Old Stick in the Mud

Yesterday we invited the kids over for dinner and it turned out they were going to go to a movie later on.  They invited me so I went, not really knowing what to expect.  The Movie was Total Recall.  I think it was a remake of an earlier movie by Arnold Schwarzenegger.  I vaguely remember some movie about him going to another planet and doing things that I don't remember the details of.   I will spare you the details of the new movie only to comment that it didn't make a lot of sense to me.  The premise of the movie was that you can change the reality of a person chemically and the rest of the movie was a lot like one of my bad dreams where I seem to run and jump and get chased for a lot of reasons non real clear.  The one difference in this movie was I didn't wake up at the end and smartly move on with my life.   

In my dreams, there is a thing that happens that tells me I am dreaming.  For years I smoked a pipe and if I am going along and light up my pipe I realize this has to be a dream.   One of the things I really hate is to be having kind of a bad dream, wake up to go to the bathroom and when I start dreaming again, the same old bad things continue to be happening.  Just once I would like to travel from a chasing dream to a fantasy of me and a pretty girl on the beach.  OK, I know that one grain of sand can turn a beach party into a bummer. But, it is my fantasy so no sand in sensitive places.

Over the years, when I have to make a hard decision or really do something I don't really want to do, I dream about that during the night.  Many times I have played out several scenarios and that has given me insight to help make the right choice the next day.   No, I don't profess that I have always been right in these events, just clearer about what the unintended consequences might be.  By the same token I tend to learn from experience and I really learn from the things that go bad the worst.  There is always one thing that gets in the way of really easy decision making. - Adrenalin. 

 I will promise you that most winners of the Medal of Honor will freely admit that they just were amped up and didn't consider that they could die doing what they did.  Well, until much later, that is.    I have a friend that was awarded the Medal of Honor as a Navy medic with a Marine unit in Vietnam.  As he was treating several wounded Marines, a hand grenade was thrown into the clearing where he was doing his best to keep the wounded marines alive.  Without thinking, he jumped on the grenade and it didn't go off.  He picked it up and threw it out of the clearing and it went off.  One of the wounded Marines told the hospital staff in Japan what had happened and 48 hours later my friend was out of the war and on his way stateside.  He is the first one to tell you that he should have put one of the dead marines on the grenade and let his family get the Medal ofHhonor. 

Oh well, I guess I am really a stick in the mud and should have stayed home and saved you from having to read this endless drivel.

MUD