​“Incorrigible buffoon.” What a great line, eh?
 
Language is awesome. I love playing with it. You can motivate others. Teach them. Drive people in a specific direction. Get them to think along novel lines. It’s about word choice and how you string them together.
 
Certain words jump out. It may be history you have with them or something about the way they are pronounced that gets you humming.
 
I remember over 40 years ago when the younger brother of the woman I was dating at the time heard me say the word “spectacular.” You would have thought I invented electricity. He went off the rest of the evening calling everything he saw or heard “spectacular” solely because he loved the way the sound of the word rolled off his tongue. There’s a lot to be said for that.
 
Just last week I was in a cemetery, meeting with a family. I drove up in a golf cart. They were eating Taco Bell. I asked how “Taco Smells” tasted. There were two women eating and a son, a 9-year-old. OMG, I made a new best friend because of calling it “Taco Smells.” He decided to tell me a joke in response: Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road? Because he didn’t have guts.

Pretty good for a 9-year-old boy. But the funnier thing is I spoke with the mother the next day in following up with her on some cemetery services, and what did the boy remember about the encounter? Taco Smells. Not much else. He was having a blast with the word.
 
The nightly news has a field day with adjectives. Alarming attacks. Distressing diets. Horrific hurricanes. Terrible tidal waves. If you listen closely to the announcer and the words his or her writers have inserted into their mouths, you’ll hear a ton of adjectives designed to drive your thought process in a specific direction. It’s not reporting the news. It’s using words to direct you.
 
Words matter. For many reasons. They’re also fun and entertaining. They’re meant to be played around with to see if you can grab someone’s attention, make them think.
 
Bombastic.
 
Understated.
 
Marvelous.
 
Magnificent.
 
Blossom.
 
So many words to describe so many things about life and the people we encounter. Words make me think about the people we meet on a daily basis, and how we define them in our minds.
 
Loser.
 
Non-listener.
 
Excitable.
 
Relaxed.
 
And sometimes it takes more than one word. There’s the snake oil salesman, someone we all know. There’s the person who knows his stuff. The guy who thinks too much of himself. We don’t really have the one word to describe the individual so we have to string a few together to categorize that person.
 
This past week, I had a customer write to me about the job I did working with her family through a grieving period. Her words mattered. She chose them carefully, identifying specifically what I did to help them through a very difficult and sensitive situation.

Her shared words gave me a terrific feeling. I beamed with appreciation. She’s not a professional writer, but I wrote back and told her she had another career waiting in the writing profession if she wanted to pursue it. Don’t underestimate the written word.

​Two weeks ago I drove home from work. Bored, tired, I wanted something to do.
 
I thought to myself, “Maybe I’ll go see a movie tomorrow afternoon on my day off.”
 
Then I remembered, “Oh, I thought I could see a movie, but I can’t.”
 
A few days later I wanted to grab a cup of coffee with my friend Peter. Or perhaps see if he wanted to have lunch. I was pumped.

“Oh, I thought, I can’t do that. We’re not allowed to dine out or sit together at a coffee shop.” I guess that was out, too.
 
I have a good friend from a previous job and I like to see him on a regular basis. He lives in Madison and is a great conversationalist and fun to have a few drinks with because we hound each other, tell funny stories and pretend like we know what is going on in the world.
 
“Oh, I thought, I can’t do that. We’re not allowed into a bar. I can’t meet him out somewhere to order an Old Fashioned.”
I got to thinking about church and upcoming services. “Oh, I thought, I can’t do that. We’re streaming them online. I’ll have to read father’s sermon again this week rather than hearing it in person and talking to friends in the congregation.”
 
I miss all those things, and more. I keep thinking, “Oh, I thought I could do that.” But I forgot. I can’t. We aren’t allowed to do those things now, and it depresses me. It’s a sad part of our condition with the virus circulating.
 
Without thinking, my mind considered going to a museum in Milwaukee a couple of weeks back. WHAT WAS I THINKING? “Oh, I thought, museums were one of the first public places shut down.” How could I have forgotten that?
 
This past week a couple of things changed. We are allowed to play golf. I got in some serious social distancing golf Thursday by myself in the rain, with one other group in front of me. I passed them halfway through the round and they drove way off to the side, probably because they were more scared that I might him them with an errant tee shot than anything else. We waved and shouted golfer support words to each other. It was nice.
 
I played again Friday with my younger brother and we did some social distancing while walking the course. Since we are both bad golfers, we stayed way away from each other trying to find our respective balls. But it was fun, and was our thing to look forward to last week.
 
This week, I’m sure there are going to be more situations where I say to myself, “Oh, I thought,” and then I’m going to remember I can’t do that right now. It’s tough. These things affect our emotional mindsets as our lives are constrained and we look for the positive in the darkness.
 
Things will open up. I know this. It takes time. It can be oh so hard to bear that in mind on a day-to-day basis.

Because we keep saying to ourselves “Oh, I thought I could do this,” only to remember we’re in a time of chaos and change, affecting our perspective and our fundamental expectations in life. At some point, when those thoughts occur to us, we will be able to do those things again. Until then, we have to recalibrate our expectations.

​Many things humans do cause unintended consequences. Who foresaw the problems the gasoline-powered car would cause? Long-term systemic air pollution. Prime land paved over. Congestion commuting. Losing touch with nature.
 
The car freed us and tied us down. It’s given us way greater mobility as individuals than at any other time in history. Wake up, drive 43 miles to your job, do your work, drive home. We don’t think too much about the routine. Yes, the vehicle is great to get us there and to other engagements, but paying for gasoline, repairs are other unintended consequences like those noted above.
 
When technology is adopted or a major change comes our way, we don’t always think through in advance what will happen in the months or years to come. That may be because we don’t have enough time to think through the changes or solely because as a species we don’t play out all the scenarios before proceeding. We act. We respond. We adapt.
 
There are going to be a LOT of unintended consequences from COVID-19. Some we already know and some we won’t learn about for years.
 
People wearing masks. Getting your temperature checked before you step into your manufacturing building in the morning or at a sporting event. Staggered work schedules so only a certain number of people are in your office space on a given day. Giving the foot kick to someone when you greet that person instead of the longstanding traditional handshake. All these things are happening now, and more are to come, both significant and insignificant in terms of how we live.
 
My wife and I have adjusted on many fronts. We maintain distance from others while out in public and appropriately wear our masks. We’re finding new ways to say hello and greet others.
 
One of the more amusing unintended consequences of how the virus has affected my routine is the piling up of magazines on our bedroom floor as I wait for our fitness facility to reopen. I miss that 3-day-a-week ritual for many reasons – the bonding with others as we go about workouts; telling a joke to a few buddies; the sense of accomplishment and stress reduction after the workout is finished.

One of the things I always did was put my finished magazines into the rack so others could have a good read while they rode the stationary bike or used any of the other machines where they could maintain fixed eyesight. I liked to share the magazines, and it was a chance for them to be reused before going into recycling. There was a little sense of doing the right thing, and giving to others.
 
Now the magazines pile up. It’s been six weeks. I don’ want to throw them into the recycling bin. At the same time, the information in each magazine slowly loses its value as the information machine in our society churns along.
 
I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. There are seven issues waiting right now. The pile grows. But there are rays of light that things will open up a bit in few weeks.

I’m hoping so. The next month’s editions are coming. And if I can’t drop them off at our fitness facility, I may actually have to change my behavior and bring them to our chiropractor.