Getting All Worked Up

Type A personalities abound. Hot blood roars through our veins like 100 octane coffee. We live like ADD addicts, hooked on anything we can get hot about. What’s life without getting all worked up about something?

**********

I first heard the phrase, ‘getting all worked up,’ in high school when my daddy advised against ‘going too far’ with my first girlfriend. At a reunion twenty years later I discovered his wisdom. Others didn’t. It pays to listen to daddy.

Small towns of the South function on idiomatic parlance. Big words are wasted, and one is branded ‘uppity.’ The hearer stands there, blank face, eyes glazed over, comprehending nothing. Replies consist of the usual utterance of guttural gibberish as, “Uh huh, uh huh.” Uh huh has been replaced by the half-witted maxim of, ‘How ‘bout them Dawgs?’ which says everything and means nothing.

This summer on the Georgia coast we pretty much moped around in a stupor, cursing the dull, drab, clammy days that dripped with humidity. Such conditions are worse than a gulp of yesterday’s leftover Mello Yellow. The only winners were hairdressers. Humidity is the mortal enemy of women’s hair. Salon owners now drive Mercedes.

The sun finally came out. My wife got all worked up on where to put our ashes, saying something about burdening the children. She worried that the prime urn plots at Christ Cemetery were fast disappearing. We had to act. Her sensibilities got the best of her. She failed to grasp the fact that ashes of this earthly tabernacle have less sensory perception than the plastic flowers that adorn the future event.

Then Trump shows up. He slithers through crowds wearing diamond cuff links a little larger than baseballs. I imagine him as a washed-up WWF wrestler wearing a too-tight red Speedo under his Armani suit. Apparently that’s what makes his neck bulge and his voice squeak while spewing his fascism and body-slamming Doc Carson off the ropes. Entertaining, yes, but like football in June, it’s too early to get carried away.

Trump’s running for President, you know. In the GOP, everybody’s running for president. How can anybody get worked up with that crowd of yesterday’s stale lineup of lackluster losers? The last dud of this ilk that we elected was an empty peanut hull and, who, unlike the Clintons, left the White House ignominiously in poverty. We should add to the insanity by writing in ourselves on the ballot.

As for Presidents, I preferred Nixon, a man you could get worked up about. He was a dapper fellow who knew subtlety and carried a switchblade. He would have been a match for Vladimir, egotistically and stealthily.

Nixon knew when to keep his shirt on and stay off horses. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and loved to record the sound of his own voice. No one should get all worked up on their own voice or their bare chest. Pride goeth before the fall.

I liked Lyndon, too. There’s something rousing about ruthless men. Plus, he wasn’t afraid of taking his shirt off. I doubt the sight of his chest produced an erotic adventure for anyone, but it did reveal a history lesson. His surgeon carved it up to resemble the DMZ in Viet Nam. Some legacies are novel as well as memorable. Like Caligula.

Without politics, the only option left is to sit around and read insipid news about the slowing economy, Russian world domination, the Clinton’s cash and declining test scores. Don’t laugh. Test scores are serious business. This news is enough to send you to the edge of your chair awaiting rapture. The children may never leave home!

Now ‘rapture’ is definitely something to get all worked up about. Word is that the advent of the largest full moon in 32 years is sending ripples of impending rapture among the select Baptist chosen. But keep that secret…it might bid up the price of grave plots.

Lately the press reports that contrary to all logic, pork is really red meat, not white meat, and all processed meat is carcinogenic. So long salami. The Meat Institute is all worked up on rebuttal of this idiocy. Big Pharma is grinning. After all, cancer is big money.

**********

As for me, I’m level-headed and not prone to protests. But my friends, eliminating bacon from the shelves is really something to get all worked up about. Are you with me?

Bud Hearn
October 30, 2015