What a terrible time it is to be a man of conviction. Or a woman, I should add, so no one gets mad at me. There’s nothing that can be said anymore that won’t elicit some outcry and injury. We aren’t allowed to like anything anymore, because if we like something then that means we hate something else. Why do you eat pineapple, because you hate mango? Bigot. This is how the new world works. And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of hiding my feelings behind carefully chosen words. I’m sick of having to make everyone happy. I’m sick of pretending that everything is the same and everything is good and nothing is bad. I suppose I’m really just tired. Tired of this political climate. This cultural climate. This muzzle that I have over my mouth at all times. I feel as though whatever I say will offend someone. Someone will hate me for it. Someone will love me, but they’ll have to keep that to themselves for fear of being ostracized. To speak your mind is to become the villain of this disjointed movie we’re in. I, for one, cannot take it anymore.
I hate pontoon boats. There. I said it. I hate them with the fire of a thousand hells. I think they should be banned. I think they should be gathered up like so many books at the order of a dictator, and burned. Except this time I’m the dictator and the only thing I don’t want people to know is what a pontoon boat looks like. I don’t want them to know what they feel like. How it is to ride across waves in your living room, complete with carpet and couches and a nearby sink in case you need to wash your hands because they’ve been touching the boat you’re in. You can try to silence me. Big Pontoon can try to cancel me. The pontoon woke will take their business from me, and all of this is fine. I cannot sit here, pretending to be a man of conviction, and let my pontoon hatred burn internally. It must be known.
Of course this puts me at odds with some of my favorite clients, and any sensible Real Estate Person would never risk the alienation of his own carefully and painfully cultivated client base. But who am I if not someone who refuses to see the wrong and not strive to make it right? Oh, your pontoon boat has several engines and it can go 60 miles per hour? This makes it even worse. Better a pontoon boat with a single 35 horse two stroke Evinrude than a screaming rocket ship shaped like a den, and with the aerodynamics of a pallet of rocks. Don’t you see what Big Pontoon is doing? They’re playing you. They’re taking their floating family room and strapping big dumb engines on it and you, the person whom I know to be smart in several areas of which smartness can be measured, are falling for it. Hook, line, and center mounted triple pontoon.
I recognize what these paragraphs have done now. They’ve ruined my career. One outburst can do that. Ask some of the people who have been canceled, if you can even find them, and they’ll tell you through their tears and trembling lips that it’s true. And so with that I must bid you goodbye and farewell. Pontoon Boats, I hate you. I will always hate you. No amount of horsepower or second deck with slide can change my mind. I believe in several things with certainty. I believe in God and Family, small government and big, blue inland lakes measuring 5400 acres in size. But I will never, ever, believe that someone should voluntarily own a pontoon boat. Carve it on my tombstone, please. Use the nicer granite, and don’t let my wife chince and abbreviate anything. HERE LIES DAVID CURRY. SON, FATHER, BROTHER, HUSBAND, BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, PONTOON BOAT HATER.
Above, not a pontoon boat.