Hello, I’m still here.

Yeah, I know it seems like the last time I posted was shortly after Al Gore invented the Internet. But, honestly, do you all think I got nothing else to do all day but sit around on my computer coming up with stuff to amuse people who surf the Internet? No, contrary to what my family thinks, I have a life.

“I have a life”- when you think about it, it’s kind of a useless phrase. If you can say it, isn’t that proof that you have one? Our society today is really great at coming up with meaninless phrases like this. Doesn’t anybody these days ever have anything important to say? Like, something along the lines of, “excuse me, sir, but a pile of bricks just fell from the top of that building, and you’re standing right under them.” Now that would be important, but you rarely hear people saying things like that these days.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I don’t actually have a life. I could just be a computer endowed with artificial intelligence, or, in the case of this column, artificial stupidity.

A corrolary to “I have a life” is “Get a life.” People always seem to be telling each other to get a life. I get that all the time.

What you never hear people tell each other is to “Take a life”. Of course, “taking a life” has an entirely different meaning now than “getting a life”. But that is really odd when you think about it. The difference in meaning between the words “take” and “get” is really quite subtle, isn’t it? So how come there’s such a big difference in meaning when you put the words “a life” after them?  It doesn’t really seem to make sense, does it?

This is why I make it a point to never tell anybody to “get a life”. How do I know that the person that I say that to won’t misinterpret my suggestion and promptly go out and brutally murder some innocent shopkeeper somewhere? This is a real possibility considering the types of people you usually say “get a life” to. They’re usually a little bit shakey to begin with. You never say that to somebody who’s got his shit together.

No, I would not want to have that blood on my hands. Furthermore, it could leagally make me an accessory to the murder. Can you imagine- the cops haul this guy in, who is probably a few deuces short of a full deck in the first place, and when they ask him why he did it he answers, “well, Mike McHugh told me to, that’s why!”

So I get hauled into court, and my only chance at a successful defense is to be able to explain to the judge the grammatical difference between the words “take” and “get”. I don’t think that even Johnny Cochran if he were still alive would be able to get me out of that one.

No, I’d most likely rot in prison, right along there with Charles Manson, just another madman who enticed folks to go around killing people.