Lunch: And the Zen of SpongeBob…

Dan Weber News

Grateful Blog: Day 63: I stopped what I was doing to eat a little lunch today and flipped on the TV. Saturday afternoon. Bland sports, mediocre movies, and mindless other Saturday afternoon stuff: my company for lunch. Then I switched over to ‘SpongeBob’. Yeah that SpongeBob, the one with the Square Pants. Plays his sponge nose like a piccolo and does a thousand other silly things. It got me to thinking how nothing’s ever the same, like even Saturday TV comics aren’t what they used to be. It’s silly really. I mean wasn’t Bugs Bunny and the whole Looney Tunes cast more or less perfect? Not sure why they had to add new characters and new episodes and change the voices and more or less ruin it. Must be some greedy TV executive behind it somewhere who said ‘No one will even notice!’

But there was SpongeBob, surrounded by the miserable neighbor ‘Squidward’ and his greedy self-centered boss ‘Mr. Krabs’ doing his ridiculous best despite them both to live a happy, carefree life. At some point it wasn’t working so SpongeBob sang a silly song called ‘Attitude of Gratitude’ which was pretty much the whole point of ‘The Grateful Blog’, chapter and verse not to mention verse and chorus. Of course I laughed so hard it brought me to tears. I don’t know if it was the silliness or the irony of the sentiment that did it for me but it didn’t matter. SpongeBob rescued that 20 minutes of lunch from the mediocrity of his surroundings and from every greedy boss and TV executive everywhere who thought I really wanted to watch a half hour infomercial on some exercise equipment. It was damn near as good as Bugs Bunny for just a bit and I forget about life and its troubles for a few minutes while I laughed myself silly.

And ANY day of the week, I’m Grateful for that…