Friday, November 5, 2010

You can't go simple...that's so 1999

Do Grandparents truly know more or is it the fine art of using fewer cuss words to get a point across?

Author Brian Andreas’s Grandmother always preached about life being easier when a person concentrates on being simple minded. Simple minded? Weren’t they a Scottish band from the 80’s?

When I hear about simple minded people I get visions of my Mother back home in Montana typing on her old fashioned standard machine; the kind that requires a gym membership to workout the muscles in your fingertips. She still uses a rotary phone that hangs between the kitchen and living room; the very phone used when I’d pretend to be Kurt Anthony at Y-93. Most kids attempted pranks; I was more interested in people’s favorite songs. Their answers influenced me to cruise up to Rim Rock Mall and purchase what was hot while staying away from what was not.

If you leap onto dictionary.com and type simple mind in the search engine you’re instantly shot to Ask.com. Tapping simple mind into its system and off I go to Mind Reading made Easy.

Wow! Having a simple mind gives me mind reading powers? No thanks…it’s already being done on Face Book and Twitter.

I keep trying to watch the new William Shatner show “blank” Your Father Says but find it extremely difficult to get past the four decades of comedians that have earned a lot of money impersonating the Star Trek star. I’ve yet to hear him say something that makes me think, “That’s some seriously funny simple minded behavior!”

Personally, I’d love to go more simple; it’s my dream to rent a giant blue U-Haul it away trash collector and dump 31 years of radio living and breathing into its soul, “Here! You take it! It means nothing to me!” It’s not that being mean to the creative machine…radio people are freaks in the hoarding department, there are very few of us that don’t still have ancient orange reel to reel tapes and cassettes of radio shows we brought to life during crowning moments of assumed greatness.

Simple mindedness begins with cleaning out the closet. Not just physically but mentally. I recently asked myself, “Why is it so important for you to begin each morning with a fountain pen in your hand and a fresh sheet of untouched paper nestled next to a desk?” The only answer I could come up with was, “I’d hate to see my life if I didn’t do it.”

My Grandparents never looked tired, worried, bent out of shape a sports team losing, angry about the government or freaked out over the price of Red Delicious apples. Grandma Bakken had a straight ahead attitude—she wasn’t out to win a popularity contest. She came with one rule; if you’re stopping in the kids better have something to do. She wasn’t the hired babysitter, she had a life to live and nothing was about to get in the way of her claim to personal fame.
On the other side of the family fence Mom’s parental figures were gooshie and mooshie and filled with too many hugs and kisses. Being farmers from Wyoming they totally understood what being of simple mind meant; Grandma Dobrenz never owned an electric hair curler, she shaped that stuff with a metal rod she'd lay on the kitchen stove. Grandpa raised chickens to eat, if he wasn’t slopping the pigs he was ringing the necks of an innocent hen that needed to be un-feathered and cleaned seconds after he’d walk past them. Gulp! I’d lay away at night in my mother’s old bedroom worried that his fast neck breaking fingers were coming straight for my throat.

How many of us could actually attain the privilege of being called simple minded?

I work with people that can’t find thirty seconds to enjoy a career; if their ears aren’t connected to a cell phone their thumbs are rat a tat tat tatting a text message, then quickly running down the hall to hit the computer on the desk, send out an email, leaping into the car to have fast food only to return to the studio to do it all over again and again then wonder why they can’t get anything done.

I can’t be a simple minded person. Simple is a cheap word for I can’t or I won’t. To achieve simple means saying no. The very second you take yourself out of the game, life might not give you another year or decade or two to dance with the devil under a pale moonlight.

Simple minded people have time to watch the commercials on TV.

The DVR was created by lifeless junkies demanding space to create more nothingness.

What would I be like if suddenly everything became simple minded? It begins with a giant blue U-haul it away trash collector. There’s not much to look forward to when your entire world is clinging to a past you can’t change.

I know! Find me a box! I’ll shove everything into it then place it in the attic. Now you know why attics stink…it’s your former life rotting away.

Ouch…

arroecollins@clearchannel.com

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