Less of an idiot today

Yesterday (early December 2008), I was waiting for the bus and I watched a young man (maybe 22) walk by who appeared cold. He was in jeans and a sweatshirt. It was 32 F and felt like 24. I imagine most might feel cold in this weather. As he passed I noticed an unusual sound was rising from the ground. I looked down to notice he was in flip flops. YOU IDIOT!

A much older and wiser man like myself knows that you need to wear socks with your flip flops when it is cold out. I am ready for shuffleboard at the retirement home recreation center TODAY. I have no issue wearing shorts, dark socks and sandals in public. Now, what I don't know is if I will buck the trend when I am 80 and wear baggy jeans and a grill, or be so advanced that I am wearing the style of a 130 year-old with my belt lashed tightly around my nipples pulling the pant cuff up to my knees, showing unmatched calf-length argyle socks and wearing glasses with lenses the size of ashtrays.

Now, I shouldn't be as harsh on this young man as I was once nearly as dumb as he. My typical goal during college was to see how late into the fall I could continue wearing shorts. I was in St. Louis so you can gauge the climate, but I would usually break within a week or so of Thanksgiving break as I had a 10-12 minutes walk to class, wore boxers, and updrafts would (I have to remember the rules) dehydrate the fruit so to speak. Why did I waste all my immunity when I was young? I'm an idiot too.

How many other dumb things have I done? Given that I am 12,000-and-change days old, idiocy comes in streaks, and alcohol has lowered my mental preventative systems too many times to count, I would guess 13,458,382. A little over a thousand a day, or just under one a minute. There are times when I will go up to 8, even 12 minutes between episodes, but I must consider there were moments where I probably racked up 5,000 to 10,000 in under an hour.

Say for example, when I went on an hour-long shrubbery-tackling streak, every split second after it started was a chance to stop tackling shrubbery and cease the idiocy, but it went on for an hour and many innocent shrubs lost all or a portion of their root system. I believe the biggest shrub ever successfully tackled was a seven-foot pine. It was recently planted. Not that that fact lessens the non-earth-friendliness of it, but I don't want to overstate my tackling prowess.

Being a frequent idiot myself, I am more able to recognize the idiocy of others. And let me tell you, IT IS EVERYWHERE! Go anywhere in public, sit down, look at the person on your left and then your right, odds are one of them has done in the last hour, or is thinking of doing, something even more stupid (stupider if you prefer) than what you just did, so don't beat yourself up (another form on idiocy). In fact, pick yourself up, head to Skyline and prove you were right when you said competitive eating was easy and would get you chicks.