Pyramid Building

 

 “Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”

So how long have you been looking in that rearview mirror?

Oh come on, it happens to all of us, something, sometime, somewhere goes wrong and for the rest of our lives we look over our shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But what if the other shoe took a walk?

And why is it that shoes drop in the first place? I usually drop my fork or spoon or if I am at a big, important party where there are a lot of influential people I can manage a whole plate, complete with frothy food, like maybe cake and ice cream or something with a whipped topping.

That’s when things go wrong and burn a hole in your memory for the rest of your life all you will be able to see is that cake or the whipped cream exploding across the carpet headed straight for the banker, chief of police prettiest girl in the room or if you happen to be the prettiest girl in the room then you’ll also have on your best dress/sweater/pants and bam, wham, Bob’s your uncle there’s whipped cream all over it.

And if you could die at that moment you would live happily ever after.

So why do you insist on carrying it with you for the rest of your life? Wasn’t the one time bad enough, do you absolutely have to re-live it over and over again?

Okay, let’s settle one excuse right here and now, High School sucked for everyone who wasn’t the captain of the football team or head cheerleader. It’s a fact and there’s no changing it. No matter what atonement you do for all of your nerdy sins, you will forever remain the class dork.

The important part is remain, it’s over. That’s right, it is in the past, part of history, shoved in a time capsule and it made you what you are today, so live with it.

If you were a dork and I was, the King of the Dorks, it’s all over now and being that person who wasn’t part of the “In Crowd”, thanks Ramsey Lewis, you went off and read books or painted or learned to sculpt clay or pot, no not that kind of pot…if that’s what you did after school you probably didn’t learn enough to read this blog so why are you here and there are only so may pictures so maybe you’d be better off with a nice Marvel comic book written for the average village idiot and you know there’s good job security in being the village idiot so maybe that’s a career path whaddya think?

But back to the rearview mirror, if you let all of the trauma of High School brand you for life; you’ve let all of those in the “In Crowd” win after all. They never had a new thought of their own and now they’ve killed off all of the new and different thoughts you could have had if only you had listened to that different drummer and not to them.

You know we live in a wonderful time, the nerds of High School have all grown up and some of them are drawing and painting and writing. They write for TV and they write about folks just like themselves with maybe a bit more glamour. You do know that a dozen hit shows feature a prominent nerd on their roster?

Could Gibbs solve all of those dastardly deeds without the star of all stars, the Queen of lab rats, Abby? She’s Elvira and the sexy scientist who whips off her glasses and lets down her hair and gets the GUY, and comes up with the biggest and bestest clue and points Gibbs in the right direction.

Abby is so big, only in spirit, style and gumption that she has a Goth angel wallpaper all of her own and she’s a second tier character.

But don’t be fooled there are a bunch of nerds lurking in the very best of shows, Garcia on Criminal Minds, such hot sh*t that she gets more and more air time every season and well deserves it. Sid the medical examiner on CSI New York, all of the Squints on Bones, Maura Isles on Rizzoli and Isles, although she’s better in the Tess Gerritson books, the Queen of the Dead and don’t you forget it and then there’s…but I should get back on point, it’s a good time to be a nerd.

So celebrate your dorkery, pull out your pocket protector, wrap your glasses with tape and bring out the slide rule we’re going to party! Dorks don’t make good football players and they don’t get the head cheerleader, but they do leave big foot prints in the sands of history. Albert the Great, no not the king who got his by divine right, but Einstein who was pretty divine all by himself. Vincent Van Gogh who wasn’t at all divine but made a mark that can’t be erased. Robert Newton, yes, I know you don’t know who that is but I’ll tell you so you will, played Long John Silver in the Walt Disney Treasure Island and forever told us what a pirate sounds like. These are the folks who took what ever they had and made a neon sign across the sky of time. They were all nerds and they weren’t looking in the rearview mirror.

If you spend all of your time trying to fix what didn’t happen back then what have you got left for now? Did you know that you can’t fix back then? Did you know that you can if you focus straight ahead you can leave a legacy like the Pharaohs? Yes, because it wasn’t their riches or victories, their history carved into the temples of the Nile that makes us stare at their works in awe, it was their art and the artists who built the Sphinx and the pyramids. That’s what gets our attention.

So here at the end of the year I’m asking you to take a look at your life and see how much time you are devoting to fixing the things that have happened in the past. Wouldn’t your time be better spent building the pyramids of the future?