Internet morons to the rescue!

Like everyone who’s not a complete sociopath (you know who you are) I sometimes get down on myself over past mistakes. I’ve made my share of them, that’s for sure.

The first I can remember was the time I left my chocolate-filled Easter basket on the dash of my folks’ shiny new ’60 Chevy while we attended mass. A hot, sunny day. By the time the priest finally meandered around to my favorite part of the service (dismissal), my chocolate delicacies had melted into an unremarkable brown puddle, most of which had soaked through the basket and into the radio speaker.

I was unhappy. My old man even more so. The radio never sounded the same. On the bright side, the car smelled delicious for months.

That was a relatively minor mistake, though, notable only because it was my first. Since then, my mistakes have grown in both size and significance.

You’d think my most memorable errors would involve ex-wives, of which I have several. But I don’t consider any of them mistakes, per se. They were all nice women, really. I wouldn’t have married them otherwise. Things just didn’t work out. Sometimes due to my mistakes, sometimes theirs. More often, both.

But the marriages themselves were not mistakes. Or so I believe. Some of my exes might say otherwise.

Then there were the kids. I was more or less a single parent during most of their upbringing, at least with the first two. Anyone who’s ever been a parent knows the odds of screwing up parenthood are about one in one.

It will happen. It did. My kids, long since grown, say I was a good parent, but Lord knows I could have been better. Were I younger, I might give it another go just to prove it.

Despite my laissez-faire parenting style, my kids turned out great for the most part. Not a serial killer among them. Now they’re adults and making their own mistakes, mistakes they will one day regret and thus the cycle continues.

When I’m getting especially down on myself, I sometimes resort to the “misery loves company” treatment; for that, the internet provides ample fodder.

I’m thinking now of the guys from Arkansas who were recently charged with aggravated assault after cops caught them taking turns shooting each other. They were testing out a bulletproof vest.

Why? Well, drinking was involved (surprise! surprise!). And in all fairness to the marksmen, it was only a .22-caliber rifle, though one of the participants did report getting miffed when the bullet left a red mark on his chest.

I read something like that and all of a sudden, the time I tried to install my own toilet doesn’t seem like such a gut-wrenching comedy of errors.

Then there’s the guy who tried to dry a wet baseball infield by dumping gasoline on it and setting it afire. Twenty-five gallons of gas! That’s enough to blast a Yugo into orbit!

Oh, bless you, you moron with a gas can! And the 75 spectators who watched it happen while filming the incident on their cell phones. I no longer feel bad about walking off a pier into Lake Michigan during a yacht club party and being forced to swim (fully clothed, in a black suit and cowboy boots) a quarter-mile from the marina to the nearest occupied boat. That seemed really dumb to me at the time, but compared to the guy torching the ball field? Not so much.

My favorite, though, at least this week, is the guy in Fresno who shoplifted a chainsaw by sticking it down the front of his pants. I swear I’m not making this up.

The store video shows it wasn’t a small chainsaw, either, but a nice-sized, gas-powered job, suitable for large tree removal.

I feel about this the same way I do about cop shows where the hard-boiled detective stuffs his revolver into the front of his pants before jumping into a convertible and tearing after the perp. It’s almost impossible for me to not anticipate the “bang” that will signal the end of the detective’s parental options.

The chainsaw guy? Well, he’s one misstep away from being eligible for a 19^th Century boys’ choir. Waaaay dumber than anything I’ve ever done.

So thanks again, internet nitwits. Without you, I’d probably still feel embarrassed about the time I figured the ice on the lake would be more than thick enough to support the weight my girlfriend’s dad’s new Mustang.