I'm not a public health official, nor am I concerned too spasmodically, but this district near mine is more transparent than Glad Wrap once around a twelve inch hoagie. Damn, you can almost see the preservatives in the stacked lunch meat. The pimentos represent certain specially medically grouped individuals. With unique problems.
It's why Westview, Pennsylvania is a great place to study something. Like the drive to succeed. It, like being squat-built, may be hereditary, but we who emphasize nurture over nature might enjoy finding events in people's lives that alter fates however occurances may, with an emphasis on success stories, so people don't get too doggone morose.
I often ride the bus through brevity's home base, and notice that most people are shorter than average, muscular, portly, especially short in the trunk, and are, most dratted, barrel chested. If I must add that there is a common physiognomy, like from an injection molding firm, it would be cranking out men who tend to croak some where's between age 32 and 48.
The leading cause of death in Westview is hereditary stunted longevity. An acquaintance of recent yore lost his father all too soon, and I am conjecturing a wide load of thought that for seeing quick mortality while in highschool, a person may feel compelled to take an early start in the career area of their lives. Such people may have no time to suffer fools, though lots of people do. In all cases, time is short.
These people may eschew vices, though some don't. I've noticed people who hang around bars in Westview drop dead soonest of the manifestly squat. One's best chance of living to be 52 is to work as a manager in one of two branch banking offices. Tom's programatic was selling 'financial packages,' and it's my contention that he might have sold either less of or no packages had he not seen, early on, that life is short, and options for the short lived blue collar are mincingly specified.
My acquaintance left town alive, to move someplace more interesting, and that is laudable. He left Westview well to do. The more common exit plan was by Greyhound or hearse, so I recall Tom to be a small town maverick.
The picture of Tom is clearing nicely after a giant cup of convenience store joe. It was July of 1995, Wooly Bully Big Bill Clinton was our BBF-like Big President. Little Me still thought weensy entrepreneurs with bright ideas deserve to prosper. How sad and funny. Gasoline was cheap. The tech industries were booming. To help other econ hamlets, the Federal Reserve took the saddles off certain banking restrictions. Out of this new liberalism galloped some fast horses in the money lending biz.
Tom would stand in the middle of the Middling Diminutive Bank and button hole people, me included, and try to sell everyone an investment product. I didn't buy anything from Tom, but I couldn't miss running into him at the coffee counter across the street. He was one of those people who drag the Good Neighbor Sam feeling out of people. I didn't always value optimism, and a decent old coffee talk with a firecracker in a crisp blue suit adds weight to certain social precepts. Like there's no sense bumming people out. I told him that I couldn't invest just now because I was saving up to build an addition to my house. Perfectly normal bullshit! Garbage like that helps me feel taller and more attractive.
There wasn't any sense bumming Tom out with all the little plans I'd been flushing, one after another, down the mortal sump. Elsewhere, there was truly a renaissance happening at the time in computers, the Internet, and in money management. It was the first time ordinary people, of any height or physique, could trade stock at home in their living rooms. Tom's line of work was not unlike selling rugs, in that he sold groups of investments, many of which offered praeternatural returns, caprice auspices of being not insured by the FDIC. His people were on this matter. It was so wrong to suppress free enterprise by forcing iron solid banks to insure deposits. But, it would continue to insure normal pass book savings, stupid though that was. Tom's products were at liberty to appreciate in value and to chunk out fab dividends.
Again, I had to thank Tom for bringing to mind something that came up a decade earlier, when I was still a philosophy major.
The few chats with Tom were grand, and he and I otherwise did what ever. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening by day,but I had been having nightmares in which a serpent bites chunks out of the Webster globe. Each time it would strike, some backwash in Kentucky or upstate New York got scratched off. In some ways, the dream made me even more optimistic because the cobra never hit Southwestern Pennsylvania. It can mean that one lives in a utopia. But it is utopia by default. Nothing too awful happened here. And, like narcotized reciprocity, dreadful things happened recently elsewhere, sparing fine folks like me and Tom. Westview is the stablest ring of hell I've ever made a habit of grocery shopping and banking in.
Tom proved to me the cobra was correct up to a point. People, so he told me, were making much money in financial products. He sustained the appearance of increasing wealth for the entire time he and I were conversant at the coffee shop, nearest the barbershop and stationery store that no one goes into. I neglected to mention earlier that people were teaching this new way of thinking, just everywhere, which professed that the best we can do for one another is make one another feel good. One way of doing so is to project an aura of positive energy, and to steer one's space wagon clear of obstructions, like negativity. Some of the philosophy professors where I went to school were teaching that imagination was a reality that needed some chin chucks, and didn't need some dirty bastard putting up obstructions. Tom said he never heard of phenomenology, and I quipped that he didn't need to have. He was already a practitioner!
