THIS IS WHY YOU'RE MISERABLE

          Watch the news religiously and you find ten things immediately that make you want to bash your head through the drywall. Healthcare costs, terrorist attacks, taxes, riots, murders, Congress’s apparent ineffectiveness, the Donald, global warming, brush fires, run-amok glutens everywhere, pollution and they quit making your favorite brand of cookie. Damn.

You can find something to be pissed off at every single hour of every single day.

Some people live their lives that way.

I refuse to.

Things could be worse, times have been worse. There is always something bad going on you could focus on, something that could be improved or fixed.

Things are getting incrementally better all the time.

Our collective lives are fantastic by perspective. Even the poor in this country are part of the one percent of the world.

These times we live in are amazing.

It wasn’t that long ago and then all the way back through history and a hundred thousand years before that, everyone had a mouthful of rotted teeth and didn’t know what to do about it other than to spit out the rotten ones when they fell out or pull them.

I have an aunt who contracted polio and has one leg two inches shorter than the other. She has special shoes now but most of her life she had a block of wood strapped under one of her shoes so she could walk more evenly.

Polio has almost been eradicated. Small pox is. Influenza killed 17,000,000 in the late 1910’s. My great grandfather died of a lanced hand back then. The child mortality rate was terribly high throughout history until the last one hundred years. Most children did not survive to their first birthdays for most of mankind.

           There were times when women were treated like property, were beaten and mistreated, “to keep them in line.” It was not against the law. Women could not purchase homes or cars on their own, could not be caught smoking, were not allowed to vote.

Two generations previous to changing those archaic ways of thinking, slavery was outlawed in this country. Slavery had been an institution going back to the beginning of time. It still exists in some form or another in parts of the world.

And since the end of slavery in this country, for a hundred more years thereafter, blacks were repressed, mistreated, hung, not allowed to vote, burned out of their homes. It was a horrible, horrible time; and yes, prejudices and racism abound to this day.

President Trump says this or does that, tweets something else stupid, when President’s should not be tweeting, he’s supported by a bunch of right-wing goons I have nothing but venom for, and has made innumerable idiotic statements or characterizations about journalists or the media that is completely and utterly inappropriate, misleading, and most are downright wrong. And this is my opinion for the guy I voted for.

The last renters’ I had bailed out on me owing me several thousand dollars. They had three large dogs that crapped throughout the house while they were on vacation looking for a place they were going to skip out of town for. They left a mess and damaged carpets that cost me to clean and repair–this from a couple that I thought were friends. They stole a hundred landscape blocks I had stored there, a tool stand, and I helped them out with the electricity bill that was past due before I was aware of their plan to stiff me. They built bunk beds and a toy box using MY construction material and nailed them into the hundred-year-old plaster walls. Hauling ass to Georgia, they left so much broken furniture, it filled a 20-yard dumpster by itself.

There was the renter the police called me about and asked questions about a burglary in progress. When the police got there to investigate, they found no one I had rented to living there but some others. Those others had controlled substances on them and had been smoking crack.

When I finally found the renter that was owing me the past month’s rent, I told her and her mother to leave. They begged to stay and said they would make things right. But they never do. I had no remorse when they left. Yes, they left a mess, too. They had only been there four months and it took us a week to clean-up after them.

There was this woman who had two-million dollars in a trust fund who paid her rent out of it. After being in the house for less than a year, she broke the lease and left without telling my property manager but left her 20-something-year-old son and a dog that soiled the carpet. The garbage disposal failed to work, it looked like they had tried to shove a turkey down it. Food and dirty water were backed up in the sink and the house stunk because the electric had been off for well over several weeks. It took several weeks to clean after them.

I am still angry with them, all of them, I want to sock them in the face. That definitely would make me happy but the damages were done, they are gone, the money they owe me will never make it to my mailbox or bank. What each of these imbeciles did was teach me a lesson and maybe I will learn how to adjust how I trust people or up the rent on everyone else to whom I currently rent.

Regardless, I choose not to let them take my happiness away. I won’t give that power to anyone else.

People and things can do that to you. Find how to be happy without being reliant on those “other” things to make you happy. People will let you down. Yes, they do make things seem a lot better at times, too, as well as having a nice newer model pick-up to drive around does.

As much as I like my newer pick-up, the old one and this one are nothing more than mere transportation, not happiness. That has to be managed from within regardless of circumstances.

Happiness is not an event.

You don’t have to wait for your next birthday.

You could always find something to be miserable about. Don’t fall into that trap. It also means that other things control you and I prefer to keep the control myself.

I listened to a great audio tape recently on the book, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.” We were driving back from NYC and my step-daughter had brought it along. I was glad she did. It made the trip more interesting and appear shorter than the 17 hours of driving that it was.

I will have to sit and read it again, I missed a lot of good parts and was unable to take notes. What I can wrap my head around at the moment is if you are rich or poor, you have problems. If you are anywhere along the spectrum in-between, you have problems. Jobs, taxes, gangs, drug dealers, food on the table, men, women, kids, sleep, bosses, the grass to mow or not to mow. Pick the suffering you are most comfortable dealing with, whether it is current job or spouse or the next one. Everything comes with problems. Everything.

Choose your suffering and choose your happiness. Same thing to me. Learn how to be happy in dealing with the things you have to deal with anyway.

If life were perfect, it wouldn’t be life.

If there were no problems to solve, there would be no reason for you to have a job.

Let’s say your boss calls you. “Everything’s perfect here, Bob, don’t need you to come in today.”

You excitedly answer, “Okay.”

Then you can almost hear him thinking and your boss says, “Matter-of-fact, Bob, you don’t need to come in tomorrow either.”

You hesitantly say, “Okay.”

Your boss continues, “Bob, what are you doing next week? Don’t need you here then, either, everything is perfect. Stay home.”

Recognizing you are on the verge of a new set of problems, you say, “Uh-okay, are you sure?”

Your boss figures this out, too, and says, “Right, Bob, seems things are going along so well, we don’t need you at all. Good luck on that mortgage payment, you’re fired, things are going great around here, with or without you. Why pay you, you know?”

I erred before when I said you could choose your problems. Just understand that regardless what station you are in life, those problems persist. You can pick the problems of starting a new venture or keep the problems with going to work at a job you hate. You will still have problems either way, but you always have choices.

Choose to be happy.

I did.

What’s that? Global warming, you say? Aren’t I worried about that?

Well, I am, but I am looking at it another way.

I’m just waiting up for the chance to plant lime trees to go along with my Coronas.

#liveandlearn #loveyourself #takeresponsibility #life #lifelessons