of Clotted Clouds and charred potatoes

I've found this to be both alarming and comforting, but nonetheless true. Once you get get 'em talking a bit, you'll find that most folks will start telling you how much it sucks to be them. The litany of ailments both real and imagined, the breaks they never quite got. The hell that is their very existence, their utter themness..

In other words, they're usually just as screwed up as you are!(That's the part that's both alarming and comforting). Granted, they may not have the same problems you do, but they usually have about as many of their own problems. And they're usually just as consumed with solving them(or at least alleviating the suffering)as are you with your load o' troubles.

What got me going on this was talking with someone in the office whom I thought if for no other reason than age should have a life relatively bereft of problems. Early 30's, apparently healthy and so forth. Once we got talking, I realized he had all kindsa stuff wrong with him just like me. Alarming and comforting in one shot.

Come to think of it, I can remember being 30 and having no fewer problems than I do now. Just different ones, a 30 year-old's problems. Actually I can't think of an age past 10 where I didn't..

I think you get in this life just as much as you can "barely" handle(or at least perceiving yourself as barely handling it), your own very personalized load o' troubles, made only for you and - well, your capacity to handle it. So yeah, it is a bit comforting to know you're not alone in this. In the words of The Ghost of Christmas Past(played by Sam Kinison)on an episode of Married, with Children delivered to a distraught Al Bundy, " You think your life stinks, pal- well get a whiff of mine!" Kinison often played characters you'd want to be downwind of under any circumstance.

So, yeah, we all have some Joe Blftsk in us(the character pictured here, from Al Capp's Dogpatch USA comic strip: the character with the perennial raincloud who is always a jinx when he appears), our own specially issued rainclouds. The umbrella is up to us.