Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 128
ESCAPE Weekly
Dec. 31, 2010 - Jan. 6, 2011 – 4
Is this year over yet?
Good year or bad, you made mistakes — so learn from them
Y
Now, during your trial, and while defended by
ou need the end of the year, my friends.
You need an end to what was, and a start the attorney who was arrested on the same day
as you, you couldn’t stop ogling that attractive
to what could be.
woman on the jury. And while you thought you
Most certainly, if this was a particularly bad
year, you want it to go away — hoping the annual were winning her vote with your smile, you were
actually giving her, and everyone else,
changing of digits will break your
the creeps. Hence, your inevitable
losing streak, melt away your spare
conviction and sentencing to some
tire, pump up your bank account
months in jail.
and make your recorded voice stop
At this point, the foreclosure on
sounding like a 3-year-old girl.
your home and your divorce were
But even if this has been the
foregone conclusions.
best year of your life, you need it to
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
end. You need this separation of the
You still have a couple more
calendar pages to focus your thinking;
brilliant decisions to put under the
to give you a kind of cosmic time out
Jim Walker
for retrospection and introspection.
Don’t Take Me Seriously magnifying glass.
You wasted no time and, on your
And that’s because you really
first evening in jail, you borrowed an
screwed the last year up.
extra mattress from an unused bunk to doubleNo, seriously. We are all imperfect beings, mes
up with yours and make yourself a little more
amis. No matter how lucky you were, or how
comfortable. This was fine until your cell partner
marvelously the past year played out, you know
you could have handled things so very much better. showed up and politely asked for it back. Because
you could see, out of the corner of your eye,
And if this was a terrible year for you
that he was much older and smaller than you —
and yours, you must realize where you were
responsible for the “bad breaks” that you currently and because you’d watched too many episodes
of “Cops,” you started hearing the “Bad Boys”
feel so unjustly assailed you.
theme, got some jailhouse attitude and ignored
Let us consider one possible scenario as an
him, pretending to be asleep.
illustrative example.
Next morning you found out the old guy
We’ll borrow a bit and call it…oh, I don’t
with the bad-back-from-sleeping-on-bare-steel
know, maybe …
was the uncle of the leader of the in-house white
… “The Year of Living Dangerously.”
brotherhood — which you subsequently had to
So there you were, driving to work, late and
join and to which you had to donate the use of
hung-over. The hangover was the result of a
choice you made at your niece’s wedding the night your skin for tattoo practice.
And guys can come up with some pretty funny
before (the same choice that eventually led to
your “fancy dance,” which is now very popular on skin-graffiti when they have nothing else to do.
When they ran out of unmarked skin
YouTube). And you were late because you needed
elsewhere, they began to pretty-up your face,
to go to the drug store for Advil in the morning.
Are you with me so far? Nothing here is chance which, in no time, limited your career options on
the outside, to say the least.
or fate — only choice.
But you weren’t quite through working your
Late, rushing, not thinking clearly and feeling
magic, were you?
less-than-well and less-than-friendly were all
Upon your release from jail, you decided to cash
ingredients you brought to the recipe. Stir in a
in on your YouTube fame and took a job doing
fender-bender with an old woman, her daughter
with claws, and a Jerry Springer-style show on the the “fancy dance” at the carnival. While this was,
actually, making lemonade from lemons, you
roadside and, somehow, you found yourself on
turned things sour again when you were caught,
trial for assault.
late one night, in the corral with the yak woman.
Oh cruel, cruel fate.
ThinkStock
Whatever you went through last year, it was mostly your own fault.
And so, today, you find yourself walking the
streets, wearing the sandwich board advertising
“Mel’s Chicken Smoothies.” You’ve pretty-much
got nowhere to go but up, so next year has to be
better, right? Maybe yes, and maybe no. It all
depends on realizing where your choices directed
“fate.” And it really depends on learning from
your mistakes.
Maybe we can do that together.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to
apologize to those I have wronged this past year
and forgive those who have wronged me — you
know, including me. I’d like to thank those
who have cared for me, buoyed me up when I
was down and, emotionally or literally, rescued
me. For me it was a tumultuous year — a crazy,
painful, ridiculous and yet beautiful year. And
the best part is, as far as I know, I’ve got another
one coming.
This time I’ll do everything perfectly.
Well, a guy can dream, right?
jwalker@the-signal.com
