StraightUpAmerican.com

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve been doing something a certain way almost your whole life, and then find out you’ve been doing it all wrong? Me too!

But I have to say, now that my eyes have been opened and I’m seeing the logic of doing things differently I wonder how I never saw it before. When I think of all those years, decades even, that I spent carefully and cautiously doing everything I could to spend less money than I made. When I think of all the time I wasted balancing checkbooks and tracking expenses and worrying about repaying my debts. It just makes me want to whack myself on the back of the head. All that stuff is so unnecessary. Why did I put myself through all that?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame myself, of course. I blame my parents and my high school math teacher. How dare my parents instill in me a sense of responsibility? Who needs that? And this sense of fairness, what am I supposed to do with that? And this “Golden Rule” thing? That’s got no place in my new reality. And then there’s my math teacher who taught me to budget my expenses within my income. He even tried to teach us that it was important to balance our accounts, every month. Can you imagine? For thirty-five years I’ve been doing all this stuff and then, just this morning, it hit me. I’m doing it all wrong. There is such an easier way. So, here’s the deal.

First, I’m going to need you to send me a couple of bucks. And then, because I know times are tough I’m going to send you back a quarter. Then, I’m going to take most of what’s left and spend it on stuff that I think you would like. Unfortunately, this will require a lot of effort on my part and there will be expenses but I don’t want you to worry about that. If I need more money I’ll just borrow it from someone else and we’ll worry about it later. And of course, I want this to be fair for everyone so if you have more money than your neighbor then I’ll need you to give him a couple of bucks so he can send in his fair share, too. We certainly don’t want anyone to feel shortchanged.

For your convenience we can set up a direct annual withdrawal from your bank account. How about April 15? And for simplicity sake you might want to make that an account that will be a part of your estate. Thanks in advance and have a nice day.

Facetiously yours,

Tim Couch

Cute, furry, fearless

Greetings,

My wish for you today is that you experience a moment of wonder.

Things have been kind of slow here at the CowChows lately. Ice storms have a way of slowing things down, it seems. During this past week while everything was iced over we took to putting bird seed out back for our more Liberal feathered friends. It was nice. They got something to eat and we got to enjoy the show. The only problem came when Senator Squirrel discovered the seeds. Then he would run off all the birds and just sit in the middle of the feeder and stuff his jowls full of seeds. We had plenty of seeds to go around, but there was just something about the way he took over the feeder and wouldn’t let anyone eat until he had his fill.

So, when he showed up I would fling the door open and storm out onto the porch doing my Rottweiler imitation and make a big show to scare him off. At first it worked pretty good. He’d take off like a shot, scamper up a tree, and sit there and twitch his tail and chatter at me. But, after a few days he didn’t scare so easily and I found myself chasing him further into the yard. Sometimes he was back before I even got the snow off my shoes.

This morning I looked out and there he was, plopped down in the feeder, jowls bulging, and not a bird in sight. I threw open the door and charged onto the porch. He looked up, fainted right and then dove left. He went to the ground, but then he stopped. He just looked at me as if he knew I was all noise. So I started down the porch steps after him, and I made it as far as the landing. There was still ice on the landing.

My shoe hit the ice and kept right on going. I was immediately in full blown FDD (Falling Down Denial). That’s when you’re obviously going down but haven’t quite accepted it yet. FDD is also sometimes known as the Falling Down Dance. Fortunately, on my way down I remembered to tuck so my wrist and shoulder took the brunt of the fall. Unfortunately, I don’t roll quite so good anymore so it was more of a “tuck and splat.” After determining that everything still wiggled like it was supposed to I peeled myself up off the ice. The squirrel was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear him laughing somewhere up in the tree. I limped back toward the house brushing ice and bird crap off my clothes, and went inside where I belonged.

The thing is, the birds didn’t ask us to feed them. They didn’t ask me to chase away the squirrel. The ice storm came and we decided they needed us to take care of them when they most likely could have taken care of themselves. And the funny thing is, come the next ice storm we’ll do it all over again. Go figure.

Until next time, Brother, when life trips you up, tuck and roll.

Fraternally yours,
Tim Couch