This Cat Is The Worst

Our cat is a moron. You know why he’s a moron? Because he always and exclusively lays (lies?) in places where humans need to walk. I have three examples, and they’re all from the last hour.  

    

You see this nonsense? It’s like he doesn’t even care that he’s in a doorway. Further, it’s not just that he only lays (lies?) in these spots, it’s that he tries to attack my feet when I have to inevitably step over him. He’s going to cause me serious bodily harm, and he doesn’t even care. He doesn’t even damn care. How inconsiderate and self centered. 

Consider this part one in an ongoing series of reasons this cat is an insufferable moron. But, most of my reasons will be that he is always where I am trying to walk and it makes me irrationally angry. Fair warning. Stupid dumb idiot moron cat. 

Songs I Loathe

Part I: Centerfield by John Fogerty

When it comes to music, I am a judgmental turd. I know it. I often think I hate more music than I enjoy. In that spirit, I present a running list of Songs I Loathe. Feel free to tell me just how terribly wrong I am. 

This one is first for a reason. I am 100% positive that I have never disliked a song more than this one. 

I am an avid baseball fan. I’ve been around the game my entire life. I LOVE baseball. I HAAAAAAAATE songs about baseball. 

Synthesized hand claps aside, what drives me unforgivably crazy about this godforsaken song is Fogerty’s insistence that he can somehow “be” centerfield. Even if you’re a fringe fan of the game, you are quite aware that centerfield is a portion of the playing field. Fogerty purportedly played the game, yet is unaware that centerfield is not “be-able”. It’s an area. You can’t be a plot of baseball land between right and left field. Can’t do it. Not possible. If you’re going to take the time to write a baseball-themed song, for the love of all things Holy, can you at least have a running understanding of the vernacular? 

If I were Fogerty’s coach, I would never let his ass off the bench. First, don’t ask me for playing time, and sure as the sun in shining don’t ever sing “Put me in, coach” at me. You’re not ready to play. You’re on the bench for a reason, John. Second, how in the blue hell can I trust you to play one of the most important positions on the field if you can’t even say it properly? It’s a preposterous notion. 

Tell you what, Johnny: instead of centerfield, why don’t you sit your narrow behind down and be “guy who is never, ever going to play”? That suits you much better, and it’s actually something one can be.  

You’re not ready to play, John. Not today. Not any day. Put you in, I shall not. 

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it. Have a lovely day! 

Follow on Twitter: @aaronmoore1322

  

Spider-Man vs. Venom

Last night my son wanted to play Spider-Man vs. Venom. This is an energy-intensive game where, as Venom, I get the crap beaten out of me by a three year old for an hour or better. The kid loves it. After working 7:30-4:00, I went to my math class for a test (which I bombed). I was beat. It had been a long day, and I just wanted to sit back and relax.

After dinner, I had a cup of coffee and flipped through Facebook and Twitter on my phone. My wife went to work out. It was just me and the boy. He wanted to play; I wanted to do anything but. The issue is that it’s not his fault that I was tired. Granted, no one has energy like this kid, but I gave him the bare minimum. We ended up just hanging out and watching old Spider-Man cartoons while I stayed stuck in my phone looking at stuff for school. I didn’t think much of it last night, but this morning I feel awful about it.

My kid doesn’t know (or probably even care) that my job can be hard. He doesn’t care that I’m tired. This isn’t to say that he’s inconsiderate, but these things don’t compute in his world. When I get home he charges me like a raging bull and he wants to play right then. Far too regularly do I have to see him disappointed when I tell him that Daddy needs some time to get in the door and relax before play time commences. That doesn’t make me a bad parent, obviously. The fact that I continued to put it off all last night, though, won’t get me nominated for any Father of the Year awards, either.

While I lament regularly that this kid is getting so big so quickly, I don’t think I’ve fully embraced the absolute fact that the time is approaching where his growing autonomy means he won’t need Daddy. He will eventually be too big to wrestle me in the living room. He will sooner than later be too mature to strap on his Spider-Man costume and tell me that I am Venom and that I must be defeated. When these things happen, will I be able to rationalize the time I spent on Facebook while sitting right next to him?

So, what I am advocating is this: put the phone down. Pay attention. Instead of lamenting the passing of time, do everything possible to not let it slip past untended. When my son is 13 and hiding out in his room playing video games instead of wrestling with me, I want to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was as involved as I possibly could have been. I need to know that I didn’t waste that time looking at the status updates of people I haven’t seen in person in years.

Tired isn’t an excuse. It’s not one I am willing to use anymore, at least. The time is too precious and far too fleeting. I am no longer willing to accept looking back and wishing I had done more. That time will be long gone, and no amount of wishing will ever bring it back.

I will be here now.

Invisible Truth

Twitter: @aaronmoore1322

Infinitely You

Ah, the once deranged mind returns.
So, here we are again.
And how do do you deal with you?
What makes you, breaks you?
What makes you tick?
What makes you “you”, you?
Where do you lie?
And how do you return?
I’ve never known you…

At once we become the thing that encompasses us because our choices are so fiercely limited, which makes us limited.
Indeed, our minds are limited which makes us limited which limits our limits, and…
In the end it’s you.
And you.
And you.
And that’s it.
Just you.
And you.
And you.

Just you. So, get used to you. You is all you have, and all you need is you, you.

Love you.

Infinitely.

Indefinitely.

Indelibly, you.

Follow this guy on twitter: @aaronmoore1333. Okay, bye.

Like Pieces of Glass

“Mostly I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world everyday. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand?” – John Coffey, The Green Mile

With a sick kid on my lap, I’m flipping through Facebook this afternoon as a time-passing measure, and it all just makes me incredibly sad. Maybe I’m spending too much time focusing on the negative, but more and more I feel like there’s way more negative than positive. Of course, that could just be limited to my social media outlets. I don’t know. Either way, I can’t help but feel like John Coffey in ‘The Green Mile’. All of this hatred and negativity truly stings like the pieces of glass John mentions.

I happened upon a Facebook page called “Being Liberal”, and realized that I agreed with their stances on multiple things…but then had the realization that what they were saying was also hatred in reverse. I often talk about how I loathe the conservative agenda that seems to speak out against things like how the LGBTQ community and Liberals in general are somehow destroying the very fabric of our society. But this “Being Liberal” just made counter attacks against conservatism which seems so backwards to me because you can’t fight hatred with hatred. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction….
The chain reaction of evil —
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars —
must be broken,
or we shall be plunged
into the dark abyss of annihilation.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Strength To Love, 1963

I’ve grown so tired of people using religion and their denomination’s version of God to spread intolerance. I’m tired of that being an excuse for blatantly ignoring passages like Mark 12:28-31:

“28 One of the teachers of religious law was standing there listening to the debate. He realized that Jesus had answered well, so he asked, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” 29 Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The LORD our God is the one and only LORD. 30 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’31 The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”

I guess what bothers me so greatly is the vast division in which we live. Everything has become so polarized and so black and white that we’ve made it nearly impossible to have a discussion of any real substance. Rather, we allow things to devolve into petty attacks and smear campaigns from which absolutely zero progress is forged. At what point do we realize that debate can be healthy but that it’s also okay for the entire world to not share your exact viewpoint? 

I’ve maybe oversimplified things, but I find it incredibly easy to do the following: 

– Respect people regardless of sexual orientation, religion, or race. 
– Respectfully allow for differing viewpoints in conversation without becoming argumentative. 
– Allow for the possibility that I am or could be wrong. 
– Stand firm with what I believe but remain open minded enough that I can at least try to see another viewpoint or idea. 
– Research things before I spout them as truth. Research things I read online before disseminating them as fact. Research things to have an informed point of view.

None of these things are difficult, but they do require a bit of introspection and the swallowing of a modicum of foolish pride. 

In the end, I feel like we’re heading down a bad path. We’re so divided anymore in even the most trivial things that I don’t know how we can come back from it. Our politics and religion are standing in our way because we use them as tools instead of allowing them to work for us. As it pertains to social issues, name one important thing that was changed by bashing the President on Facebook. Don’t worry…I’ll wait. As it pertains to God, do we exhibit God’s grace when we condemn people because our man-made laws require us to do so? Is it our job to judge? Is it our job to hate? Or, rather, is it our job to seek out and attain a personal relationship with God and then spread His love? I think there are extremely simple answers to each of the questions posed.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Think about that lone statement. Could it be any more true? Damn it, man, we have got to get better at love. We’re killing ourselves and creating this toxic environment of hate, intolerance, and ignorance. To what end? I read the following comments on an article advising that Obama promised a mosque would be built at Ground Zero before his term was up, and I found it to be a microcosm of things. This, too, made me incredibly sad for all of us.

We’re better than this.

It’s time we realized it.

It’s not too late. 

Enjoy this post? Excellent. Like it. Share it. Check out some other stuff here. Need some positivity, optimism, and motivation? Check out Shorthoptimism. Follow me on Twitter: @aaronmoore1322, and @short_hOPT.

Time Alone

There exists such a thing as humility
Though veiled and hidden by vanity
Casting long shadows across fiery seascapes
And collections of wanton ubiquity
There exists such a thing as impotent insolence
And verbal repentance through inconsolable incompetence
And relentless petulance
And yet…
And yet…
And yet we remain negligent
Obviously obfuscating that which is so imperative
To the very fiber of our beings
To the bones that uphold us
To the earth that sustains us
To the love that escapes us

With time alone we can recant the empty promises of before
With time alone we can begin to see that forest for the trees
With time we can heal
And yet…
And yet…
Until we learn to love (and love properly)
Time will never, ever be enough.

-A.

A Time to Love

To say I grew up in the church wouldn’t be accurate, but I spent a decent amount of time there as a kid. Most consistently, I attended a Baptist church on Sundays with my Grandma Sleppy. Later, I spent time in another Baptist church, but it was mostly Wednesday night teen meetings that always seemed more social than religious to me. These visits were infrequent at best. I’ve never felt truly comfortable in any church, so I have always been thankful that I wasn’t “forced” to attend. My parents prevailing thought process was that my siblings and I would go when we were young so as to build a base of general religious education. From there we were allowed to make our own decisions as it pertained to the pursuit of God. I have always appreciated that stance.

As an adult, my time in the church has decreased significantly. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I spent any time in a church outside of my friend’s wedding a couple months back. I remember some of the basic fables from my early church going, but for the most part, what I remember is pretty vague. What I do remember, though, was hearing a constant message of love; Jesus’ love, God’s love, and the love we should have for one another. Conversations RE: The Golden Rule were aplenty, and they were taught without stipulation. It was never, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…unless they’re black, female, gay, or anything your mortal mind deems unfit for your love.” It was always a message of unrequited love, and often spoke specifically about loving those that have wronged you directly. It spoke of loving those who were seen as unlovable because, indeed, they need love the most.

When did this change? When were the stipulations added? When did we decide that we could start judging others and taking stances against the very love that we have been taught to provide no matter the cost? When did it become okay to use God and His Word to wage our very personal and very human social and political battles?

What we have forgotten is that we are mortal. We are human. We should not and cannot judge. It is not our place. God is not a tactical weapon to be used to figuratively smite those with whom you disagree.

What we have lost is that message of love, of compassion, and of general decency. We judge so quickly and resolutely that there can never be room for gray area. We make sweeping generalizations about people we don’t and will never know based solely on what we think we know about how they choose to pursue their own happiness. Is that our true purpose? Is that what God intended? Did he put us here to spew hatred and vitriol for our fellow man? I refuse to believe that he did.

For what it’s worth, I’m aware of the hypocrisy in these very words: I know that by even making this argument that I am also pointing fingers. I know that. Try to see it as an urging rather than a judgment, though. Try to see it as a call for more and better love and compassion. The God I know would want it that way, and the personal relationship I have with Him tells me that I am to live through Him, not to use him when it’s convenient to me. That’s not the deal. We know that, but we forget that with saddening regularity. It is far beyond time to remember that message of love we learned when we were Sunday School kids and start applying it.

Thanks for reading along. Follow me on Twitter – @aaronmoore1322. Do you need a shot of positivity, optimism, and motivation? Check out shorthoptimism.wordpress.com, and follow on Twitter – @short_hOPT. Have a splendid day.

White Kids Need A History Lesson

A recent phenomenon suggests to me that white kids have completely lost their minds and are in dire need of a history lesson. Via social media and in person, I have seen and heard the whitest of white kids throwing the n-word around in the breeziest of fashions. I’m talking about teenagers. I’m talking about white teenagers from such hardened Kentucky boroughs as Villa Hills, Fort Thomas, Union, and Crestview Hills. I’m talking about scared little white kids that are insulated by other scared little white people with nary a skin tone above beige anywhere to be found in their safe little bubbles. Yet, they take to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and suddenly develop this ridiculous persona where they’re somehow “hood”, “street”, or worse, “gangsta”. But the dagger here isn’t the complete and absolute lack of street cred. Rather, it’s the continuation of the denigration of an entire people by so carelessly floating about the vilest of racial epithets and lending it absolutely zero credence in the act of doing so.

Here’s the thing: you sound and look stupid. (Want to make yourself un-stupid? Read something. This is a good start.) Frankly, where I grew up, spouting that word off would have gotten my teeth kicked in, and rightfully so. Do you know why? Do you have any clue why that word should get you beaten? For decades upon decades, that word was used to verbally assault and demean a specific group of people. It was (and is) used to make people feel inferior while attempting to make the speaker of the word feel superior. The use of this word is only successful in the inferiority portion.

The most pathetic argument for white use of the n-word is that black folks use it amongst themselves. So, hey, why can’t we use it, too, right? Personally, I take white people fully out of the equation in this argument. Black people have been beaten over the head with this ruthless moniker for years upon end, so, to me, the manner in which they choose to use it is at their sole discretion. Sure, an argument could (and has) been made that the perpetuation of that word only serves to allow a vicious cycle of racism to continue. But, guess what, white people? That’s not our argument to have. We don’t have a voice in that argument. We can’t have a voice in that argument. As the chief engineers of the very insinuation of the word and its unfortunate lasting presence, we should make every effort to steer clear of that argument. Again, it’s not ours to have.

Point blank, this whole “phenomenon” reeks of ignorance at its most base level. It’s stupid. End of discussion. Casually throwing around the n-word in whatever forum isn’t cool, white kids. It’s patently dumb. Aside from being egregiously moronic, it’s hurtful. It’s careless. It’s disrespectful. Don’t believe me? Try an experiment: the next time you step out of your cozy little circles and venture out into the world, walk up to the first black person you meet and call them the n-word.

Let me know how cool you feel then.

Thanks for reading along. Follow me on Twitter – @aaronmoore1322. Do you need a shot of positivity, optimism, and motivation? Check out shorthoptimism.wordpress.com, and follow on Twitter – @short_hOPT. Have a splendid day.

2014 Community Hero Awards

Posting on behalf of Serena Owen (who should likely be nominated for this award herself):

“The Owen family invites you to help keep the Appreciation Cycle going by nominating a deserving person you know in your family, school, church, or community who lives or helps others in Elsmere to be recognized for their service to others. Everyone nominated will receive an appreciation certificate of service and be recognized during our Labor Day Community Reunion August 30-September 1, 2014. Please mail or hand deliver your nomination to Deaconess Serena Owen at First Baptist Church of Elsmere 1007 Garvey Avenue, Elsmere, KY 41018 or email it to her at NKyEducators@Gmail.com. Entry deadline: Sunday August 10th.

Name of Nominee:
Phone/Email contact Information of Nominee:
Please provide a brief summary or list of your nominee’s service to others:
Name of Nominator:
Nominator’s Phone/Email contact information:

Thanks for taking the time to show Appreciation. God Bless!

From Serena: Say “Thanks!” Nominate a Community Hero today! Like the Friends of Elsmere Facebook page for more information: https://facebook.com/friendsofelsmere

Thanks for reading along. Follow me on Twitter – @aaronmoore1322. Do you need a shot of positivity, optimism, and motivation? Check out shorthoptimism.wordpress.com, and follow on Twitter – @short_hOPT. Have a splendid day.