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Golfing Joke Number One

Golfing Joke Number One
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NB: Select “Play in a new window” if it stalls in Safari or on Mobile. Patience, Grasshopper. Plays quick in Chrome.

Original Post

My old boss John Gray loved golf and he loved a good joke. I always tried to have a joke for him. We hadn’t seen each for at least fifteen years when I learned he died in the hospital. That’s what happens when you lose track of people.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02.090]
This was a joke that I was saving for my old loss. John Grey. Unfortunately, I never saw him again. He died in the hospital. I think this would have cheered him up, so I can’t tell it to him.

[00:00:20.040]
I will tell it to you. Have you heard the one about the golfer who had a wife who was a hypochondriac? She was always thinking she was getting this disease or that completely going out of her mind. She was always worried that she was going to catch the death of a cold, which would turn into pneumonia and finally kill her. Well, one day she did catch a cold.

[00:00:50.660]
How a little bit of slight sniffles and pronounce that this was the end to her husband. She told him, this is it. And I think that you should make plans for my death and be prepared to move on after I die. And he has heard this before. And he said, oh, come on, one, you’re not going to die.

[00:01:21.600]
You have a slight cold, a few sniffles. Everything is going to be all right. There’s no need for me to make preparations. And she says, no, no, no, I really feel that this is it. And I think that I think it best if you.

[00:01:41.380]
And then she took a slight pause. She said, you know, now that I think about it, you probably already started making preparations, haven’t you? Once you heard I had a cold? Yeah, I think you probably already. Yeah, you probably already have a girlfriend, don’t you?

[00:02:00.360]
And he started to laugh and said, this is ridiculous. You just have a slight cold and your imagination is starting to run away with you. You’re not going to die. There is no girlfriend. So you need you need to start making sense.

[00:02:19.340]
Well, she gave him another long stair and says, no, no, no, I know you. You’ve got a girlfriend. You’re already starting to take her out. You’re already starting to make plans with her, aren’t you? I mean, you’re starting to go to dinner and taking long walks in the moonlight, aren’t you?

[00:02:40.790]
And he said, you are really off this time. First of all, this back up, you’re not going to die. Okay? You have a slight cold. That’s it.

[00:02:52.860]
As for me, there’s no girlfriend. There’s no romantic dinners or any dinners. There’s no moonlight walks. And she looks at him even harder and says, no, no, no, I know you okay. You’ve gone way you on this.

[00:03:11.880]
You’re already starting to do the things that you used to do with me, like, like golf, right? I mean, you’re giving her lessons at this point and she’s starting to take it up. And you’re really getting ready to move on, aren’t you? And he said, okay, this is really getting stupid and silly. You don’t have a cold.

[00:03:35.320]
I mean, you do have a cold, but you’re not going to die. It’s just a sniffles. And there’s no golf. There’s no girlfriend there’s. There’s no moonlight walks.

[00:03:50.900]
There’s no dinner. There’s nothing like this at all. And she pause. Well, now your already giving this girl lessons, like I said and teaching it. And then she really started to pause, and she says, yeah, you’re doing everything with her.

[00:04:13.850]
And the worst of it is when I die, you’re going to let her use my club. And he looked at her and said, of course not. She’s left handed.

 

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I Know You Are Trying to Help – Part 1

I Know You Are Trying to Help - Part 1
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Medical advice offered by friends can become as toxic to that relation as money between friends.

ROUGH AND UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:15.930]
Testing, one, two, three, four. Testing, one, two, three, four. Good evening from Pahrump, Nevada. It is 12. I don’t know, fifty in the morning, my insomnia of 30 plus years continues, but I. So many people that have it so much worse than I do, I recognize that that’s why it’s very. Difficult to talk about my problems when. Other people. Have. Greater problems. There’s a woman next door over who’s dying of cancer, my brother has now let’s leave my brother out of it.

[00:01:10.160]
He’s a private person. And I’m going to be speaking a little more slowly. Tonight, so that the bot’s transcribing this will be able to keep up. Everybody wants to help. But that. Everybody wants to help you with a mental illness or a physical illness, everybody wants to help. Everybody has their own idea on what will work. And your brother, your sister, your mother, your dad, they all have ideas and of course, the therapist, the psychologist, psychiatrist, they all have their own ideas based on their own experience about what will work.

[00:02:06.640]
Unfortunately, aside from the medical. Profession. If somebody close to you. Suggests something, they’ll get resentful if you don’t try it and if you do try it and it doesn’t work. Quite often this person will think that you just didn’t try hard enough. The blame comes back to me. I get. I didn’t ask my problem to begin with, that’s understood, it was a traumatic event that came completely out of nowhere, literally, I did not ask to cause it and.

[00:03:02.590]
I can play the victim card. This was an event I had absolutely nothing to do with, so that when. This person’s favorite technique or something they heard about on the Internet or it helped Uncle Joe when it doesn’t work with me and they yeah, it comes back to me. You didn’t try hard enough. And they can’t figure out why it didn’t work. This is very common with lay people or people that think they’re somehow have medical training or holistic people, you name it.

[00:03:42.020]
Uh, the. So I’m the one to blame now because it doesn’t work, I didn’t you know, I didn’t want to I didn’t try hard enough. I don’t want to sell self and not want to get. But we tend to be a blame society. We. Want to, we really want to. Figure out how we can assign. How we can assign the blame for something to somebody. Can’t be us, can’t be the person that gave the advice, they’re far too smart, and so this failure of a person to not get better obviously has something to do with them and not the person making this suggestion.

[00:04:43.510]
And this is just it’s extremely common and everybody’s well-meaning. So you can’t get too terribly angry at the people that are making the suggestion. But they can’t relate. They really can’t relate. That’s the verdict that goes to the medical profession as well as you don’t wish the ills of yourself on the psychiatrist or the psychologist, but they just they don’t have any idea what I’m going through, no matter how often it’s spelled out. I think they only seemingly the only connection I get.

[00:05:26.150]
Yes, if I lay out a nightmare that happened and. I’m. Pretty good at relating these nightmares and the. And I think they understand my suffering somewhat when. I described these horrors, I get some sort of human to human connection at that point, but it doesn’t help. It’s like, oh, I was once in a circle of people discussing anxiety. We were all anxiety sufferers. I’ve been I’ve had terrible anxiety since third grade and interesting.

[00:06:11.510]
But they all had panic attacks. That’s right. They had panic attacks. And I really don’t ever have them. And I really couldn’t relate to them. And of course. We don’t have any solutions, we’re just talking this out. As if it can be talked out, I’m not convinced at all, but if I say that I don’t want to get better, right. So but I if it could only work. It’s interesting with nightmares how if you dream analysis, classic utter failure with nightmares, because what happens is that all of the professionals don’t understand this until it happens.

[00:07:03.350]
Uh, uh, if you’re asked to keep a dream diary or such or recognize, you know, backing up, though, I never had violent nightmares before this event. So if I did have some traumatic incident in the past that caused them, that sort of sort of produced them before I was almost 30, but I never had a violent nightmare before my problem. Uh, but getting back to suggestions, the first thing, the psychiatrist or psychologist, you get a new one.

[00:07:33.890]
The first thing they want you to do is stop drinking or stop alcohol. I mean, stop alcohol, stop caffeine. And, um, you know, if you don’t, then you don’t want to get better. It’s your problem. It’s so early on. One psychiatrist, one psychologist. I was it it’s common. You see a psychiatrist for drugs and the psychologist for talk therapy. But she said you have to stop drinking. And I said, fine, stop caffeine.

[00:08:10.490]
Fine. So I went without alcohol or coffee for a year because I wanted to prove to her that I wanted to get better. And it just killed a lot of my socializing and it was extremely uncomfortable. And I love coffee. And that was all gone for me and caffeine at the end of the year. We’re getting ready to I was getting ready to discuss the results of the year, and that week leading up, I had nightmares that were.

[00:08:50.950]
That’s as bad as when they first started. There was absolutely no benefit in alcohol, caffeine. Uh. Killing that for a year absolutely did not work. And what was her? Opinion of this whole thing. Well, let’s try another year. And that’s why I refused I, I, I. Again, socializing that I enjoyed being able to. Come home after work, put up my feet, have a drink that was important to me having coffee in the morning, that was important to me.

[00:09:40.290]
But more important, of course, was that it did not work. And yet that is the first thing that medical people will do with a lot of problems is stop drinking. Well, so much for that, and I have given up alcohol deliberately, voluntarily, for health reasons in years past recent years passed and now it hasn’t helped. As I’ll be there, but. Again, she was she had no plan B. All she could say is, uh, another year, try harder, it’s on you, and that just makes me feel.

[00:10:23.770]
I didn’t want any of this to happen. And yet people are coming at me saying, well, you’re not trying hard enough, it’s your problem. No, it’s not it just because your solution doesn’t work doesn’t make me. Responsible for that failure. Let me pause it right now, I think I’m going along.

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Can Writing a Certain Amount of Words a Day Improve Your Writing?

Can Writing a Certain Amount of Words a Day Improve Your Writing?
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

Can you improve as a writer by writing a certain amount of words every day? I have heard this advice over the years or read this advice over the years. I remember Ray Bradbury in particular. I think he was encouraging a thousand words a day. There are other great writers that said similar things. The problem is in this equation is that these writers usually were very well educated, really well grounded in the classics, and they had. A much deeper well of inspiration than most of us do today, I think.

That that time, if you were going for a thousand words a day, I think a lot of that time would be better spent reading great writing or great poetry. There has to be some source of inspiration. There has to be some sort of background. And without it, then if your background is only, oh, I don’t know, newspapers today and blog posts like mine, if you’re not reading Melville and Conrad and Tolstoy and wanting to read those writers, Huxley I.

Your exposure to beautiful writing and beautiful turn of phrases, turns of phrases is going to be limited to none. And so. Your thousand words a day may just be. Reciting from a very limited vocabulary. I think it’s a well, let’s back up. If you are having to write, if you’re forcing yourself to write a thousand words today, then something right there and then is. Questionable, you, as a writer, like a bird, has to sing, you probably writing already.

I don’t play guitar, but I follow some guitar guitar players on YouTube and they want to practice. They want to play and no encouragement needed. I know in the third grade I tried to play violin. I was encouraged by my dad, thought a good idea at the time, had no interest in it. Learn to hate it more than anything else. I really wasn’t drawn to it. And so starting at the beginning, I think you have to want to write to begin the process at all.

If if you do find yourself naturally drawn to writing rather than that thousand words a day thing, I think. Direction is better and you can come up with any number of exercises on your own, try to write 750 words without any commas that will force you into thinking and looking at things differently, really practice journalism or newspaper openings in the old style, who, what, where, when, why, how. And you can look at any news report and try to rewrite what they’ve done and make it better.

And that can all lead into. I really encourage people that want to get into writing to get a relation going with a local newspaper, especially a weekly and. It’s take a look at how that’s done, because what happens is if you get on with the newspaper, even as a freelancer, even if you’re paid very little, you will be under deadline and you will be under somewhat of a style restriction. And that will help you improve much more than directionless writing, just simply writing to write.

You’re just going to be repeating your own thoughts. And that’s another. Speaking of deadline, if you’re going to do this thousand seven hundred fifty words, then try a complex story that probably needs three thousand words and put it into seven hundred and fifty or. You’re going to do a thousand words, try to do something in a half an hour. Something really readable, somewhat polished that quickly direction, writing with direction, but I’m not I’m not trying to organize your life.

I’m I’m just I think we’ll get back to what I think the question is originally is, does writing a certain amount of every day help you? And I think, again, you would be better spent. These writers encouraging it, had a great background in the classics. And I think that’s the missing part of the equation when they give that advice. So good luck to you and your reading and especially Conrad. Talk to you soon.