Neila and her family, who I observed quite keenly for decades, are cretins.

Case in point:  In 2017, before things went sour, I was walking through Dad's den to the kitchen. Tiffany was there.  In the kitchen, I stopped cold in my tracks. Something was very, very out of place. What was it?

I returned to the den and looked around. I couldn't figure it out. Was I just trippin' or sumptin'? I thought not. No way - something was not right.

What's That Rectangular Thing in Your Hand??? 
Then, it hit me. Princess Corn Log was holding a book!

It was the first time I could recall seeing a Neila, Reagan, Ryan, or Tiffany holding a book in over 150 years of combined observation.

Granted, she was in nursing school (which she successfully completed), so the bibliounion wasn't voluntary and therefore only earned her half credit, but still, it was a book. In her hand. A Neila's family hand. Wowzers!

I'm a book guy, so I notice stuff like that. When I moved to my house, it took three trips in my full-size Bronco just to move the books, body of the old-school SUV bouncing off the tops of the rear tires from the overload of wonder, wisdom, and knowledge in the back. To quote Jefferson, "I cannot live without books."

Then, I got to thinking some more and realized that I could recall just one time in which I'd substantially interacted with any of the aforementioned Flozwads regarding any work of art. That work was Adam Sandler's 1993 album They're All Gonna Laugh At You. Prominent in that interaction was track 14, "At a Medium Pace." Behold:

Nine 
Ryan was nine years old. Nine. Human years. Earth human years. Nine.

I felt kindasorta creeped out listening to that with the wee lad. It seemed a bit like watching a porno flick with a little kid. I asked him, almost whispering, if his mother knew he had that material. Yep - she was the one who bought it for him. Silly me - I should have known.

Oddly, when I was about Ryan's age, Neila scolded me for saying "testicles."

I, too, was raised in a permissive home, but my George Carlin and Richard Pryor albums were part of a huge mosaic of varied forms of art, so I had a crack at emerging well-rounded. Ryan, a walking monument to a bubble world of poor parenting, had no such crack. The only crack he saw was...aw, hell, I won't even bother.

Thinking about it all now, how differently things turned out with Ryan vs. his family counterpart Tony, the difference is striking. Ryan is toast. Tony is a single father giving it his all, and doing well.

The number of works of art I've discussed with Tony has to be in the thousands by now. We've spend countless hours hashing over the works of Pink Floyd, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, and PTA, among many others. He has matured into an insightful and intelligent gentleman I'm very happy to know.

Art simply makes you smart. It's true, and it rhymes.

Even Worse - Vicious Cretins 
When people are mostly stimulated by crap like lawsuits, conflict, angertainment, cable TV "news," Dr. fucking Phil, Survivor, Hoarders, Call of Duty, The First 48, sports, and The Bachelor, they seem to grow not only painfully obtuse, but also disturbingly vicious. I've seen it again and again and talked to many who have watched their loved ones gradually fall to this scourge.

That's not hard to understand - when immersed in exploitation, anger, backstabbing, adversarialism, dysfunction, vacuity, just for starters, it bleeds into the viewer. There's no way it wouldn't. Just as with diet, any material can be a harmless guilty pleasure as part of a balanced whole, but live on junk and you turn into junk.

GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

To Mom, We All Were Cretins 
Mom always knew the Flozberks were our bottom-scraping cretins and it disappointed her greatly. Things of true beauty and value often seem unknown to them; they are more inclined toward fluff and consumption.

She so wanted to have her spirit and ego boosted by highly sophisticated people under her wing, but none of us could cut it. The Flozberks were not even in the running and Mom often lamented their lack of polish and intellect.

John had a shred of sophistication, but not much - he's first and foremost an empty, materialistic, boneheaded sports fanatic disco fuck challenged mightily by even a basic foray into the finer world. I was the most sophisticated, but still way, way too much of a rustic redneck hippie rock and roll stoner freak to make the cut.

Dad tried and tried hard, bless his heart, but he had the heart and soul of a simple man and over time Mom's respect for him faded away - he was utterly unable to stimulate or inspire her. However, Mom herself was not nearly as sophisticated as she fancied. She held impressive knowledge of things cultured, but her behavior often fell way short of refinement and her desire to keep evolving through middle and old age was essentially nonexistent.

Me, I've tried to tap into the best qualities of Mom and Dad while also transcending them and constantly moving forward and upward, methodically, at a medium pace.

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