What, me read? Isn't that a 4 letter word?

I had an appointment this week at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center to have an echocardiogram, which by the way is an EKG times 10. It's a very thorough heart, artery, and vein exam. Contrary to what you may have read about the VA, these people are very good to Vets. By the by, I passed and was told I could continue to be the stud of a man that most people believe I am. Scratch that one off the list, as I am still good in that department.

I made my way up to the 3rd floor of the matrix of hallways and clinics and held up a Louis L'Amour novel, 2 copies of Reader's digest and 2 issues of Popular Mechanics and asked the 50 or so people in the waiting room, if anyone wanted something to read. Not a single taker in the bunch. Seriously? The western was Rider of Lost Creek; an awesome depiction of the 1870's gunslinger era in the old west.

I laid them on the table and sat down and chatted with two grisly old Vets my own age. One had flown in from the Philippines and was suffering from congestive heart failure. The other one lives in Vidor and they are lifelong buddies from the Vietnam war. I had already read what I brought to augment the usual "stuff" that is on the tables in this place, so I simply chatted and exchanged experiences of my time passing through the Clark Air Force Base on my way to the war.

Joan Martin hit the proverbial nail on the head with Tuesday's column titled "Writing & training my brain" and I told her so. I love to read and spend a great deal of time exercising this skill every day. Yes, I call it a skill, because evidently, it is vanishing. I call what I do exercising because as Joan stated, it does indeed exercise our aging brains.

"Writing is like reading, on steroids." I quote myself. Writing is a seriously bumped up version of reading, because writers create. We pull words out of thin air. We weave stories and ideas to fill the need of readers and ourselves. I literally see the stuff I write and often will read and reread my own column 10 times before I submit it. I write because I must. I read because I can't stop thirsting for knowledge and adventure.

But what about those who never read more than they have to? They read street signs and food brand names. Restaurant menus have become a challenge to  many unless they have pictures with a number beside them. They read Tweets and one sentence paragraphs. They speed read everything, making Reader's Digest look wordy. If you ask one of these many what book they last read, they look at you with a thousand mile stare, once reserved for combat veterans.

Online programs such as Twitter are actually making people stupid.  Texting four word sentences, if you can call them that, are promoting the same degenerative retardation of our cognitive abilities. To prove a point in how low we have fallen, take a look at this column.  I write in very short paragraphs, or no one will read it. If a friend sends you a joke and it is more than 3 short paragraphs, do we read it?  Highly unlikely, right?

Reading books is already a socially diminishing skill. Those of us who still do it are vanishing dinosaurs and when and if we pass on to the next life, what does the future hold? Like Joan Martin said, each of us has a story inside us. Each of us crave to have that story told. Reading and writing go hand in hand and if you have a keyboard and a computer, start writing stuff down. You never know who will read it down the road. You may discover that as a reader, you are also a writer and to me, that is something special.

Truth be told, if you are reading this... you are a reader and like I pointed out, you are much in the minority. Reading is a dying skill being replaced with someone or some piece of technology talking to us to tell us what to think and what to do. "Press 1 for this, press 2 for that. Punch in this code and then leave a message."

Smart phones have us reading everything in micro-bytes and using our fingers to communicate. Do everything virtually for happiness. Press 1 for extra happiness. Press 2 for self-gratification. Pres 3 to put your brain in neutral. Lord help us in the future.

Enlightenment or Idiocracy and Hashtags?

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 We are living in an enlightened time where almost any question can be answered by simply pulling an electronic device of some sort out of a case, or your pocket and typing – or speaking it into said device and blam, your correct answer – maybe.  You still have the responsibility to sift what you read, hear, or watch and determine if it is in fact, the literal truth.

Huh? #WhatMeWorry

“You mean if it is on the Internets, it might not be true?  Who woulda thunk?”

Unfortunately, there is literally tons of misinformation on the Internet that is incorrect, just like this sentence.  Just because you hate a political candidate and your best friend sends you scandalous or negative information on them in an email, doesn’t write it in stone. 

The way urban legends get started is the writer plans to fool you when they start it by writing a mixture of truth with their tricky fiction.

The second the unsuspecting reader sees the hated candidate’s name and a smidgeon of truth, they feed on it like a toothless starving man with a steaming hot bowl of buttery grits.  They giggle wild-eyed as their hands shake and violently stabbing the send button, they send it to all their other starving grit-eating friends. #ToothlessBum

And they don’t learn a thing.  This behavior continues year after year, even when non-grit eating friends point it out.  Take for instance this new trend called hashtags.  I hate it.  I hate everything about it.  I hate how it is being thrown in my face by every commentator on the news and buttery grit eaters.

It’s time for my version of idiocratic enlightenment folks, so listen up.

More and more often I am hearing people use the term "Hashtag" in conversation, as if a hovering computer is indexing every word they speak.  To me, it borders on absolute idiocy.  It is a Twitter indexing term and Twitter is making people stupider by the millisecond. Now it is working its way into broadcasts, online forums like baytowntalks.net, and Facebook, as if it actually were indexing key words, which its not. 

I joined Twitter, like I do every new thing that comes down the pike (to be progressive in my own education), when it first appeared.  I wanted to stay informed; nothing more or less.  It took me about a week before I dismissed it as blather and fluff.  A year passed and I reconsidered.  Maybe I was wrong.  After all, everyone is quoting Twitter.  Famous people tweet!

The second time lasted about 20 minutes and I closed my account.  There are enough distractions in this life without openly inviting attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to eat grits with me, butter or not #ADHDWithButter.

Now you may love Twitter and that is your right, but one look at the movie Idiocracy and you’ll close your account, I promise, #IWasSoSmartAndNowIAint.  Here is an excellent example of what I am talking about and it was pointed out to me after I began writing this column, #ImMadTooEddie.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake, both icons of the generation using this term make fun of the use of this word and how it has schlepped into people’s everyday “conversating”.

In the movie Idiocracy, two under-achievers become part of a US Army experiment which accidentally propels them 500 years into the future. They discover a society so incredibly dumbed-down that they are easily the most intelligent people alive.  Look around us folks.  It’s already began #UhHello.

Take for instance the 7 armored car robberies Houston had in 2013.  Only an idiot would try to rob an armored car with guards carrying copious amounts of weapons and many of these guards have military experience with no compunction against firing said weapons.

Oh, you want another example?  Okay.  Only a person of low intelligence would drink alcohol and get behind the wheel of a car or truck.  What is it now for the first offense?   How about a $2000 fine, up to 3 to 180 day’s jail time, loss of driver license up to a year, and an annual fee of $1,000 or $2,000 for three years to retain driver license?  Then we’ll add in the massive lawyer fees #JustTakeACab.

275 idiots were listed by the Baytown police department for DWI in 2013 and we got us 15 vying for the title already in 2014.  Oh, you think I am being rude #WhoCares?  Well, put yourself in the place of the people who are killed by these morons and the loved ones you leave behind and you’ll change your tune.

Hey!  I don’t claim to be Alfred Einstein or the sage James Finley, but when people idolize celebrities and quote their tweets as if it is the Gospel, I find a quiet place away from the drivel and read a book #ShakinMyHaid.  Then I double check the facts.