What a coincidence! I'm with "Stupid," too!

Well, this can be a painful subject, but so what. Somebody has to talk about it, and I guess it might as well be me.

There are a whole lot of really, really stupid people in the world.

Surprised? Of course you aren't, or at least you shouldn't be. You only need to exist on this fucking bunghole of a planet for, say, 25 minutes in order to discover that we are surrounded by idiots, paralyzingly stupid morons, people who are here just for the specific purpose of pissing everyone off, and I am sure that is why they are here because I cannot imagine what other possible role they play in whatever master plan there is that guides the workings of our little universe.

I am not, of course, talking about people with mental handicaps. These people should be treated with compassion. I'm talking about people who seem to have chosen stupidity as their lot in life. I hope you know what I am talking about, because I can't seem to come up with a better way to explain it.

And these fucking people are all over the place. They are in front of me when I am trying to get coffee. They are cutting me off on the highway because they are too busy changing their Best of Boston or ELO or Supertramp or whatever 8-track tape of unbearably shitty arena rock crap to bother watching the road. They are standing in the deli like trying to decide which bologna is cheaper, the one that's $3.99 a pound or the one that's $4.29 a pound, and the whole time they are doing this they are ramming you in the ass with their shopping cart for no good reason, not that there would ever be a particularly good reason to do such a thing.

.I have known my share of stupid people. I've even managed to have stupid friends, because there are some people who have qualities that are somewhat endearing enough to enable you to overlook their core stupidity.

Here's an example of stupidity that I have never forgotten, even though it was many years ago, and this is gospel truth, as unbelievable as may be. When I was a kid I had a stupid neighbor. He was a good type of fellow, but he was, sadly, a very stupid young kid.

I guess I was about 12 years old, and my brother was 5 and a real hell-raiser in those days. One day while I was asleep on the couch, my brother thought it would be funny to break a plate over my head to wake me up. This not only succeeded in waking me up right quick; it also put a good-size gash atop my head which left a scar that can be viewed to this very day, now that my genes have decided I don't need much hair on my head anymore but need an abundance of it everywhere else. My mother drove me to the hospital, and the doctor sewed me back up good as new, or at least almost good as new.

So I came home with a huge bandage on my head, and my neighbor, Young Master Stupid, stopped over to poke his nose in and find out why my head was dressed out like that of a mine disaster victim. I told him the sad truth: that it was because my little brother had broken a plate over my head.

It's no surprise that Stupid's first reaction was to laugh, and I sure can't blame him, because how could anyone not laugh at such a ridiculous thing? I would not be surprised if you are laughing right now at the thought of it. It is funnier than when I was nailed between the eyes by that 100 mph soccer shot by the Mongolian kid on our high school team.

So then Stupid stopped laughing and decided to analyze the entire event, as if he were a color man for a TV sporting event. I will never forget his next words:

"Well," he said, "maybe he thought he would do like they do on the Popeye cartoons. You know, when they break those fake plastic plates over each other's heads in the cartoons."

Now how the fuck do you respond to something like that? Here was a kid who was almost old enough to get laid, and he believes that Popeye and Bluto are real actors who need to use stunt props to effect the illusion of violence? God almighty in heaven, I almost fell over. But I didn't say anything. Just like you don't want to be the one to tell a kid there's no Santa Claus, I didn't want to be the one to tell this kid that Popeye and Bluto (forget that fucking "Brutus" nonsense that came later in the Popeye series...this is Popeye were are talking about, dammit, not the Roman Empire) aren't real people.

Anyway, Young Master Stupid came to a sad end a few years later. As I told you, we lived way out in the country, and I'm sorry to report that a common means of culling stupid people out there at that time was auto accidents because the country roads were dangerous and stupid people had a tendency to push their luck on them. He died in a sadly stupid fashion, traveling about 300 mph on a twisting country road with his lights off in the middle of the night. He used to like driving with his lights off because he thought it was "exciting." This was not Stephen Hawking, folks.

Anyway, I think of this poor guy and others like him whenever I happen to see people wearing those "I'm With Stupid" shirts. Whoever thought of those things was a genius, because there is a huge market of people who would buy such a jackass thing and then humiliate their spouse or partner by wearing it. What a world.