Outplay Them

"Excuse me... do you have the time?" said one of the two young men in front of the mall's record store this morning.

Translated it means "Hold on there until my buddy blindsides you. And, by the way, do you wear a Rolex?"

I said "No" forcefully and kept a fast pace. He wanted to know when the store opens. I said a second "No." He walked after me in frustration as I kept him in my peripheral vision, but finally stopped.

The next step would have been to press the button on my switchblade.

This was early on a Sunday morning, while walking the mall due to inclement weather. I carry my handgun at night but seldom go out then, and haven't been in a bar in a decade or two. I haven't had an incident like this in years and years. I live in Podunk and we have little crime.

I'm 60 years old and so many pounds have transferred from my chest to my gut that it seems I've gotten to the point that I no longer repel punks. I remember the good old days when some road rage idiot would get out of his car, I got out of mine and he stopped cold, mumbling while he got back in.

The truth is that I can no longer fistfight nor run away, so my options are down to being more aware, reducing opportunities for incidence, and increasing the counter-lethality to match.


If you can't outrun them, outplay them.

But if I cannot evade, outplay or outthink them, I will shoot.




- text © 2009 by Willy

Exit Strategy

Johnnie and Jane went trick or treating on Halloween and knocked on an old lady's door, who gave them candy but felt it odd to close the door on them because they just stood there instead of running off to the next house, so she asked "What's the matter, kids?" and Johnnie said "We don't have an exit strategy."

Before you laugh: Afghanistan is costing us a million dollars per soldier per year.

A good joke can be reused. This one came out years ago and it was about President Bush on Iraq. President Clinton had Somalia and Bosnia, and it could have definitely been used with President Johnson on Viet Nam. The only difference is that this year "exit strategy" is called "off-ramp." It's all the same. It is unfortunate that we keep finding ourselves in the same spot, year after year, but I have to trust that our President knows a hell of a lot more than I do.

But wait... maybe I should apply this to my personal life. I should think ahead and ask myself "how am I going to get out of this" before I do anything. If I had, I would not have dated, gotten engaged, married, nor had kids (now you can laugh). I've made mistakes year after year. So, now, and in the future, I will not even date. I'm going to stick to the predictable, the reliable, even the boring... to what I know... solo... that has a built-in exit strategy. I will keep a much lower profile ("remain in the noise floor" in engineering), because I will not enter.

Versus the more common exit strategy of leaving once they get some.



- text © 2009 by Willy

P.S., That I need what I know is yet another blog.

To Believe the Incredible

You already exercise faith. You already believe the incredible... you're just used to it by now. Birds fly whether or not they believe in the laws of aerodynamics and we all enjoy the phone, TV, driving and flying... even though few of us understand the laws of physics. We enjoy a sunny day without understanding (believing) in nuclear fusion. Mother nature took billions of years, they say. Our technology took a couple of centuries to evolve and allow us to have our current era of magical gadgets, we think. God took six days, it says.


We can't see electrons any more than we can see the wind moving around... but we can see evidence of electrons via light bulbs and of the wind by rustling leaves. We believe through evidence, which is all around us. Yes, we can believe impossible things, Alice In Wonderland... and we do.

One must use faith to see the invisible and believe the incredible... and so we do, in this circular argument for faith.



- © 2009 by Willy

P.S., To be alive in such an age! - Walt Whitman

Lock Up?

"We lock up more of our citizens per capita than brutal dictators like Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro," wrote Cynthia Tucker in her request to end the War on Drugs.

I've got news for her. In the early 1960's, Castro's Cuban revolutionaries shot the entire previous party dead... up against a wall. No going to see a judge. It was televised, day in and day out. "Paredon!" they chanted. Thousands and thousands died, so there was no locking them up in the hoosegow. And many of the ones that were lucky enough to get to jail ended up dead anyway, due to starvation and sickness. Rape, murder and looting (in that order) were wholesale and only deterred by hefty walls and demonstration of defensive gunfire. No getting caught and going to jail for that, since the murderers were the new revolutionary party. Then in the 1980's, Fidel sent his prisoners here via the Mariel Boatlift and emptied his jails.

Since then, news and pictures have appeared of dissidents being beaten to death at the US Special Interest Section in Cuba ("the embassy")... no need to lock them up either.

Yes, Cynthia, brutal dictator Fidel Castro doesn't lock up the citizens... he kills them instead. Your statement is an insult.

"Tijuana authorities found 275 pounds of marijuana and a half-completed tunnel under the border," quipped Jay Leno, "Wonder why the tunnel was only half completed?"

Dahhh! Is it better to laugh with Leno and be ignorant like Tucker, or be stressed with the truth?


- text © 2009 by Willy