Column 14

[Note: This is my worst column to date. Accept these token sentences as my attempt at atonement. Or don't. I'll enjoy this glorious punctuation, diction, and syntax all by myself. Mmm...]

When I was a young boy, loitering in the not-yet-radioactive hills of rural Appalachia, my father taught me some very valuable lessons. I look back fondly on the days when we would lie in wait beside the highway, a pavement-colored contraption carefully concealed before us, as we watched some damned Yankee carpetbagger drive ever so briskly into our machination. Then we would spring forth and thrust upon him/her our esteemed wares of Southern heritage such as Confederate flag bumper stickers, deep-fried pig spleen, and Pappy Meggs's last molar, knocked out in a fight with a particularly ornery raccoon over a piece of cornbread (the 'coon may have had it first, but that never stopped Pappy when carbohydrates and/or varmints were concerned).

But tourist traps weren't the only things I learned from my father. Once we were out chopping wood for our cast-iron stove (which was really a carburetor and a waffle iron melded together) when Pappy's axe sailed through the air and hit me right on the top of my head. The effects are still obvious, as you can tell by the picture you see of me above, but as I wailed, screamed, and gradually subsumed to an amnesia inducing coma, I can still remember my father's kind words of encouragement: "Y'all best stop that bellyachin' fore I shows you how I got this here ice-skating trophy! It shore warn't from iceskatin' I tells you what! Suck it up, son!"

Lying in my unconscious state, I pondered the wisdom of this advice. Yes, I had just suffered a great deal of physical and emotional abuse, but then again, whose parent hasn't chopped off the crown of their head with an axe (metaphorically speaking, of course). After I awoke four months later, I learned that he was actually talking to my brother, Mylan Mort Meggs the Eighth, who had brought out the vacuum to retrieve the remains of my brain, but I kept the lesson in mind (not to mention an axe fragment or two).

Today, whenever life gets me down, I think back to Pappy Meggs. D+ in Turfgrass Management? Suck it up! Printer jam involving my tongue, a toner taste test, and a triple-canine-double-helix-ribonucleicaci-dare? Suck it up! A malignant tumor shaped like FDR on my forehead? Suck. It. Up!

But it doesn't just work for me. I see folks whining about parking tickets, breaking nails, and genocides all the time, and, really, it'd just be easier if they'd just suck it up. Communist sympathizers steal your TV right before you find out whether Dan's evil twin is the father of Stacy's Uncle's Neighbor's Rottweiler? Suck it up! A man in a pink trench coat walks up to you, calls you a morbidly obese philistine, and pokes you in the eye? Suck it up! Your entire community, family, and culture is decimated by foreign invaders who rape and pillage every inch of your homeland while the international community has tea and discusses the political implications of checkered versus solid wallpaper? That's right. Suck it up!

Because, really, no one wants to hear about it. We all have problems. Even me. I haven't been intoxicated for at least the four minutes, twenty two seconds it's taken to plagiarize this article, but do you see me crying about it? I'm certainly not going to suck it down, if that's what you're thinking. I suck it up, and, by golly, I like it! So next time you want to cry about your mother's cancer, your husband's latent homosexuality, or the ever decreasing quality of the volunteer writers working for your college's periodical, please, suck it up.