The Lone Ranger Rides Again!

What I learned in Sawyer School was that people don't always practice what they preach. I think that most people learn that sooner or later but, when faced with a conflict between practicing and preaching, many people will believe the practicing rather than the preaching. I've often wondered why I turned out to be the opposite. In the Blue Jeans Incident, I immediately concluded that it was the teacher's practicing that was wrong because her original preaching had obviously been correct. Well actually, the practicing was not done by the same teacher who had done the preaching, but everybody knows that those people are all in it together. The point is that I believed what they had taught me about democracy without question, so it was obvious to me that the fault was in the practicing.

I might have gotten my sense of right and wrong from the folks at Elsdon, except that those people didn't always practice what they preached either. It just now occurred to me who was my most significant role model in those days. It was the Lone Ranger! I knew that he was a fictitious character, but that didn't mean he was wrong about anything. Indeed, the fact that he was fictitious meant that somebody had envisioned him as the ultimate good guy. It would be difficult to find a real person who was that good of a guy, so they made one up. I didn't realize at the time that the Lone Ranger was affecting me all that much but, decades later, I bought some of his old shows on DVD. Viewing them again after all those years reminded me how much I wanted to be like the Lone Ranger when I grew up. Of course I could never be as good as the Lone Ranger but, as somebody famous once said, "Man's reach must always be beyond his grasp. Else what's a Heaven for?"

If I hadn't quit going to bars before the smoking ban went into effect, that would have made me quit going to bars. I didn't mind not smoking in stores and restaurants but, if you can't smoke in a bar, where can you smoke? When I open a beer, the next thing I want to do is light up a cigarette, they just seem to go together. I have tried drinking half a beer, then going outside to smoke a cigarette, then coming back in to drink the other half, but it's just not the same. I only drink two beers a day now, and I drink them in my garage where I can smoke at the same time.