2 Many 2 Count

My intention is publishing this blog is to offer lessons I’ve learned in life to others. And there are 2 many 2 count, so I should have no lack of subject matter.

Most people won’t care about the lessons I’ve learned in life, and this is to be expected. People who are young aren’t usually interested in learning from others’ experience. They don’t see the value in it until they’re older and have made many mistakes their elders warned them about. Such is the nature of youth.

People who are old enough to care about the experience of others will often find my lessons pointless and will think I must just be stupid to think there’s any value in them. No problem. I’ll admit I’ve made some stupid mistakes, but I have faith that there are other people just as stupid as me out there.

A lot of people may simply not agree with my values and the lessons I’ve learned from my experiences. That’s to be expected because different people have different opinions. It’s ok to disagree. I only hope that some will listen even when they disagree. There’s something to be gained from trying to understand others, even when you disagree with them.

I guess those are some of the lessons I’ve learned about people.

I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, some really stupid. Like the time I stole the tractor, or when I said “Voulez vous coucher avec moi” to my French teacher. But one stupid thing I did rises well above anything else on the stupidity scale.

I started drinking alcohol when I was about 16 (that was stupid, but not the stupidest thing). I drank infrequently, but when I did I drank a lot. And if I drove to the place where I was drinking, then I would drive home … super drunk. And I did that plenty of times. I even drove home drunk on a winding mountain road once (about 20 miles). I finally got pulled over by a cop one night after I backed up in the middle of an intersection because I missed my turn. I was 18 then.

Driving drunk was incredibly stupid of me. And everyone always thought I was smart. Well, I am smart academically. For some reason, I never saw the immense stupidity of it until I got arrested. Then I immediately saw it. In fact, I’ve only drank alcohol once since then and I certainly didn’t drive that time.

It’s remarkable how well young people can deny seeing what’s obvious sometimes. I guess I just didn’t allow myself to think about how stupid I was behaving with my drinking.

I lost my drivers license for a year. I also had to attend several alcohol awareness classes and several sessions of what they called therapy. It wasn’t therapeutic though. I didn’t need any therapy because I had already learned my lesson, but it was pretty shocking to see some of the other people in those classes. Multiple DUI offenses, people selling valuable belongings just to buy alcohol. And I’m not sure if I saw anyone there who was going to stop drinking and driving once they got their license back.

The scariest thing of all is thinking that I really could have killed someone. That’s even more scary to me than thinking I could have killed myself. Oh how my life would have been ruined if I had killed someone in an accident. There’s no amount of fun that could justify a risk like that. But it’s easy to ignore consequences, especially when you’re young.

What shocks me is that ever since I was arrested for a DUI so many years ago, I keep hearing about DUI penalties getting less severe. Instead of revoking your license for a year, many courts only do it for 6 months. I can’t see any rationale for that. The penalties need to very harsh. That will help convince people not to do it again. And for those people who will never learn, then they need to permanently lose their license after very few arrests (or at least for several years). Drinking and driving is just too dangerous. And how can any attorneys live with themselves trying to get people off the hook for this?

I think that overall, people may have become a little more responsible about drinking and driving since my drinking days, but there are still far too many drunk drivers on the road.

Here’s the short version of this lesson. If you feed a stray cat, that cat will continue to come back and hang around your house in the hopes of getting more food.

Now the long version. Feeding strays is great because you’re helping them live a little better. Helping is good. But you’re also helping them reproduce and make kittens … every 6 months. Within a year, you could go from feeding one stray cat to feeding one stray mama cat and her 3-5 kittens. And those kittens may not know how to take care of themselves because you will have been feeding them since they were small.

So it’s a difficult situation. You want to help, but you don’t want to create more strays. One solution is to take the cats you feed to the vet and get them spayed or neutered so they can’t make any more. That will cost you, but it’s a good thing. There’s a terrible overpopulation of stray cats.

Another solution is to adopt whatever cat(s) you begin feeding (and still get them spayed or neutered). Then you won’t suddenly disappear from their lives one day and leave them without the food source they’ve become accustomed to.

When I moved in with my wife (she wasn’t my wife then), I had one cat and she had two. A few months later I discovered that she had been feeding a stray out in back of our house. That cat got into the habit of sitting outside our house and meowing. It took us a few months, but we decided that we’d better just adopt her and call her ours since she wanted to be anyway. She was obviously a cat someone had abandoned in the neighborhood.

Well, we also started feeding a few other strays and they spread the word so that even more showed up. And they started having babies, who we fed also. This was a rental house and we knew we’d be moving within a few years. But we hated to think that we’d abandon all of those cats who depended on us.

So we decided that would take ‘em all with us whenever we moved, which was an intimidating thought. Over the course of a few years, we managed to capture all the females and get them spayed.

During that time, we ended up feeding 26 stray cats, and that isn’t counting the three we started with. Sadly, many of them disappeared, and for most that surely meant they had died somehow. But when we finally bought a house and moved away, we had 15 cats in tow.

They all now live in a house with a specially fenced in backyard so that they can’t wander. They still have about 1/3 acre to roam around (maybe closer to 1/2). And they’re safe from all the stray dogs and pet pitbulls in the neighborhood.

It’s expensive to take care of them, but it’s gratifying knowing that their lives are immeasurably better because of it. But if you start feeding any strays, just think about what could happen.

As much as most people (myself included) would like the world to be black and white with clear lines separating the good from the bad, it turns out that the world is only black and white in movies and books. Not in reality.

Nonetheless, many (probably most) people try to turn a world of greys into black things and white things. And for the most part, they succeed. Because the reality in our minds is largely how we perceive the world to be. If we see black and white and we believe in black and white, then we will interact with our surroundings as if they were black and white. Even if they aren’t.

Growing up, I believed that gay people were bad people and I hated them. I don’t know where I got that from, but it was ingrained in me as if it were sent down from the heavens. It was a given assumption as much as apples growing from apple trees.

But eventually I met a gay man that I worked with. We became friends and had started hanging out a lot. I didn’t know he was gay, of course. We were eating dinner one evening and he told me he goes to a lot of gay clubs. And I said (I actuallly said this) “Why would you do that?!?” Why would he go to gay clubs? He wasn’t gay. Immediately after I said it, I realized he was gay.

I felt very uncomfortable around him after that and I gave excuses when he asked if I wanted to get together. I just didn’t know how to deal with it. He was a great guy. Fun to be with, good conversation, great values. And he was gay. It didn’t all fit together in my black and white world.

So I struggled with this dichotomy for many weeks. I tried to comprehend how a gay man could otherwise be such a good guy. Eventually I figured it out. It was obvious, but I never saw it before. Gay people were people too. They weren’t good or bad. They were people.

Now I can’t understand why I didn’t always see that.

Unfortunately, I had already destroyed my friendship with my new gay friend. We were nice to each other at work when we saw each other, but we had no more friendship.

This is just one of countless examples of how the world is made of shades of grey, and is not black and white. This was one of the most poignant instances of me learning this lesson.

In my early teens, I was saved. I became a christian and for the first time in my life I truly believed in God and the bible. I was much more zealous than most christians. It lasted a few years before I lost faith and became agnostic again.

But one day during those few years that I was a fanatical christian, I found a cassette tape on the ground. It was Iron Maiden’s “Piece of Mind” album. I had heard of Iron Maiden and knew that they were a heavy metal, and probably satanic, band. The tape still had the jacket with the lyrics on it, so I read them. I wanted to make sure that they actually were satanic.

One of the songs included the lyrics “O God of Earth and Heaven, bow down and hear our cry.” Well, that did it for me. Obviously they were sacreligious to say something like that. I proceeded to destroy the tape so no one else could be exposed to that heresy.

Ironically, years later I became a big Iron Maiden fan. And at one point, I found out that those lyrics I perceived as mocking God were actually a direct quote from the bible. How ironic again.

It’s just an example to show that if you’re looking for reasons to like or dislike something, you’ll usually find what you’re looking for. I was looking for evidence that Iron Maiden was satanic, and I found it, although I had to grossly misinterpret it to confirm my belief.

The more you can keep an open mind and avoid preconceived beliefs, the more you will learn and the better you will be as a person. Judge everything and everyone for what they are. Don’t prejudge them and then look for evidence to support your judgment.

And by the way, Iron Maiden is not satanic. They’re a heavy metal band. They drink a lot of alcohol, and they don’t do drugs. I like their music, but a lot of people don’t.