Acceptance

*Blogger's Note: for better or worse -- readers be the judge -- this is Blog Post #500. Slaughtering the words of Winston Spencer Churchill, "never since AlGore's last speech, has so little been said, while taking so many words to say it"*

In Star Trek II, one sees the playing out of a Star Fleet training scenario, infamous among cadets for wreaking havoc on the simulator room, and the cadet in command. It is known therein as the Kobyashi Maru scenario. And -- as would come as no great surprise -- the only Star Fleet cadet to ever beat the "no win" scenario is hisself, Admiral James T. Kirk.

'Cuz he reprogrammed the scenario.

I'm here to tell you, folks....I ain't that smart.

Oh, academically, I dun okay, grammar used herein aside. But when it came to puzzles, I was, how shall I say it....on par with a door knob. I hated puzzles. I didn't care for doing puzzles. I didn't care if they were put-together puzzles, crossword puzzles, number puzzles, or the kind of picture-association, geometric mosquito spit, that required a deeper grasp of analysis than I was up to.

Call me intellectually lazy...I just didn't apply myself in that mode.

It's not that, given half my life, I couldn't put together one of those scenic 1,000 piece puzzles of a manatee stealing a six pack of Bud Light from Flip on a Frontier jet tail fin; I just didn't feel like giving a generation's worth of time to sort all the pieces, and put them together over a quarter-century or so.

Besides, for a period of my life, there were pet cats in the household; and we all know how cats like to scatter stuff. I just didn't feel like chasing a cat, trying to retrieve a piece of a manatee that the cat probably would have spit out, had the cat given it a moment of thought or visual analysis. But I digress.

Anyway, I hate puzzles. Which is a bit ironic, since in my job, I have to solve puzzles. But never once in that job, have I had to chase down a cat who snatched a key piece of one.

At any rate, on the eve of Mother's Day, I called dear ol' Mom to wish her a happy one. And as the conversation went on, she reminded me of my innovative method of solving one of those puzzles that I have, for all of my adult life, loathed.

Leave it to dear ol' Ma, to remind me of an event I spent more than 30 years trying to forget.

I don't recall just when the infamous Rubiks/Rubix Cube came into being. But like mood rings, pet rocks (the real ones, not my freak of geologic nature, Seymour..."am NOT!"), etc., for a while about every home in America had at least one Rubiks/Rubix Cube in it. A Rubiks/Rubix Cube -- for those who ain't ever seed one -- is a six-sided puzzle. Each side is one color, different from opposite sides. The idea is to twist and manipulate the Cube until the colors are all messed up; and then, put the Cube back into it's original "all sides one color" mode.

I can't speak for others...but I was abysmal at this kind of puzzle. I spent hours, trying to work out a strategy in my head, visualizing this stupid Cube being put back into original form. And the plan never came to fruition in actuality.

Perhaps I should have tried while drunk; since I never got stoned, perhaps I missed out on the shortcut to getting it back to whenst it was when I first got it.

Others tried to show me how to do it; but all they got from me was the equivalent look of the AFLAC Duck, listening to Yogi Berra rattle off some of whatever it was he made famous saying. It just didn't register.

But I was stubborn; I kept trying. And many of my friends, long since having mastered the Cube, had moved on to other silly fad sh** -- like polyester leisure suits -- and were giving me tons of grief, 'cuz I was letting this silly, six-sided son of a plastic cubeoytch, get the better of me.

One day, the fire of my inner determination to persevere went phffft. So I began to seek a face-saving shortcut.

I pondered painting my Rubiks/Rubix Cube. Alas, I couldn't find paint to perfectly match the crappy, worn plastic colors my Cube was fading to. I'd be outed for my inability with matching colors and brush stroke.

I pondered taking the Cube apart, and re-assembling it. Alas, I never took anything apart that I didn't have leftover pieces afterward; and anything I disassembled, never worked again.

I could say that I woke up one day, and found that my Rubiks/Rubix Cube had, like in a country western song, run off with my best girl and pick up truck. Alas, I didn't have a truck, and my best girl wasn't, after hearing that idea.

I mulled saying that my Rubiks/Rubix Cube had been hijacked by aliens; again, a non-starter. 'Cuz anyone including me knew, the aliens would put it back together correctly, before impregnating it with some snake-like alien spawn. It would look like it should, before it grew six foot hairy ears, and started eating the neighborhood.

I came to the conclusion that, unlike Admiral Kirk, I had come up against a 'no-win' scenario. Yet, I didn't react as he would, a few years' hence; I found a curious level of acceptance with this realization. I found that, when all was taken into account, I could accept defeat at the cubes of a diabolically stupid human contrivance, designed solely for the purpose of demeaning me.

I would, as one might expect of one still wet behind the years in the throes of young male adulthood, "man up" and accept things as they were.

Having found this acceptance, and calling it good, I proceeded to act upon it in a manner one would expect a young, wet-behind-the-ears adult man would.

I took my Rubiks/Rubix Cube out, and shot it. One 20 gauge round. *BLAM* Mourners omit flowers or Super Glu.

Acceptance never felt so good.