‘You’re getting old and losing your memory’

I had something to write, but I forgot what it was.

Now I remember. A local politician came into The Advance office Tuesday morning to check on the political ad he wanted to run in the newspaper this week. I’m not going to name him, but let’s just say he’s running for the San Juan City Commission and it’s not “Markie” Villegas.

He actually submitted the ad last week, but I told him I didn’t want to run it until I had checked out the information he had in the ad, which alleged possible wrongdoing and questionable actions on the part of certain people.

For one thing, I don’t like negative political ads, even though he said it wasn’t negative as much as informative. We can agree to disagree on that. Whether you want to call it a negative ad or not, it takes too much time to vet it and fact-check it.

When he stopped by the newspaper office Tuesday morning, I got on the phone with him because I was away, and I told him that I decided not to run it after all.

He told me that I had promised him last week that I would publish his ad this week.

I told him, no, I had said that I would look into the info it contained and make a decision, but that it would indeed run this week if all the facts were true as he had them laid out in the political ad. Turns out, I didn’t find all of the things he had in the ad to be entirely accurate. At least not up to my standards.

He wasn’t happy, claiming that if I had told him last week that I wasn’t going to run the ad, he would have published it in The Monitor. Now, he said, I had just delayed his publishing the ad by a week. Whether The Monitor runs it, who knows.

I told him, you know, the older I get,the more cautious I am with regard to running certain things because I no longer want to deal with angry people. People who claim I did them a disservice by running something about them that wasn’t entirely true and accurate. This especially pertains to political ads. I was relatively chill when I was young, despite having a short fuse, but have only grown more so the older I have become. The less BS I have to deal with, the happier I am.

Again, he told me that I had promised him I was going to run his ad, and then he threw in the kicker: “That’s okay, Gregg, you’re just getting old and losing your memory.”

I told him: “Seriously, you’re going to use that against me? I’m getting old and losing my memory?”

He told me, yeah, have a nice day, and then he hung up on me.

Funny thing is, my memory is sharper now than it was when I was younger and drinking way too much. Now that I’ve dropped the last daily two beers on my menu, my memory is even sharper than it was a year ago. So no one can use that against me.

What was I writing? Oh, yeah, the memory deal.

Turns out, there’s another advantage to getting older. I can laugh at the things that used to make me mad. Ten, 20 years ago, if someone had insulted me like that, my fuse would have been lit, I would have told him to go get…and hung up.

Now, I just laughed at him over the phone because I thought his claim was actually funny.

I’ve seen memory loss, dementia, in my mother-inlaw when she developed Alzheimers. I know what memory loss looks like, and I don’t have it.

On top of that, I told him, look, I’ll write a story about the campaign. You can lay out the same claims you’re making in your ad, but I will get your opponent the chance to rebut them.

He wouldn’t have any of that. Just kept insisting I had gone back on my word, what with my faulty memory and all.

Anyway, have a nice day, Pete.

Jan’s Note: In this case, it would seem that both rational thought processes as well as human decency and good manners are lacking in one person rather than memory loss in the other.

A news story with an interview allowing BOTH sides the opportunity to state their opinions is a FREE ad. Now who’s losing it, Pete?