Random Thoughts - March 2026

Ted Reads Random Thoughts

13:03

People ask me what I do. Here’s my answer: “Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m my own worst enemy?”  I help people change that.

If I ever wrote a book about my life, I think the title of it would be “Cutting Grass.”  And it would have nothing to do with marijuana. It would have to do with where and when I do my best and most expansive thinking. I just read a research article that suggests our best ideas come at that point where we are half sleep and half awake. What would be the title of your book?

My daily physical ritual before I leave the house includes the motions that Johnny Carson made famous when he did his comedy bit, “Carnac, the Magician.”  Touching my forehead (Glasses on) my lips (Dentures in) and chest (Phone on lanyard and around neck.)

To possess the truth is good, but unless I do something with it, it doesn’t much matter. For truth to be effective I must move it. Communicate it. It’s irresponsible for me not to. If I don’t have a plan to enable it, enact it or execute it, it disappears, the way the fog of my breath dissipates on a cold winter morning.

What’s with our relationship with cows? As in Holy Cow!!!  Same question about a town in Ohio. Toledo, as in Holy Toledo!!!?  And Cowabunga!

I also learned today that ants have a consciousness. A sense of self. They can look in a mirror and know that it is them. Whoa.

I was wondering why a type of investment are called securities, when we are told that a person can lose everything if you buy some. Doublespeak 1984ish? George Orwell.

I was reading about Pete Seeger and thought at the end of it all, I would like to believe I had lived my life in a way that my contributions to life reflected my value system, as his did.

From now on if someone accuses me of being a numbskull, I will have to own up to it. I can blame the dermatologist though who MOHS’d me. She first put a numbing agent into my head. I suggest that the more we accept what being human is all about, the less we have to defend our self. So, yes, I can be a numbskull.

Walking these days for me is like riding a bicycle. Like the first pumps on a bicycle can be a bit wobbly and then as momentum gathers, things go more smoothly. Once moving you face the danger of unexpected obstacles, and negotiating turns, a tire blowout, the frame breaking, and risking falling over when stopping.  The same is true of my pedestrianism.

I was watching someone kiss another and noticed how they had to contort their heads to consummate the act. Isn’t that sort of weird? I was thinking of other mammals who don’t have to do that. Why us?

I am experimenting for the third month, to not allow any negative words to come out of my mouth regarding other people, including myself. While noticing that I’d LIKE to comment on them. 

I see our reaction to Artificial Intelligence eerily similar to our actions and reactions to COVID.  Some refuse to see it as anything more than something that someone wants us to worry about, and is no real threat.  Some are saying, “Look out, this thing can and will kill life as we know it”.  Some are putting it into the category of simple natural changes like moving from horses to tractors for farming, and that those changes in the long run have and will make things better.  Some are warning of change on a cosmic, unimaginable level.  Some say those who are really worried about it are just alarmists.  I haven’t heard much about that “It escaped from a secret lab in China,” but I have seen the rationalizations for not putting any limits on it here in America because it would provide an unfair advantage to China and would put us WAY behind in “The race.”

Me?  I read that it recently caused the reduction of 40% of a major corporation’s workforce.  I have several of my clients who now have ChatGPT as a co-therapist or coach.  I would hope that more folks would see what’s happening with AI as the moment when they realized COVID actually could kill people, even themselves.    

Someone was commenting on what appears to be my addiction to research and that I didn’t seem like a nerd in-person. (I probably get notice of three dozen research papers a week. I don’t read the entire research paper, but I do read the abstracts) I remarked that research papers are about the only source of information that I don’t have to take in with huge grains of salt. What I do with the information is extrapolate the findings and see how they might apply in explaining current conditions, to try to make sense of what I am experiencing.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY BELOW

Nazi-ism did not start with Hitler’s arrival on the political scene or go away at his death. Nor did the KKK go away. They just huddled under a rock, waiting to be exposed to the light. Nazism was quite popular in America until Japan attacked us in 1941. Neither will America’s current versions of the same go away at the end of this regime. It wasn’t about one man, or one woman. Or a few dozen. It was and is about millions of them.

I felt a lift of hope over the new year’s season. I remembered that growing up, this time of year on the farm, one of the activities was to scoop all the manure out of the barnyard and spread it on the adjacent fields. The effect being the fields are fertilized. Crop growth enhanced. I am hoping for the same thing to happen with our country. 2025 has been a good year for manure production.

By the way, one of the farmer jokes goes, “What is the only piece of farm equipment that John Deere won’t stand behind?”

Answer? “Their manure spreaders.”  

For those of you who are having trouble understanding that joke, “stand behind” means guarantee.  But in this case, “stand behind” means being in the place - the back of the manure spreader where the manure is flung out like a person trying to get something sticky (a booger, for example) off of the end of their finger.