I Question Everything

I didn't always question everything, and I don't remember when I started doing that. It was probably about the time I started talking to people on the internet. The old saying is that there are two sides to every story but, if you talk to enough people, you will usually hear more sides than that. Then again, if I hear the same story from a whole bunch of people well, that makes me suspicious too. Maybe all those people are just repeating what other people have told them. Even in books, if you look at their source references, it's not uncommon to find several different books that are essentially quoting each other. The news media does that too, somebody breaks a new story and then all the other news people just rehash it over and over again. Maybe the first guy lied, or maybe his source lied to him but, after the story is repeated numerous times, people tend to accept it as fact. The easiest course of action would be to not believe anything you hear and half of what you see but, as soon as you do that, somebody will tell you the truth for a change and you won't believe him either.

I don't know if it's the same in all states but, in Michigan, if you show up at the emergency room, they have to take care of you whether you can pay for it or not. I suppose they make up for it by charging their paying customers more, which may be why it costs a thousand dollars to get a fishhook jerked out of you. The alternative is to go see a regular doctor in his office but, by the time you can get an appointment, you likely will have either gotten better on your own or died. We used to have a thing in Cheboygan called "urgent care", where you could just walk in off the street and get treated. The intent was to provide care for things that weren't serious enough to justify going to the emergency room but too serious to wait for an appointment. It didn't last long though, they said they weren't making enough money.

We started out in the 70s hunting foxes because they were plentiful at the time. Around 1975 the fox population crashed and the rabbit population proliferated, so we started hunting rabbits (snowshoe hares actually, but everybody around here calls them rabbits). We didn't eat the foxes, but there was a local trapper who would pay five or ten dollars for what they call "carcass goods". Putting up fur is a skilled job and, if you don't know what you're doing, you can easily ruin the pelt, so he would buy the whole animal at a discount and add value by skinning and processing it himself. We only got a few foxes, but we had a lot of fun chasing them around. The rabbit hunting was much more productive. I got 28 of them in my best season, and averaged about a dozen per season until their population crashed in the early 90s. Neither the fox nor the rabbit population ever recovered enough to make keeping hounds worthwhile and, when my last dog died in 2008, I didn't replace him. My hypothetical wife used to enjoy tagging along on the fox hunts but quit about the time I switched to rabbits. You don't move around as much with rabbits, and my entourage would get cold and bored waiting for the dogs to bring the rabbit around.