Nuts

People can be nuts sometimes,
Really they can.
They infuriate me with their way of thinking,
Slow moving and dim.
Chrissakes, I talked to this old guy the other day,
He was convinced Saddam still had WMDs.
I said, “Hey, old chap, but Saddam’s dead.”
He stubbornly maintained that WMDs were in Iraq, and paid no attention to me.
Rolling my eyes, I said that if thousands of UN inspectors hadn’t found anything,
If Bush and Rice and Blair and Howard hadn’t found anything,
It was pretty damn clear that there were no bloody WMDs in Iraq.
“What about Saddam, eh?” wheezed the old codger, waving his stick at me,
“You’re not telling me he hasn’t got nukes stockpiled in his dirty great palace?”
I stood for a moment, trying not to yell out.
Calmly, I remonstrated with him that Saddam was dead,
And was probably in Muslim Paradise,
Eating grapes and cursing Bush and all the rest of them,
Eternal paradise and all that.
The old geezer looked at me curiously, and then shuffled off,
Muttering about young ‘uns and overactive imaginations.
I stared after him in exasperation. Imaginations?
He needed to read the frickin’ newspaper a little more.
If he could read, that is.
While on the subject of imaginations,
Take my four-year old nephew.
The kid thinks that Superman is real,
And that he can fly, and will prove it too.
So, when his disbelieving uncle, (me), visits his mother,
He pulls on his tights and dons his cape,
And takes a leap off the sofa.
The dive I made would have got me into the Aussie rugger team,
If any talent scouts were watching.
I dusted him off, and said,
Kid, there are three things that are certain in life,
“Death, taxes, and the fact that humans can’t fly. Got it?”
He struggled to absorb this, and then whined,
“But Superman can do it!”
I replied that if Superman was real, I’d eat my kettle.
The brainy little kid took this in, and then piped up with,
“But Uncle, you won’t be able to digest a kettle.”
I gave up.
As I said, people can be slow-witted and dim sometimes.
Then I get home and discover I left four lights on, and the burner running.
Okay, so maybe I’m a little forgetful sometimes.
But that’s not the point.1