Don't you know ANYTHING? Well, not really....

As I close in on 50 years old (in 7 months – don’t rush me) I was thinking about the amount of things that I still don’t know anything about after a half century on the planet. It’s amazing that I still don’t know why women cry at movies on Lifetime network when I find the same films hysterically funny…

Tonight on the Oxygen network…"She had no choice but to kill him at this point." Really? Taking a train out of town was absolutely out of the question?

I don’t know why Fabio is on the cover of nearly every dime-store trash novel that women love to read. Aside from the basics of addition, subtraction, and division, I’ve never known what “n” was in the isosceles triangle, nor do I friggin’ care. Come to think of it, I have no idea what an isosceles triangle is, either. I don’t know why we as a nation are so captivated by the doings of Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, and no-talent morons and losers of their ilk.

I don’t know the meaning of life, but I have seen the Monty Python movie that tried to explain it to me. I don’t know why when we’re going up it’s an escalator, but coming down it’s not called a descalator. I don’t know who killed J.R. Ewing. There is a song that starts out, “Have you ever - ridden horses through a rainstorm?”

Nope.

From my early childhood onward, no one ever told me how much the doggie in the window cost. Carl Sagan told me there were billions and billions, but I usually tired after counting 20 or so. I don’t know if OJ did it; but I have my suspicions ;-).

I’ve never understood why I’m such a staunchly proud American, but I am. I’ve often wondered how much more quality music we all could have enjoyed if Mark David Chapman had not been born. I’ve never understood why a soldier – entrusted with this nation’s highest ideals and principles – would do something to disgrace themselves and those ideals; but sometimes they do.

Onomatopoeia has something to do with poetry. What it is exactly makes my brain sizzle like a hamburger in a pan. Ok, perhaps that was too deep for most to understand. Google it, then come back and read this again.

I don’t know when the “Oldies” radio stations started playing the music I like, but they have been for quite a long time. Hip-hop and Rap are supposedly different...who knew?
I don’t know why teenagers in 2007 wear the same checkered shorts and striped polo shirts that we are embarrassed about when we look at pictures of ourselves from the 70’s, but they do – and they say it’s different.

Uh huh…whatever.

Halloween has become dangerous, but I can’t understand how or why we arrived at that. Christmas is about gaudiness, over-extension, and arguing about who has the right to display what.

????

I still don’t understand why I hear the ocean when I hold a shell to my ear, and it’s ok not to know. Magicians have been a lifetime of joy and wonderment to me, and nope – no clue how they do that…or that.

So when it all comes down to it, I’m just a wandering dumb-ass, unaware of most things that make up what we call life. I’m a happy-idiot, as Jackson Browne so eloquently put it, going from base to base, hoping the shortstop will miss the cut-off throw so I can cross home-plate unopposed.

Here is what I do know:

Although I have never been able to place a definitive finger on exactly what love is, if you look into my children’s eyes – or more accurately – my eyes when viewing my children - you’ll see it.

And after all, isn't that the one thing we crave to know the most?