Cracker Power!

Boredom is one hell of a drug. I've been told when people smoke pot they have deep conversations that aren't really deep. These talks are sort of like the, do you think Bugs Bunny is hot conversation from Wayne's World. Right now I'm a force fed boredom addict. Remember when Rick James and his girlfriend kidnapped a woman, forced her to do heroin and crack? Take the heroin and crack, replace it with boredom, subtract one part Rick James and girlfriend and then add something definitely not as cool as Rick James. Once you calculated the word problem you get my situation.

Under the influence boredom, my work friends and I have gotten into some interesting, yet totally irrelevant conversations. A topic that frequently comes up is the, I can do such and such conversations. This conversation usually boils down to stupid human tricks. Sometimes you get some cool information like hey I could have gone to circus school, or I use to be a ballet teacher. I have no such cool talents or no such cool tricks. Because of this I like to play spoiler and mention things people can't do. Yes I'm a jerk. On one such occasion I mentioned that nobody could eat seven saltine crackers in a minute. I roll with a lot of type A males. This was taken as a challenge. Come on no way seven tiny little crackers can stop them.

Crackers three, humans zero.

How Oprah killed Santa

I remember back in my younger days I had summers where I didn’t do much on such an occasion I did a lot of TV watching. I’d watch it all. I’d watch so much TV that I could say all the words to commercials as the actors in the commercials were saying them. This drove my babysitter crazy. I found that I had a particularly good talent at annoying people, but that’s another story. One show I watched was the Oprah Winfrey show. Back then it was just a day time talk show. It wasn’t the huge daytime show it is today. That was when the talk shows were all the same and you couldn’t catch an A list star dead on one of them. It is funny the transformation the show had developed. Back then it was just like all the other shows. One of the shows was about things men needed to change in order to make their women happy. They had this one guy, where all his wife wanted of him was for him to buy new clothes. As I watched it was interesting to see his argument. He stated that he liked his old clothes and they were comfortable. That seemed reasonable to me. Then his wife started talking about how he wouldn’t even buy new underwear. She mentioned how the underwear he had had holes in them from being worn thing.

I thought to myself I’m never going to be like that guy. What an idiot, you can’t get that attached to your underwear; an old hat, jacket, heck even old shoes, but underwear? I forgot about my adventures in daytime television thinking nothing of the resolves I had made while I was younger. You see I hadn’t really tried to see the guy’s point of view. I just got caught up in the mostly female audience’s snickers, boos, and what have you.

I have a favorite pair of boxers. They have the words, “Santa is Real” written all over them. They are comfortable and I like the message, even though nobody can read them. I think it is for me more than anyone else, as underwear should be. Well after my last wash I’ve noticed that they too have holes in them, in quit embarrassing spots. I was tempted to just keep on wearing them just because I liked them so much. Then memories of day time Oprah came rushing back. I figured I owed it to kid me to at least keep a couple of resolves I made back then. So this way if kid me ever ran into less kid me I could say to him, “at least I wear new underwear still.”

By the title of this blog you might have thought I would talk about how all her gift giving overshadowed good old St. Nick, and in that way killed Santa. Nope, but in a way she did wound my childhood. I suppose it won’t be long until Christmas and I’ll be able to buy another similar item. Well maybe Santa is dead after all.