Chuck Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Someone please summons Mr. Charley Dickens because many have been searching for the former lately with not much success. I, myself, was looking amongst and beneath the couch cushions for better days/daze and came up snake eyes. I did find, however, close to $1.80 in change and enough food parts to feed the entire population of Barbados for three weeks. Which brings me to this Post.

The Cosmic Arbiter sure dealt me and almost everyone I know one helluva good hand. And that includes the unemployed, the underemployed and the people who think their boss makes Joseph Stalin seem like "a decent enough guy".

As someone told me once, not only do I have a better quality of life than the VAST majority of the living on the planet, I have a better life than 99.999% of ALL THE PEOPLE WHO EVER LIVED. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Captain CrankyPants.

Not only do I have immediate access to hundreds of things that make my life more comfortable but I am also at arms length to hundreds of things-both needful and necessary- that even Kings and Queens didn't have as recently as 100 years ago.

We all need these self reality checks from time-to-time. There's a good chance your net worth is considerably less than it was five years ago. Your business went belly-up. That vacation is definitely NOT happening this summer. Your teenage children are possessed by some deranged poltergeist who instructs them to only stare blankly at electronic media and say the word "like" roughly 16 times per sentence.

I feel ya, bro and it's easy to get pissy about things...especially lately.

Without sounding like some charged up, self-help Super Sage on an Infomercial, the next time you work yourself up into A LATHER (ya know, like, later today), spend about 30 seconds thinking about what you HAVE as opposed to what you don't. Got it there, Jerky?

Let's look at a live case study.

My day today, in the vernacular of 18th century England, "sucked wicked bad". But I'm going to have a nice home-cooked meal this evening, fart around with my 7 year old son in the backyard, watch a good chunk of the Sox game on the tube, sleep in my comfy king-sized bed and then, tomorrow morning, unleash an uninterrupted stream of expletives as I ponder the incredible injustice of Boston traffic as it relates to my life. I'm kidding. The "No Whining Rule" will be strictly enforced, starting tomorrow, regardless of how the Sox fare tonight.