Wednesday, April 16, 2008

sheepish wolves


The problem with cliches besides the fact that they lack ingenuity is that they are true.

Like it or not cliches help us deal with the world in which we live.

The cliche "Play with fire and you're going to burned" is a very popular cliche, one useful in situations where you chose the road less traveled and realized at some point the road was less traveled for a reason. Basically its a catch phrase people tell you and one you perhaps tell yourself to help deal with a situation you opted into when that situation takes a drastic turn south. So the question is - when you play with fire and get burned - what do you do? Do you chalk it up to lessons learned and move on, do you stand up and fight back or do you write a sarcastic blog about the ordeal in an attempt at theraputic healing?

While I debate between the ease of option one or the satisfaction of option 2,
I'll settle for a bit of option 3.


Growing up you know there are good people in the world and there are bad people in the world and take for granted the simplicity of being able to distinguish between the two. Later on you learn about the proverbial "wolf in sheep's clothing" and realize the line separating the good from the bad is not a defined line - its a line that is contstantly morphing and is often hard to detect. This shifting line is the cause of much of life's hard learned lessons and often the reason we end up taking the road less traveled. Having recently traveled down said road I can look back and note that the lack of signs indicating where this road was heading as well as the lack of other people traveling along did make me a bit leary. However being the eternal optimist, I kept on traveling thinking surely this road leads somewhere worthy of the energy exertion its taken to get this far. Afterall sometimes in life you have to take a risk - right?
Well recently while the end of the road become thankfully visible I made one fatal mistake.
I chose to ignore my gut's instictive assumption about a particular person and give them the benefit of the doubt. Afterall we'd traveled so far and been through so much - how could the wolf be waiting at the very end since we'd already slain so many wolves along the way.
That being said - while people think when you assume something you make an ass out of u and me, what they overlook is that ignoring such instinctive assumptions only makes an ass out of me - a very angry and bitter one at that.
The lesson here is don't trust uneducated, monied, oil-drilling, self-serving, sweet talking, baffoons becuase at the end of the day they are just baffoons and will behave accordingly.