Over time, I’ve come to love my Mary with all my heart. I’ve
also learned to become protective of her, because the lord knows she has the
worst picker I’ve ever seen. It’s like she’s disabled but doesn’t know she’s
qualified for a placard.
This assumes that there is such a thing as a picker, and
that it’s on your person somewhere, always hiding and waiting to make a
decision. People decide to go to church based on less information than the
average picker I’m talking about, so let’s just put the possibility that the
picker exists on that level – God, picker – maybe?
Really, who’s to say?
(I’m not talking “American Picker,” an excellent show on
cable TV that plays five times a day. They seem to have a generally good
picker, though some of their choices seem overpriced to me.)
I’ll point out right here and now the obvious – she picked
me. But just as a tax cheat is what you need to put in charge of finding tax
cheats, (or running the country), I’m exactly the kind of man to manage her
picks from this point on, (I don’t do pre-existing conditions or regrets). In a
way, my past supports my current claims to bonifides. I’m just here to help.
As an aside, I’ve noticed that everyone feels guilty when
they are caught, and that only losers want to compromise.
Usually how this writing thing goes, when I’m the one
writing it, is: I mention Mary, then write four or so pages about me. At this
point, it could go either way – I’m sort of free forming things loosely, and
taking lots of breaks. Mary is an angel, have I mentioned that yet?
I’ve read articles in magazines, usually women’s magazine,
about women who consistently pick men who are bad for them -- both bad in general
and in specific ways. I’m not taking about that kind of bad picker, though it
is a part of it. Since Mary picked me, I’d like to move on quickly.
I’m talking about a woman who picks the wrong thing on menu
when we go out – oatmeal instead of gravy, canned cranberry instead of fresh --
the kind of woman who picks the wrong grade of gas for her car – that kind of
thing. Given the choice of two things, she picks wrong every time – it’s so
predictable that her kids depend on it when dealing with her. I try to help,
but sometimes she doesn’t listen. Mary very often does the exact opposite of
what you tell her to do, for some reason I don’t ever seem to know.
Now, truth is, I’m kind of an always has-to-be-right kind of
man, so some of this might be shaded a bit. And, to be honest, she is so nice
and helpful to others that it might just be a misguided form of giving. I’m
really just saying that it is, and she needs help with it.
Help is help, but it comes in many forms, or guises -- like
God, or mustard. In America, we tend to go Calvinistic most of the time and
diagnose moral failure for almost anything fun or danceable, and prescribe
shame to sanitize everything back to a baseline. Everything not of the elect and pure is of
suspicion and to be weighed and measured, and then, after all possible angles of
critical review, found wanting. Wanting of less usually – less passion, less
verbal and less visible. Those of the elect do not have to advertise their
godliness, it’s just known, and enforced.
But again, I digress.
Or, as of late, we go Catholic lamb of god and, after stating
our utter shitfulness, throw ourselves on the mercy of the unseen and
unquestionable. “Yes, I’m the worst, but what did you expect and do you have
candy?”
These approaches, though useful and appropriate for the
average things in life, don’t work for me when dealing with someone that I
actually love and care for – I want to help, not cripple her with the loving omnipresence
of a punishing and vengeful god. That’s what I’m for.
I’m going the Rocky mountain way – convince her that I’m not
the crazy one and then hold on to her until the thrashing stops. To paraphrase
the late great Martin Luther King, ‘A bad picker is not driven out, it is crowded
out through the expulsive power of good.”
Although I am also guided by Malcom X – ‘You can’t give a man
a good picker; if he is a man he has to take it.’
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