My mother once told me, on one of those family gatherings up at Jackson on the old Henderson homestead, that one of my father’s sisters had complained about my loud laugh and boisterousness. Let’s see, I think I must have been all of ten. I mouthed off something smart about the complaining aunt and was confined to the space beneath the stairs for a spell to cool off. Seems I was always offending the feelings of some stuffy Henderson.

OK, I know. This sounds like an antisocial personality. Right? It could be if taken to an extreme. But I never did that. Anybody who knows me knows what a sweet guy I am. I did, however, develop a healthy disrespect for authority that seemed always to have another idea about what I needed to be doing. The problem I saw in authority was that it always saw itself as right. That’s a lie of course, but it meant that I, an adolescent, was wrong. Of course I was wrong. An adolescent, by definition, is wrong. But as I grew into adulthood my perception of authority seems not to have wavered. It was at that point that I decided never to go into politics. I would either shoot someone or more likely get shot. In Louisiana, the shootee, was a foregone conclusion.

It didn’t stop there. Every now and then I would say or do something that, on second thought, might have been done better. But there it was, hanging out there like a tattooed butt crack in the grocery store. For those rare occasions, I now gladly apologize. And will continue to do so.

However, it has occurred to me that in many of these situations, there is a shared responsibility. I would say that at least half of those poor souls whose feelings I have injured were, in the first place, emotional junk closets just waiting to fall all over someone like me. How’s that for a juicy rationalization? I don’t claim that it’s original.

So, let me just say: if I had a dollar for each time I have hurt someone’s “feelings” I’d be the richest son-of-a-bitch on the planet. And being the richest son-of-a-bitch on the planet, I’d happily pay for their goddamned therapy.