Money-Making Schemes and Metaphors – Thoughts from January 29 and 31, 2023

January 29, 2023

I just want to start this Thoughts paper by telling you, the reader, how much I appreciate what you do. I don’t know what you do beyond reading these words, but I appreciate what you’re doing right now. There are many words you could be looking at and you chose mine. It makes me think about crying with joy. I won’t, though. I could lie and say I cried while writing this, but I don’t lie. Exaggerating for comic effect is not the same as lying. I never lie when I’m being serious. Before I get too serious, I’ll end this paragraph and give you what you came for in the next one.

Let’s talk about vacations. Patti and I are going on vacation in about a week. We’re going to Disney World and staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. It should be fun, but I know vacations are not good for my health. I eat too much of the wrong things. Donuts are one of the biggest offenders of the wrong things. At some point, I need to learn to control myself. I can still have fun without consuming all the things. Also, I would like to write about each of the days in my Thoughts papers, but I didn’t do it on the last vacation we went on. I didn’t make it past a few thoughts on my first day. Hopefully, I can get myself to do it more this time. We won’t be drinking as much as we did in Vegas so that should help.

I’m continuing to digitize my old VHS home videos. If I hadn’t mentioned that I’m doing that, know it now. The oldest one was a video my dad made of all our 8 millimeter films. They had no audio. I was hoping my dad would comment throughout the films, but he only pointed out a few things in them. I did several stop motion films usually involving Star Wars figures. My dad said, “I think this is one of Brian’s space movies.” I appeared in several of the films in all my young, skinny, and goofy glory. My sister was in some of them. It was nice to see we got along when we were young. In our teenage years, that was not the case. Even cats and dogs got along better than we did.

January 31, 2023

I was coming to work the other day and I stopped at a gas station to (of all things) get gas. I only needed a little bit to get through the next day and I could get local gas that’s cheaper on my days off. In the quick time I was at the pump, the news on the screen above the pump told me about a recent death in the local area. If you’re not a regular reader of my Thoughts papers (and why would you want to subject yourself to the weirdness of my thoughts), you may not know my opinion of the news. No matter what the form of the news, I find 99% of the news useless and harmful to my mental health. If the screens only showed the weather and local traffic, I could see how that could be helpful to people. Hearing about a recent death does not fall into the helpful category. If this is the glimpse of the future that science fiction movies have shown us where we have screens everywhere vying for our attention, I’m going to give up on understanding the world.

I think it’s about time I talked about the money-making scheme Patti and I have been a part of for several years. We shop at Aldi as part of our grocery shopping trip. If you don’t know what Aldi is, just know it’s a grocery store where you need to have a quarter to get one of the grocery carts. I don’t like to park close to whatever store I’m going to, so we can usually see most of the parking lot. We always scan the parking lot and much of the time we find shopping carts just sitting out with quarters in them. If there is one shopping cart, we can shop with it and take the quarter when we’re done. Sometimes, there are multiple carts in the parking lot. Each cart builds upon our fortune. A quarter to fifty cents a week may not seem like a fortune, but that’s only because it isn’t. It makes us happy to not only because of the extra money, but it helps keep the carts out of the parking lot where they don’t belong.

My name is Brian. There is only one version of my name. People have shortened it to “Bry” or “B” but there is only one official version. Some people (like Patti) have several versions of their name. I rarely have to remind people what my name is. I think I just look like a Brian. Changing my name was never something I thought about. There were many jobs, classrooms, and other assorted groups where I was not the only Brian. It’s not a unique name. I’m fine with that. My uniqueness doesn’t need announcing with me name before someone gets to know me. I like to introduce my weirdness slowly to people. My normal name hides my thinking, behavior, and honesty. I can keep those hidden until I know people can take those parts of me. It is the very rare case that anyone gets to know all the hidden parts of this Brian.

Metaphors are never the best way to describe things. Nothing is exactly like something else. I find freeways to be simplistic examples of how people live their lives, but it is incomplete since people don’t live their lives in vehicles. Humans are very different when they’re not in vehicles. Most metaphors equate things to a perfect version of something else. Since perfection doesn’t exist, the metaphor falls apart the closer you examine it. Most metaphors are poetic and I don’t like poetry. The only metaphors I like are humorous ones. Comparing one thing to another is absurd. Using it humorously is the only time we should use them.