DEM BONES

Nope, I’m not trying to bring back Halloween. Nice holiday, lots of fun for kids and all, but that isn’t my goal.

When I speak of bones, I’m talking about the corpses of our failures we love to try and keep buried. The basic rule to me is that the bigger your are in terms of exposure the tougher it is to find a graveyard that somebody won’t find.

And I don’t think it is too hard to appreciate how many “grave” diggers there are in the news media that want to find those kinds of bones. They all can be pretty vicious when so motivated.

Speaking for myself I am aware of this reality and thus am forced to walk the tightrope between cultivated a flawless public image and finding a way to hide my map to where “dem bones” of my blunders are buried. How do I accomplish this you might ask? There are several methods that work for me.

The first is “hiring” myself my own grave digger. In my case that is my pal, news paper reporter Hugo Muckraker. Admittedly to be sure he doesn’t lose his credibility as a grave digger we do have to be sure he finds some bones at times. Just not the “dem bones” from my grave yard.

But that is a price I’m willing to pay you understand. Allow somebody else’s skeleton’s to get found doesn’t upset me at all. I think you can appreciate how I would be a tad happy to sacrifice somebody else in that regard.

Now beyond hiring my own grave digging reporter the other side of it is to try and keep the bones to a limited number. By that I mean doing what I can to negate a situation where it might become a bone.

So it means honing my public image in a way where I try to keep the upbeat part as generic as possible. You know say I’m a great guy. Only do it in a way that I don’t go overboard and make it sound like I’m some kind of saint.

That is the part where I see the biggest blunders. People let their egos get in the way of the reality. They just can resist going overboard and trying to paint themselves as practically a god.

Which when you get that carried away it is like painting a big sign that says, “Hey I got one heck of a big cemetery and I’m so full of it in terms of ego that I might even tell you where it is if you suck up to me enough.” Believe me when you get that far gone in terms of thinking you are so perfect and invincible you might as well bend over because somebody is going to chew on your rear end big time.

Still that won’t change some people. Regardless of the times dem bones get found and the times you end up not keeping them hidden, people still try to hide them and brag at the same time. All I can say is enjoy being stupid because when the bones appear in a story everybody will know it.