COLUMN: It's not what I Intended

By Tobin Barnes

I try to have the best intentions.

It's one of the easiest things to do...yeah, going around having good intentions, like little Miss Mary Sunshine. I do it all the time.

Unless you're an evil and demented Jeffrey Dahmer-type sucker, intending to do good is a walk in the park.

So that's me, Mr. Good Intentions. That's probably you, too.

But, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Supposedly, that thought originated with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who, I'm assuming,

was a tortured cleric suspicious of anything that smacked of the least bit of fun. His original thoughts were actually more like this: "Hell is full of good wishes and desires."

In other words, if wishes and buts were candy and nuts, it'd be Christmas every day.

Saint Bernard may have been inspired in his morbid musings by the Roman writer Virgil,

who said, "It is easy to go to hell."

And I agree. Amen, brother. Especially when we're talking about waist size. As in "Man,

he really went to hell, didn't he?" Chest of drawers disease can happen to anybody in their 30's or 40's when a guy's chest starts falling into his drawers.

Can happen to women, too. "Man, did she ever go to hell." Death by chocolate.

Uh huh, we fall far short of our intentions. We never intended to get fat, ugly and lazy--

just the opposite--but, yup, there we are. At least 10,000 times along the way of life, we've said, "Oh...what the hell!" to everything from another piece of pizza to another evening on the couch.

(Hell has evidently become central to this analysis, hasn't it?)

Nevertheless, despite all evidence to the contrary, past experience doesn't stop us from

continuing to have good intentions.

I'm as guilty as the next guy--you maybe. I'm still at my age chock-a-block full of wistful

thinking. Experience has done nothing for me. I haven't aged a bit in this singular respect. I'm still a babe in the woods.

My worst domain of unfulfilled intentions comes when I've got free time coming up on

the horizon. While I'm still busy with the chores of the workaday world, I can weave an amazing magic carpet illusion made up of all kinds of productive uses for those upcoming, long-wished-for idle hours, days, or maybe even weeks.

Oh, it will be glorious!

I'll read volumes by great masters, I'll start writing the great South Dakota novel, I'll

perfect my French, I'll lower my handicap by five strokes, I'll slim down to my high school belt size, I'll build great social relationships that will spread my bumptious personality all over town by changing overnight from an introvert to an extrovert.

I'll...I'll...oh, I can come up with dozens of things I'll do with that spare time. The list of

good intentions becomes infinite like a manic-depressive on the upswing.

And, of course, at the end of that beneficent bout of free time, I've accomplished hardly

anything. Then I'm like a drunk with a hangover, a druggy in withdrawal. With just a few hours of that precious free time left, the high grinds into a low. Little is left of my intentions but sad, sorrowful regrets.

Yes, woe is me.

But I've thought of a remedy. Hey, I'm going to turn this cycle around. From now on, I'm

going to expect absolutely nothing of my idle hours. Instead, I'm going to sit on my butt all day, stuff my face, zone out, and try to accomplish a totality of zilch--let myself morph into a gigantic, parasitic pustule of dependency.

Then if I do anything whatsoever during that period...anything, I say...even the least bit of

anything, and I'm bound to do a some little something of value here and there--even if by

accident--then that'll be a great positive good, because nothing good was ever intended.

What a turnaround! What a revelation! No more hangover, no more withdrawal, no more hell. It will now be a matter of "Look what can happen when I don't set my mind to it."

PAST PERSONAL FAVORITE: Days of the Living Dead

By Tobin Barnes
My father-in-law was a mortician.

Said he’d be the last one to let me down. Har!

Didn’t work out that way, but the image has stuck. I see him pushing the button, the motor kicks in, and soon I’m six feet under.

A goner.

But sometimes, even while we’re alive, we have to die a little to stay vital.

You’ve been there.

Every once in a while—to merely survive the day-to-day rat race—a guy’s got to turn into a zombie.

Know what I mean?

Yeah...that’s right...kinda become undead.

Doesn’t mean he’s got to stop functioning, just that he has to take it down a couple notches from maybe prime operating performance.

Ironically enough, it’s actually a survival technique.

Oh, the guy’s still functioning when he’s in his zombie mode, still going through the motions—just not completely there. Numb might be a better description.

And numb can be good.

That way, in the undead state, time passes during unpleasant periods without the pain of being truly present.

You’ve seen the movies about the undead. We guys get just like them sometimes.

The zombies stumble and bumble and mumble across the screen. They grab at things, but miss. They chase after things, but stagger along, stumble and fall. They try to communicate, but it’s just stupid cave man talk. Aargh! Urpp!

And who can blame them? Heck, they just climbed out of a grave, for crying out loud. It’s been a bad couple decades. They aren’t what they used to be. They can’t even put their arms down.

But, after a fashion, zombies still go about their business, though admittedly not very effectively—only victims they ever catch are their cousins, the brain dead—but nonetheless their awkward gallumphiness has a certain impact on others.

After all, zombies are hard to miss. They meander into the local bar or stop-and-rob, people are bound to scream.

And so we guys do the zombie routine during our rough patches, like during a rainy weekend with no golf or midway through an endless project at work. Or like Dilbert during a meeting.

Also helps when a guy’s short on cash. Turns into a zombie, he doesn’t care. (After all, real zombies don’t carry around much cash. Heck, the undertaker took it.)

Like I said, a guy feels less pain when he’s like a zombie—makes things more bearable, if not necessarily pleasant.

Time enters a fog, and when he resurrects, he’s on the other side of an obligation.

I was in zombie mode for a time last week. Uh huh, I was undead.

I was in the nether state of there and not there.

Oh, I was breathing. I was talking, kinda. And I was functioning at a minimal level, I suppose.

But people probably looked at me and thought, “Guy’s a zombie!”

Didn’t bother me, though.

Nice thing about being a zombie, you don’t care what people think.

Besides, now I feel a lot better. Almost alive.

COLUMN: Just Give Me the Good Stuff

By Tobin Barnes

            “I don't need to know how long your newborn is. I'm not a baby tailor.”

            Har!

            And here’s another one:

            “I know making good time is important, but if Indiana Jones is beating people up on your vehicle, I say slow down and pull over.”

            Again Har!

            Those are a couple of Tweets by Tim Siedell @badbanana that I have “favorited” at one time or another and thereby saved for I don’t know how long. No one will tell you that, but they will tell you that bad stuff about you on the Internet will last for eternity. But then again, maybe things on the Internet have a half-life like nuclear waste.

Here’s another one I favorited by Molly McAleer @Molls: “I would buy you a clue if they made them in your size.”

Yeah, another good one; that is, if you are me. But maybe this kind of wit isn’t up your alley. And that’s the thing about social websites. Most of the stuff you run into on sites like Twitter is, to put it bluntly, complete crap.

Same goes for the other social websites—mostly chaff without many kernels of wheat. A guy’s got to wade through a lot of sludge to find the occasional thing of interest.

Take Twitter, for instance…as long as we started there. I bet I scroll through at least thirty Tweets before I get a Har! or even a Huh!

I should have better things to do than wasting my time on such an unprofitable slog. Or anyway, you’d think so, but I guess I don’t.

So what’s with the other twenty-nine Tweets that contained absolutely nothing for me? People obviously wrote them thinking at least one someone else, somewhere would find them interesting.

And, well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the Internet in a nutshell. There’s something for everyone, just not necessarily where you’re looking at any given particular moment.

Same thing can be said for the mega-beast of social sites, Facebook. Sorry to say, despite the fact that the entries on Facebook are put there by my “friends,” most of them—again being blunt—aren’t of much interest to me.

Of course, my “friends” who are doing the posting have many friends other than me, oftentimes hundreds of them. (By the way, how many “friends” is too many?) And maybe those uninteresting posts, from my perspective anyway, were actually meant for some of their many other friends and not me.

So, okay. I get it. The majority of what’s on my social sites isn’t meant for me in particular, given my stodgy, less-than-all-encompassing nature.

But why shouldn’t it be? What with all the algorithms (I had to look up that spelling) and whatnots and scientific digital gobbledygook, something amazing should be out there eliminating all that chaff-like stuff from my online horizon. Yeah, please spare me the snoozers. Just give me the info only I want.

And the Internet should certainly know what I want by now.

Through cookies, spiders, and I-don’t-know-what-all, cyberspace has been watching my every digital move like a celebrity stalker for decades now, and I’m no celebrity. It knows my sites, my “likes,” my favorites, my smiley faces, and heck, who knows? It might even be looking at me through that little camera on the computer whenever it wants, although I can’t imagine when and why that might be.

As we’ve just learned in the news, the government can do amazing things with so-called metadata like this. With relatively insignificant bits like phone numbers and time spans it can supposedly stop 9/11 knockoffs and other nefarious deeds planned by evildoers.

So why can’t all this metadata be used to perfectly customize my content? Why can’t it be used to give me ONLY stuff like this on Twitter:  

“When my phone says ‘searching,’ I hold it to my heart & whisper ‘Me too, phone, me too,’ then burst into tears.” lauren caltagirone @MrsRupertPupkin

 “Millions of people firmly believe that I wrote every word of the Bible... yet they still haven't bothered to read it all.” almighty god @almighty god

“Art Thief Will Not Have To Return 125 Clown Paintings” and “Watchdog Group Says Mailmen Pose Biggest Threat.” CabbageNews @CabbageNews

“It's not that I don't like you. I mean, it's not that I DO like you, but....” Le Ms. @debihope

Good New Yorker Cartoon: Lives Lost