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Happiness, your happiness and that of your friends, family and neighbors depend upon you creating happiness. Now, that’s not too onerous a task for humanity, is it?
Gosh, I hate being serious. I mean being serious is like being prodded with a hot poker. It is no way to live your life. I am not talking about depression although being too serious can readily lead to depression. I am talking about taking life too seriously when frankly it is all one big joke. Sometimes it is on us and sometimes well sometimes we don’t get it (the joke). There must be a remedy for this serious behavior. Aside from taking long walks and talking to myself as I point out my sideshow of life to anyone in the listening area. Sometimes I tell myself jokes to lighten the mood.
Which brings me to this week’s word LIFE! I like to take life in big exuberant gulps. I don’t like to mess around with tiny licks or tastes. I want to experience life in all its glory and frankly sometimes that stinks when I bite a bite to big to digest or a segment of life that tastes like shite. But nevertheless, I embrace my life with total gusto. I don’t like to namby-pamby around with it.
I want to rip off big chunks of life! I want to live my life like I am on a surfboard, experiencing every tone and nuance and not to sound to rote living life to its fullest and beyond that. And that brings me to this moment where I am living life on a farm that I call a ranch (a word ranch if you please and I always wanted to be a cowboy) because I really want to wear a Stetson every day and trade in my baseball caps for cowboy caps errr hats. As my daughter so appropriately states Home Home on the range, where the words and the alphabet play. Here’s a brief interlude with a poem about Cowboy the Poet.
Cowboy’s Word Ranch
Everyone called him Cowboy
if he had another name
it was long forgotten
Cowboy & long-time bride Thelma Lou
had some history together
before they got themselves hitched up
It seems there were some run-ons
with the grammar police
in their hometown
which no one seems to be able to recollect
But all was forgiven
When they started
Cowboy’s Word Ranch
You have to understand
they started the ranch
Cowboy refused to call it a farm
on a shoestring
way before words were
as popular as they are today
It was a decent sized spread
some 3,000 acres
of some of the rowdiest words
to come out of the English language
Kinda wild in places
but they didn’t mind
Cowboy &Thelma Lou
pride themselves
on their eccentric ways
You can find words
of every description
all manner of lettered things
earnest epithets
sanctimonious soliloquys
colorful curses
spontaneous speeches
Imagine fields of free-range
words & languages
nurtured and grown
to the peak of perfection
Cowboy & Thelma Lou
take great delight
in their crops
growing the finest
letters & words
& Symbols too
You cannot forget
about those symbols
that would be
the worst of word
discrimination
& What better place
to find unusual words
than Cowboy’s Word Ranch
& As an added plus
they are all organic
Now back to our regularly scheduled OBS Post:
So, what is life you may ask. This word that tickles humanity on a daily basis. Life according to the Oxford dictionary is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. It comes down through time from Dutch and German derivations of live. And you may ask what is the purpose of life? To my way of thinking it is to survive a concept we went over last time.
It comes down to this. Why do I write OBS Post? I write it because I believe in humanity and refuse to be overcome by the bad news bad guys. I know that people are inherently good and I would like to busily create the future, a job that we should all be partaking. We must create a future for ourselves, our families, friends, and neighbors. We must create a future for all mankind.
So, writing OBS Post free of the entanglements of political persuasion. The whole thing is just a big con job, both sides at the beck and call of the rabble rousers. It is important to have a vision of what you want your life to be. Do you want to be attacking your neighbors because they don’t agree with you or are you going to sit down and break bread and mend your differences. I choose the latter because nothing good can come from the former, nothing good at all.
Happiness, your happiness and that of your friends, family and neighbors depend upon you creating happiness. Now, that’s not too onerous a task for humanity, is it?
Since I have been living on the farm (ranch), I have become more conscious about land use and abuse and pollution. We tend to take for granted the Thursday pickup of trash, with trucks grudgingly picking up our dross. I wonder when will the landfills be filled. So much trash. So much garbage. Where will it all go. Recycling seems to be a myth with the oceans swimming in plastic. For some reason I had the idea of these huge incinerators burning the trash and using it to create energy like coal. Except with all that plastic burning, it would probably kill off half the population.
We don’t seem to think about where that stuff goes when you flush the toilet or put out the trash. We take it for granted, like we do much of Earth, concreting over marshlands, wetlands, and swamps, putting the trash out for someone else to collect, poisoning farmlands with poor agricultural practices, I could go on and on but I won’t. I just want folks to be cognizant of their behavior to Mother Earth and her progeny and maybe even a little respectful. It wouldn’t hurt.
I want to proclaim once and for all: The earth and its inhabitants are not disposable.
Earth Day is on April 22nd, 2023 (I’m a little early with my earth gratitude). However, in tribute to that day, I bring you Michael Jackson.
Lawrence George Jaffe
Lawrence George Jaffe is an internationally known and an award-winning writer, author, and poet. For his entire professional career, Jaffe has been using his art to promote human rights. He was the poet-in-residence at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, a featured poet in Chrysler’s Spirit in the Words poetry program, co-founder of Poets for Peace (now Poets without Borders) and helped spearhead the United Nations Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry project which incorporated hundreds of readings in hundreds of cities globally using the aesthetic power of poetry to bring understanding to the world.
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