Bill Moeller Commentary: You Can Say That Again

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You’ve read it before, haven’t you? I mean the part where this so-called columnist complains about an overcrowded drawer in his file cabinet, just bulging with bits and pieces that he thought would make the base for a full column because he didn’t want to throw any away when they didn’t. 

Here — in no chronological or sensible order — is about 600 words demonstrating just such a failing.

1. Only one person can be the first to do what “couldn’t be done.” 

2. A showing of an early program in the TV series “MASH” demonstrates that it began as a series based only on laughs but slowly became an argument against the horrors (and senselessness) of war. 

3. Scam phone callers ought to be taught how to speak in a manner that doesn’t immediately display them as a person who couldn’t find a decent job and that this one is a last resort.

4. If a tear begins to come to your eye when you remember how you felt in the movie “Casablanca” when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman “we’ll always have Paris,” you’ve likely gone through the same experience yourself at one time.

5. If you’re old enough to remember the musical quartet that called themselves “The Hoosier Hot Shots” and heard an old recording today, you’ll realize that they weren’t as talented as you thought they were at the time. Perhaps that’s why few people today have heard of them.

6. You wish that the TV show “Northern Exposure” would have paid whatever they had to to keep Rob Morrow as Dr. Joel Fleishman. He may not have been your favorite character but the program fell to pieces when he was let go.

Along the same line, the program “Death in Paradise” is still running but I, for one, stopped watching when Ben Miller was let go as the inexperienced and somewhat bewildered head of police.

7. Melting glaciers mean eventual diminishing amounts of water for electric power. So if the predictions for automobiles all eventually switching to electricity are correct, where is the staggering amount of electricity going to come from? 

8. And it’s time to ask my semi-perpetual, semi-annual question: Why are so many local people who came here and stayed often so anxious to change us into something closer to what they left? Have they never tried to drive on Centralia’s Harrison Avenue on a weekday afternoon? 



9. What is the past tense of sneeze? Snoze? Sneezed sounds so sterile to me.

10. Why do people say “forever” when they really mean something less than eternal?

11. I guess I don’t qualify as being macho when my favorite sport to watch is a tennis tournament. Outside of boxing and wrestling, it’s the only sport where one person is pitted against one other (I get bored, though, watching tennis doubles). 

12. Here’s one that I know will get me into trouble: How can a person shout out “I can’t breathe” if they’re not able to breathe?

13. If you had a chance to go back to any part of your past life, what would it be? After pondering the various ups and down in my own life, I’d have to answer that it would be when we first moved here and lived in a huge old house that sat on 5 acres of cleared pasture land and the children could help feed the animals and could build a fort in a wooded area across the street and we couldn’t even see the houses of our nearest neighbors but had an unobstructed view of Mount Rainier.

14. Here’s a quote from Garrison Keillor: “Committees are God’s way of preventing change.”  This would seem especially appropriate in our current political scene.

And, sadly, the “committees that produced the changes and solutions of the ‘60s — ERA, Civil Rights, etc. — have revealed how tentative those solutions can be.

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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.