I’m a fan of old movies, Turner Classic Movies, and a part of that must come from the fact that I didn’t go to many movies when I was a youth, so a lot passed me by. There are run-of-the-mill things about me that some people would find discouraging. As a boy I had little respect for the people behind movies, books, songs and people who liked to take pictures. I liked all of those things well enough, but the people behind those things were of no interest in my world.

There are oh so many dots that I didn’t connect. I think the worst is that I didn’t see the danger in people who study books. When I was a boy I saw the world all Tom Sawyer: who can lick who. The world belongs to wimps! What a sickening realization, that power doesn’t come from the might in a fist or out of the barrel of a gun: it comes from the people who promote people to fight with fists and the people who send the strong to shoot down one another in wars.

If I’d had more interest in going to church I would have got the sense. The stone that the builders refused will become the head cornerstone. Fortunately, a thing about this world is that there is some grace lurking in every folly. As a boy and young man I had better things to do with my change than spend it at the movie theater, and now I’m in love with all that I missed. These are old movies, but they are very new to me: I haven’t seen them before.

One of the characters, movie stars I’ve really grown to like, is Glenn Ford. Flat out I’ll tell you I don’t cotton to people who are worse than I am. I have a rough time with myself because I remember every disappointing thing I did or failed to do. I drink inexpensive rum, but my friends are top shelf.

I could name my friends to you and you would find if you investigated them that they are all the best quality human beings. All of us are sinners, but there are people who are closer to God. I have heard of people who choose friends based on wealth. I choose friends based on the beauty of their nature.

Okay, I wouldn’t be surprised if my friends don’t love me as much as I love them. I would be more in my company if they were people on the precipice, people on the brink of falling over. A guy who was once a crack addict said you never keep a friend who is weak on that drug because you are going to fall. I don’t get upset with any friend who wants to dump me. I have only gratitude.

Glenn Ford, I haven’t seen him in a movie where he has a role that didn’t show the nobility of man. He battles sin, and sometimes he’s on the verge of falling, but he’s always going the extra yard to do the right thing. He’s just the opposite of that woman whose mind I’ve grown to dislike.

I’m talking about Bette Davis, and I am yet to see a movie with her that doesn’t make me want to see her hung by the neck until she was dead. The thing is, I liked Bette Davis before I met her in the movies. I got captured by the song, “She’s got Bette Davis eyes.”  According to Wikipedia, the song was “written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon,” and it wasn’t until “Kim Carnes recorded her version of the song in a radically different synthesizer-based arrangement, that ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ became a commercial success.”

I don’t like Bette Davis in the movies because in every one I’ve seen her she is a wicked, conniving — let me not say the word that is the most fitting to describe a woman person like this. Ouch, I saw her in this movie where she hated her sister for her success, and she murdered her sister’s maid to cover up what she was doing to her sister.

In the movie, The Little Foxes, that — that — noh mek ah seh the word, refused to give her estranged husband his heart medicine, and she coldly watched him kill himself trying to climb the stairs in his house to get a bottle of what the doctor ordered for his condition. When Miss Davis is around you can bet that somebody is going to get — what is the word for the female canine?

There are stories of things Miss Davis said off screen that would be concerning, if it was my business. It’s not. We are strictly onscreen. I see her in a movie and I know I’m in for some suffering.

Some people will say it’s only the movies, but I don’t swallow all of that. There are enough good roles out there if a movie star wants to do good things for the world. Let’s be real here: everything around you has an impact on your life. If they play the flute for you, you are expected to step out, and if they play a ballad for you, you are to think about a cup of rum.

I like the good guys in the movies. I think most guys love the good guys in the movies. That is why we never get tired of watching Alan Ladd take down that devil Jack Palance.

There is an ongoing discussion about a show that some argue has caused young people to commit suicide. A movie, like a song, like the counsel of someone, will have an effect on you. How deeply it impacts you depends on your personality. If you live in a black and white world you don’t give a daam about others, but if you see black, white and shades of grey, you will have a concern about those who are vulnerable, made susceptible to fall with certain exposures.

I am not the strongest person cerebrally, so I like a movie that challenges me to be better. I want to grow up to be gallant like Glenn Ford, not a monster like Bette Davis. If I had met that woman in her real life (Bette Davis died in 1989) I would have said, “You can keep your beautiful eyes, Miss, because I don’t like your mind.”

There are a few women who turn into killers, for other than defensive reasons. That is as bad as it gets for their kind. These kinds of women are indeed very rare because women by nature are nurturers. It is unbelievable some of the things they do when people are sick. All this must come from their usual first roles when they mature — tending babies. Tending a baby doesn’t only involve feeding and bathing and playing with their toys and singing Missa Maatn gat wahn leaki oal doari. Almost everyone of us can and are happy to do that.

You just know that Rhaburn song, the one in which he sings: Who yooz tu chaynj yuh dayapa, nobody but yoh mada and yoh faada, is borrowed from some country foreign, one where they don’t roll the way we do. I don’t know how the puhpa get eena dat song. If yu have tu yu have tu, if it comes to that, but it ain’t natural course for us. We chop faiya wud so the ma can boil the water so the baby don’t get introduce to disease or worms in the baba, and the dayapa get sterilize.

I could run the gamut here. We will do everything under the sun for the baby, and that, only if it comes to that. If yoh really want to know hoo yooz tu chaynj yoh dayapa — it was yoh mother.

They, women, are not unrewarded. Ask any decent man and they’ll tell you, every day is Mother’s Day. Right away, I suspect you segweh with me to those brutes who hit mothers. There are a couple times, only two times, when a man has license to do that. If you’re trying to save a woman who is drowning, you can pow her like Honeymooner Ralph threatened to do Alice, if yu have tu. If she catches a sneeze while you’re hiding out from a dangerous villain….

Hmm, now you know there is no such thing as “never” in this world.

Whoa, I was working on this piece when I heard a mother call into KREM WuB to express her and her daughter’s pain from verbal abuse. I think less attention is given to the words people use because the people who run the world are wordsmiths.

It is my observation that people are far more concerned with people hitting people than people cutting down people with words. The European Union (EU) reportedly sent strict orders with the aid fund, that we are not to use sash cord, tambran whip, not even ruler to smack wayward students at school. There are no reports that they said a word about the words people use.

There’s this little saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” which everyone who gives a half a thought knows is absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. They get away with that because it is those with words who rule the world, not those with brawn.