Cranky Large Medium reading, 9 April

Go away.

What is keeping you from leaving? Are you hard of hurrying? Skedaddle! Scat! Scoot! Scram! So you're not going. Why is that, again? Oh, you came here for a reeeeeding. I think I can arrange that, if you promise to cut your visit short immediately afterwards. Go visit my other personalities, or something. Ah, great, a promise. Then I deliver, here:

Your most annoying characteristics are uptight honesty, dogged dependability, a stiff spine and bloodthirsty ambition. People often foolishly seek your advice (hey, it's not my birthday!). You are blindly loyal to your friends and heavily depend upon your family and the home ties (I favor bolo ties instead).

Are you happy, now? Of course not. Your life, somehow, doesn't measure up, when you look at it through the eyes of someone like a hermit on a mountainside. Still, what we have here, on this precipice, is no bluff --- it is actual life, and it sure as shootin' works for me, so why are you complaining. After all, you could be among these people, all of whom, on this date in history, leapt into the chasm of the timeless: Yuan An, Zeno, King Edward IV, Lorenzo "il Magnifico" de' Medici, Simon Fraser, William V of Orange, Michel Eugène Chevreul, Vilhelm Bjerknes, Leopold Vietoris, Pope Constantine, Pope Benedict VIII, William Law, François Rabelais, Mikael Agricola, Sir Francis Bacon, Richard Condon, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustaf Tenggren, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eddie Edwards, Phil Ochs, Brook Benton, Tom Cora, Eddie Cochems, Willie Stargell, Billy Hitchcock, Erastus Corning, Charles Goodyear,

and David Prater.

Comin' to ya on a dusty road. Without a drop to drink.
Happy birthday anyway.