My Father-In-Law the Ass Man

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer mistakenly received a new car tag from the DMV that said "ASS MAN"? It's season 6, episode 20, entitled: "The Fusilli Jerry," so called because Kramer crafts a likeness of Jerry out of fusilli pasta. Turns out the intended recipient of the tag was a proctologist (a word that always makes me squirm in my chair a bit). Kramer has a lot of fun being the Ass Man until the tag mess is cleared up.

My father-in-law, E.J., was a man of well-thought through philosophies. That sounds so much better than saying he was opinionated, right?

I attribute this to the long hours he spent every single day with his girls which numbered near 100, all of which he could recognize better from the backside than the front. He was a dairy farmer and twice each day, beginning in the wee hours of the morning, he would pat these old cows on the rump while placing a milking machine on their full utters then watching the milk flow through glass tubes in to a stainless steel tank. You give a guy hours a day looking at the asses of cows and he's going to develop a worldview.

One of the things I've looked forward to in the aging process is getting my license to be opinionated and to share my high and mighty view whenever two or three are gathered together. Even though I told myself as a young man, I would never become some cranky, narrow-minded old fart. Maybe it's just that with the passage of time we become more confident in the strength of our convictions.

Now I've promised myself I would, at least on this blog, try to avoid the the opinion-triggers like politics, religion and NCAA conference alignments. So this post is really just my reflection about having and expressing opinions, and being judicious about it because after all opinions are like asses--we all have one. So the quandary is how to have one and not be one.

Are you an ass; man?