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Ten steps to a longer life
It’s the Pitts
By Lee Pitts

Popular periodicals are always printing lists of things you can do to make your life last longer. Usually these involve yucky diets, regular body cleansings and renewing your subscription. As an alternative I’ve come up with 10 other ways to make your life last longer, or at least feel like it.

•10 - The tenth best way to make your life feel like it’s passing at a snail’s pace is get a job you hate. The hours will tick away like months.

•9 - Have extensive oral surgery done. There’s nothing like sitting in a dentist’s chair and having huge hypodermic needles, drills, and sharp pointy objects in your mouth to make you wonder if the present period of pain will ever pass.

•8 - Attend a convention of soil conservationists or a seminar on dung beetles and attend all the sessions and listen to all the speeches. Within two days you’ll be in a persistent vegetative state and forget what day or time it is.

•7 - Attend those same conventions and spend the entire time in the bar instead of listening to speeches. Drink copious amounts of alcohol so that when you wake up the next morning you’ll have the Smirnoff Flu and its accompanying giant hangover, a mouth that feels like a herd of sheep bedded down on your tongue, and a head that feels bigger than a house. On the morning after the night before, the hours between nine and noon will feel like the longest time you’ve ever spent in your entire life. Just hearing the ticking seconds that come a half-hour apart will make your head throb.

•6 - Get a new puppy and housebreak it. I once spent six months one week housebreaking a puppy that I thought would never grow up. Just remember that one month of cleaning up messes around the house is like seven in dog years.

•5 - Have all your plumbing back up and then call a plumber to fix it. As you wait the mandatory four week waiting period for the plumber to show up (it’s written into their union contract) you’ll swear you can see flowers grow and insects fossilize.

•4 - Have house guests for an extended stay and you’ll agree with me that whoever said that fish and house guests start to smell after three days was wildly optimistic. After two days you’ll be willing to try everything short of dynamite to get them out of the house. Who knew that three days could last a month?

•3 - If you are used to spending your winters in Bermuda shorts on a golf course go spend a winter in North Dakota where it’s too cold even for polar bears. North Dakota is a great state with wonderful people but there’s a reason it’s so sparsely populated: only North Dakotans are tough enough to live there. If you want to see time stand still rent a house for the nine months of winter in Minot, invite all your in-laws and outlaws for an extended stay and have the plumbing back up. Time will literally stand still. At this rate you could live forever... if you don’t commit suicide first.

•2 - Conversely, if you live in Minot head south and spend a summer in Gila Bend, Arizona, whose motto should be: “Where the devil goes to warm up.” After only minutes being exposed to the Arizona sun you’ll be longing for a good blizzard.

•1 - From personal experience I can tell you that the number one way to make time stand still is to rent a cheap motel room in a 1940’s “motor court” for you and your wife, in a town you wouldn’t normally stop in unless you had car trouble. I promise you’ll spend the longest night of your life on a flea-bitten mattress that’s thinner than a fast food steak, only not as soft. You’ll be kept awake by crickets that live in the walls and by your wife who refuses to use the moldy bathroom or to step on the filthy floor. She’ll harp on you all night for being such a tightwad jerk. I believe it must have been a similar experience that prompted prehistoric man to first utter the famous phrase, “tomorrow never comes.”

This farm news was published in the Sept. 27, 2006 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.

9/27/2006