good hands

I guess you can measure a day by how many times circumstances provoke you into thinking something that you hadn’t planned on thinking about. Like watching an insurance commercial that offers you the assurance that you’re in ‘good hands’ promptly followed by someone in the next advertisement offering up an observation, just as earnestly mind you, about what the future holds.

My first thought is that if you’re buying life insurance and you end up collecting on it the only thing those ‘good hands’ will be doing is lowering you into the ground or perhaps handing over some cash to your grieving loved one so they can grieve in warmer weather and sip alcoholic beverages with chunks of fruit clinging to the edge. It should go without saying that in the picture I am trying to paint they are surrounded by exotic flowering plants.

Even if the insurance you end up using is car or home you can’t really expect the future to ‘hold’ anything for you. There’s a ton of stuff floating out there but it will never be handed to you. Even if you have insurance, that just replaces the stuff that gets lost or stolen. The future may hold a lot of promises but no certainties. There are simply too many sayings that involve things slipping through your fingers for it to be a coincidence.

Throw in the metaphors about holding onto the past and those about the present barely holding our interest and it’s hard to get a grip (thought I was going to say hold didn’t you?) on what’s worth grabbing to begin with.

So the thought I hadn’t planned on thinking clearly has little to do with buying insurance. The ironic part is that I don’t really want to spend too much time trying to figure out what it is I’m trying to think about because I have this weird feeling it has to do with time. Doesn’t it always seem that when you start talking about metaphors it’s simply a matter of time before the first irony starts creeping in uninvited?

So I sit up on the couch and debate whether to follow this train of thought or whether to change directions completely and ask aloud why anyone who enjoys Cheez-Its would buy Cheez-It Party Mix which clearly contain less than 1/5th the amount of Cheez-Its. As an aside, the boxes are identical and when I’m shopping for snack foods I shouldn’t be expected to pore over every inch of a box to make sure I’m getting the right product. I feel it would only be fair if the Cheez-It Party Mix box had a huge red warning label plastered on it alerting people that anyone who purchases this product is going to be sorely lacking in the Cheez-It department.

Now you may think that the decision of choosing between these topics would be easy but I fear that you are siding too quickly with the weightier of the two. Sure I’d get to feel like quite the little philosopher if I chose to wrestle with the former seemingly poignant subject matter but in the end would I actually get anywhere with it? Probably not. On the other hand, I can quite easily make a good case against pretzels, rye chips and cheese balls. Given only a few minutes I could probably cast outrageous aspersions against anyone preferring this unholy mix over good old plain old American old (damn, one too many old) Cheez-Its and be done with it. Free to sink back into the couch and waste the rest of my evening watching TV and picking out pretzels, rye chips and cheese balls. Using my ‘good hands’ to know my immediate future holds only real cheese goodness.

There is no danger of getting tangled in irony when debating the virtues of snack crackers.