Yesterday marked forty-eight years since Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane went down. Taking half the band and leaving behind a message that outlived them all: “Be a simple kind of man.”
Ronnie Van Zant once said those words came from his gramma’s advice; to be patient, stay honest, and live by your own measure.
Good advice then, maybe better now.
We have made life a hell of a lot more complicated since 1977. I went to the doctor and the bank last week and noticed how big everything looked. Not because they added space, but because the steel file cabinets are all gone. Our lives used to be kept in drawers, folders, and manila envelopes.
Now it all floats in the clouds, guarded by passwords and a few caffeine-soaked nerds who have never seen sunlight. Yesterday, one of those basement dwellers figured out the password and hacked the internet. The poor bastard has never seen female genitalia, but he knows your social security number, your blood type, and your sophomore transcripts.
We lost the cloud for a few hours, and the world panicked like a toddler without a pacifier. Maybe Gramma Van Zant was right all along, be a simple kind of man, because the more we hand our lives to machines, the dumber we get.
Keep your word.
Know who you are.
Do your job and do it well.
That is how simple men and women built this country before the cloud stored our memories.
Finally, the sunset today...
...the last one past six o’clock until next March.
The weather corner has sperm swimming under the clouds, my way of saying it is going to be a windy day.
Tuesday morning, perfect for being in a daydream, humming some Skynyrd, and remembering to keep it simple.
