I Live To Serve

Stolen from the MDB site, where it was posted by the lamentable Kerry Shirts — Over at a place that I sometimes call the “Peterson Obsession Board,” where I’ve been a principal target and a continual focus of defamation and attack for roughly a decade and a half — day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year — one of the unfortunate inmates who happens to possess some talent as an illustrator posted this caricature (along with the photo of me on which it was based), inviting other residents of the institution to contribute captions for it. Anybody here who is interested is also free to contribute a caption on this blog, of course. Or not. I don’t really care. The rules of this blog, though, are much more liberal: They don’t absolutely require proposed captions to revile, ridicule, slander, or demonize me.

On Friday night, we went to dinner with several friends at the Bombay House in Provo, one of Utah Valley’s great culinary treasures. Most of us had been associated with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and its successor, the pre-June-2012 Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, in their heyday. One or two I had not seen since the Purge.

Tonight, before attending a performance of Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical at the Hale Center Theater in Orem, we met together with a sizeable group of our neighbors and friends for dinner at MidiCi: The Neapolitan Pizza Company in Orem. There was a reason for going to MidiCi: Today only, we were able to designate a part of what we paid there to go toward the medical needs of someone we all know. So it was a good evening.

It was while we were out with friends for dinner and a play that the image above was posted on the Peterson Obsession Board. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Now, why do I occasionally mention going out to dinner or lunch with friends? Not because I’m particularly a gourmand. Honestly, I can’t typically recall by the next morning what I ate the night before. The subject just isn’t that important to me. No, I mention it because the demonic caricature of me that some have labored to create cultivate over the past fifteen years is so toxic, so casually vicious and yet, at the same time, so vacuously stupid, that the very fact that I have friends — and quite a few of them, actually — should be an impossibility. And yet there it is. I do have friends, and I enjoy spending time with them. I also mention such meals because doing so plainly irritates the heck out of a few of my more deranged critics, who feel the need to comment upon and lament every aspect of my life, including my eating out at restaurants. Without me, I fear that their drab existences would have little or no purpose.

I repeat a passage from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer that I quoted just yesterday:

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

I Live to Serve