My wife wants me to tell potty training stories, but, alas, I\u2019m not sure how to make those interesting. There was the time that our oldest used her crap to draw on the walls of my parent\u2019s house, or the time just recently when our youngest came home from vacation and celebrated by taking a dump out in the driveway. The bottom line is that gross things come out of kid\u2019s bottoms, and there are only so many ways to describe a rogue bowel movement. If Mrs. Cornell wants to make a guest post on the subject, she\u2019s welcome to do it. All I can say is she\u2019s far more tolerant of my children\u2019s bowels than she is of mine.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s started a new yoga class and brought home the literature therefrom, which maintains that yoga clears out your colon and cures AIDS. Neither one of us has AIDS, so that\u2019s lost on us. However, that colon thing seems promising. I\u2019m still in my personal trainer hell, and I almost fainted on Wednesday in my first workout since my return. Exercise just blows. There\u2019s no way around it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m reminded of one of my old acting professors who smoked incessantly and mocked the people who talked about smoking ten years off of your life. \u201cFolks,\u201d he\u2019d say, \u201cit\u2019s the last ten! What am I missing, a chance to drool into my soup?\u201d I feel that way about exercise. So what if I live longer? If I subtract the time exercising from my extended life, I come out just about even, don\u2019t I? Actually, no, because the quality of life improves. I have to admit I feel better and have more energy to do stuff. And smoking, I\u2019ve decided, doesn\u2019t just lop off ten years \u2013 it accelerates those years, so that you get to drool into your soup ten years earlier. I remember the guy we hired to move us from St. George to Sandy had the worst emphysema you\u2019ve ever seen. We called him Gollum, because he had to painfully slurp in each breath and only seemed comfortable when he had a cigarette, and he smoked a pile of them. I\u2019d bet a whole lot of money that the dude is dead by now.<\/p>\n
Forgive me if I don\u2019t shed any tears. This dude was scum. He\u2019d hire black assistants to help him pack his truck, and he\u2019d spend all day hurling racial epithets at them until they quit, so he wouldn\u2019t have to pay them. He ran out of boxes while he was packing us and asked us to go to the dumpster behind the mall to get some more. And to top it off, when it was all over, we found out he\u2019d stolen our television set. I\u2019ve forgotten his name and the name of the company, so I can\u2019t warn you away from using him. But as I say, he\u2019s probably dead, so it doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n
Tony Snow is dead, too, and that makes me sad. He was a classy, funny guy \u2013 easily the best press secretary of any president I\u2019ve seen in my lifetime. I was listening to Condoleeza Rice praising him, and she said that Tony Snow will never be forgotten. And it dawned on me that she\u2019s absolutely wrong. Everybody is eventually forgotten. Seriously. How many people\u2019s names and accomplishments outlast their lifetime by more than a couple of decades or so? Even historical figures like kings and presidents get forgotten relatively quickly. All the great artists and writers like Shakespeare and DaVinci \u2013 they\u2019ve only been dead for a few hundred years. They\u2019ve beaten the odds, but will they still be remembered in another thousand years? Can you think of any artists from 1008 or earlier whose names ring a bell today?<\/p>\n
The only exception to this rule that I can think of is religious figures. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha \u2013 these dudes have stuck around for a mighty long time. That\u2019s why L. Ron Hubbard founded a religion \u2013 he wanted to carve his name into history forever. He\u2019s succeeded in lingering for an extra couple of decades, but I\u2019d bet a million dollars that he\u2019ll be completely forgotten in less than a century. (If I\u2019m wrong, I\u2019ll be dead before it can be proven, so no one will be around to collect.)<\/p>\n
I think there might have once been a point to this post, but for the life of me, I can\u2019t remember what it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mywife wants me to tell potty training stories, but, alas, I\u2019m not sure how to make those interesting. There was the time that our oldest used her crap to draw on the walls of my parent\u2019s house, or the time just recently when our youngest came home from vacation and celebrated by taking a dump ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}