Bullshit Lane Is Paved With Obligation

I find myself, at the ripe old age of sixty in possession of a life I love, an extra ten, fifteen, twenty pounds, and a finely tuned bullshit detector.

It has been honed and calibrated through the years, no, make that decades, mostly by paying attention to how it feels when something or someone is serving me some “shit of the bull.”

It has become a visceral thing and by that I mean I can smell it—because it stinks.

And it feels really, really bad.

Like fall down the stairs bad.
Like hit by a meteor bad.
Like thirty car pile up on the Interstate caused by a jackknifed big-rig full of dildos (I swear that really happened to me) bad.

You get the picture.

With regard to the meme above, I’m terrible at hiding, well anything, most especially the bullshit—so I don’t.

Neither will I defend it. I may try, but the minute you look at me cross-eyed or call “bullshit!” I cave because
I ALREADY KNEW IT!
I had the t-shirt and the all-day VIP pass.

But throughout my life, the one that continually trips me up is that rascal— rationalization, and it looks like this: me getting out my old Weight Watchers scale and weighing up the pluses and the minuses. The good and the bad.
Tracking columns, keeping score, making lists.

All the while knowing full well that the bad feelings far outweigh the good, that the minus column is as long as the neck of a giraffe, but still, there is that nagging, underlying sense of…what?

What has caused me through the years (although with much less frequency) to override my bullshit detector TO. MY. DETRIMENT?

Obligation. Obli-fucking-gation!

And what is obligation anyway? It’s the “shoulds”. The unspoken agreements. The implied senses of commitment and duty. In other words, things we feel we can’t get out of…alive.

I refer to it as the dreaded seventh sense, and in most people (myself included) it is the most powerful sense of all. If you ask any Catholic, Jew or basically anybody with a mother, they will tell you that their sense of obligation can take over their common sense, their good sense, their sense of self and most importantly it rides roughshod over their sense of what is really important in life—and what is BULLSHIT.

I know I don’t have to plead with you to understand (the last mention in the meme) because, well, you’re here and you’ve read this far so I feel confident that you can relate.

After this most recent, calamity ridden trip down bullshit lane, a route freshly paved by an irrational sense of obligation, I am bruised, battered, beleagured—and smelly, but now my eyes are wide open and I’m hopeful that it will be my last.

How about you?

Carry on,
xox