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By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

I have an old friend in another part of the country with whom I exchange letters and telephone calls from time to time. My friend wrote me a letter recently in which he began by expressing his apologies for his delay in answering my last letter to him. “Forgive my delay in responding to your latest correspondence,” he wrote. “As humans we rarely give importance to the most necessary of things but focus our attention on the mundane simply because the mundane requires less involvement and emotion.” This was an observation which caught my attention.
My friend went on to say that he had watched some of my recent internet podcasts and found them to be rather boring. “They would be of more interest,” he opined, “if you guys debated on subjects that are relevant today. Talk about what you disagree about. People love car wrecks and families that are contentious, but loving.” Contentious, but loving? Hmmm, that expression caught my attention too.
I was not surprised by my friend’s observations. In fact, I completely agree with him. Contention and argument are very entertaining. Former television shock-jock Jerry Springer proved that. Moreover, if you want to sell a movie screenplay to Hollywood, your plot had better contain some character conflict and personality dysfunction. The more, the better! Movies and sitcoms about happy, harmonious families do not usually sell many tickets.
And yet… And yet… Despite the entertainment value of contention and dysfunctional behavior, how many of us enjoy these things in our everyday lives? My friend is not the only one who spends most of his time doing mundane things. A typical night of television programming often contains more human conflict and violence than most of us experience in our entire lives.
When my brother, Phillip, and I kicked off our all-new Albritton Letters podcast recently we decided to try something new. Instead of trying to present controversial and incendiary topics filled with bright lights and explosions that grab an audience’s attention by their collective throats, we decided to select topics from our everyday lives, mundane topics that most people talk about most of the time. I did not think such a plan would work very well, and I told Phillip so. I said to him, I said, “Phillip, I don’t think it will work very well.”
Phillip, our family genius who recently posted a hilarious YouTube video of himself silently reading a book, countered, “Lloyd, you have been trying for many years to get people’s attention with your flashy and controversial media content with very little success, so what do we have to lose? Well, one cannot easily argue with a genius like Phillip, so I said to Phillip, I said, “Phillip, you are so wise.”
And so, Phillip and I get together every week or so nowadays and record our thoughts on such mundane topics as letter writing, exercising for old people, composting, outside grilling, the psychology of living near close relatives, fads and fashion, etc. Truth be told, Phillip and I, and our other brothers, Ronnie, Gregory and Avis, and a few of our neighborhood pals often entertained ourselves with this little colloquial exercise when we were young boys growing up in one of the most boring, mundane places in the whole wide world, the sparsely populated rural community of Nokomis, Florida, located just a few miles southwest of Atmore. The most exciting thing that ever happened in Nokomis was when an unidentified car drove past our house. We fellows would often gather on the front porch or in the backyard under the old oak tree to discuss various topics for extended periods, despite having limited knowledge about them. Such is the kind of stuff country boys do to entertain themselves when they get bored!
I have often wondered how Albert Einstein was able to stay awake and pay attention as he pondered the mundane nuances of his Theory of Relativity. I can’t help but think that one’s ability to pay attention may have more to do with being “interested” than it does with being “interesting.”
Several years ago, when I started my precursor to The Albritton Letters, a podcast and radio program called, Lloyd and Friends, Interesting Conversations With Interesting People, my wife asked me sarcastically, “Are there really that many interesting people in Atmore for you to interview?” After pondering her question a moment I retorted, “Will Rogers once said, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ I say, ‘I never met a man who was not interesting.’” I will add to that sentiment now that I have also never listened to another man’s thoughts that I did not find interesting. Though Phillip chooses our podcast topics, I find each one interesting and worth considering.
In Richard Nixon’s famous 1952 Checkers Speech, Nixon explained on national television some accusations that had been made against him by his adversaries of irregular campaign gifts he had received. Nixon promised to return several of the gifts, but there was one special gift which he took exception to. One of his supporters, Nixon said, had heard him say publicly that the Nixon family were poor people and did not even own a family dog. Consequently, the supporter sent the Nixons a little black and white Cocker Spaniel puppy who his 6-year-old daughter, Tricia, fell in love with and named Checkers. “As far as gifts are concerned,” Nixon emphatically stated, “We love this little dog and we I don’t care they say, we’re gonna keep’im!”
Likewise, me and Phillip don’t care how mundane our Albritton Letters podcasts are, we’re gonna keep doin’em! Join us on the internet at TheAlbrittonLetters.libsyn.com and make up your own mind. You might be pleasantly surprised at how interesting the mundane things of life can be.