Best 10 quotes of Jon Obermeyer on MyQuotes

Everyone in California outside Sacramento thinks of it as the place where laws are created, where regulations are invented, and white-shoed lobbyists entertain elected officials from Tarzana and Tehachapi with filet mignon and garlic mashed potato dinners. I’m sure it is the same way in Albany, Springfield, Baton Rogue and Raleigh. State Government is like an ingrown toenail. Put your sock over it, slip your foot into a shoe and limp to work. Don’t let anyone else see it.

Everywhere you lived is just a ledge, a place you could have tumbled from. Your hometown is a precipice, you’ll learn someday. What the realtor sold to you is merely a coat hook, an excuse for the roof to settle atop your head, like a butterfly

I assume a constant state of genuflection, retrieving pills, pens, coins: they flee my grasp like Mexican jumping beans. Please do not ask me to carry the groceries, hang pictures, dust the mantle. I succumb to indexterity.

If you live on Statin Island, cholesterol is not a problem.

I have probably seen the airline belt buckle demonstration 400 times, maybe more. They won’t even start the airplane safety demonstration until everyone has their seat buckle on. That's weird. Here’s my suggestion. We are all savvy, digital travelers, tracked by the FAA by our drivers licenses (used for operating automobiles, where we also have seatbelts). We shouldn’t be penalized (or paralyzed) by watching the darn seatbelt buckle demo after we’re already buckled in. Create boarding group “R” for Rookie. Before boarding, everyone who hasn’t flown 5 times within the last 10 years has to get in a room in the departure lounge to have the mandatory seatbelt buckle demo privately, including the “helpful” tips about the direction of roller board wheels (pointing out), and how to pull the strap and inflate the life vest.

Maybe it's my undiagnosed, adult-onset ADD, but I rarely have a problem with writer's block, a daunting blank page, or picking a topic. I read a lot and that helps

My Uber driver in Sacramento was not like my San Franciso Uber from earlier that day at SFO. My SAC Uber driver’s first presdential election was JFK-Nixon (or Eisenhower in 1956) and he was already drawing a Social Security check. "Father Time" overshot my fixed location (twice) and then didn’t listen to the navigation instructions. This guy’s signature move (and totem animal) is a U-Turn, a mile past the original juncture.

The poet is happiest with the simplest of things: sourdough toast and apricot jam, an etymology dictionary, and a biography of Josef Stalin (also a poet, in his younger pre-purge days). He is interested and amused by just about anything lying around: last month’s light bill (especially the four-color chart explaining hot water usage), the Thai menu (with typos) at lunch, an old airplane boarding pass. His ADD serves him well. The poet is an introvert, but not really. He reaches out to every parcel of the planet, because everything is subject to him (he delights in this double meaning).

The poet walks the earth in relative obscurity. You might see him surface briefly at an open microphone event or at a workshop, but for the most part he stays in his burrow. His bosses love him. He writes elegant copy and sticks to his knitting. You hardly know he’s there in his cubicle.

Your destiny is tiny. It says so right there in the word “des-tiny.” That means its really not that big a deal. Destiny is a pebble in your shoe.