My Turn in the Barrel
Everybody has an asshole moment
There’s an old joke about a barrel with holes in it, and a guy who asks the purpose of said barrel. Once he finds out, he understandably would prefer not to stick around.
Our turn in the barrel, to my mind anyway, comes when we discover we’ve been a righteous jerk. Or asshole, whatever. If we care about it at all, and I most certainly try to keep mine to a minimum, it’s painful when you and I realize we did some damage.
For my part, and this is not offered up as an excuse, I deal with sometimes considerable emotional volatility, which is the result of 21 concussions. If you saw the movie Concussion with Will Smith, that’s my world. However, what I do, I do, and I own the results. The only saving grace is that I’m aware that the tendency exists and that some days are worse than others. It’s like having a case of Tourette’s asshole-itis.
Granted, some folks come out of the womb like that, but that’s another topic.
Here’s where I’m going with this. I have a number of favorite writers, and some of them are very outspoken. That’s a big part of what I like about them. One of them penned a headline not long ago which, for whatever reason, landed precisely the wrong way on precisely the wrong day. I didn’t bother to note the author’s byline.