say and no way to say it.

This whole organic, sustainable agriculture movement has gone too far. I recently saw a grocery store promoting free-range and cage-free mother’s milk.

White people who don’t think some Black people have had it rough should consider that many Black people have been threatened with nooses hanging from a tree. It’s a real thing. White people don’t have to face anything like that. What would that even look like? A Rice Krispie Treat wrapper hanging from their mailbox?

The most recent ex-president has made his idolaters forget that they ever supported invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and that they voted for George W. Bush twice. He’s erased their memories.

Hurricane Ian hit the wrong side of Florida.

I wouldn’t mind having flunkies and lackeys around, but I’d draw the line at lickspittles and bootlickers.

It’s possible to be simultaneously for and against abortion.

Politicians constantly promise to “fight” for us. I wish more of them would just do their job for us.

I was standing in a badly formed line at a Safeway last month when I noticed a fellow inching closer and closer to the Post Office counter, seemingly trying to get ahead of me, even though I was there before him. He’d scoot a little closer to the counter, and then I’d match his distance. We weren’t talking to each other, and I was imagining the conversation that appeared to be barreling toward us: “Excuse me. I was here first.” “No, I was” — that sort of thing. After a few minutes, he said, “I’m not trying to cut. I’m just trying to keep out of people’s way in the aisle.” It was just another case of a human misreading another human.

If I was king, I’d make it a law that if you’re in a store and an employee is on his cellphone ignoring you, you have the constitutionally protected right to take possession of his phone for two minutes to determine what he’s looking at.

Here are some fantastic dying words: “I wish … I wish … I wish forever …”

Mrs. Ericson and I made mistakes as parents, but we always had fruit in the house.

When someone says, “I’ll never forget …” I wonder, “What if you get Alzheimer’s?”

When today’s election fabulists were kindergarteners playing games like tag and hide and seek, they were the ones constantly and falsely accusing other players of cheating, and then trying to get a teacher or a principal to believe them. Remember those kids? They were the kids who never grew up.