Jerry Mack Cook

I had to write an essay about my pet peeve and my English teacher liked it so much she prompted me to write a series of similar essays.

Bailey Ford

11/20/13

Stevenson, block 9

Jerry Mack Cook

When prompted with the question, “what is your pet peeve?” Most people would come forward with adjectives describing some attributes of people:  whiny, preachy, self righteous, bad mannered, unable to correctly form sentences, and the most prominent, outright stupidity.  However annoying all these traits can be when viewed individually, my pet peeve is my step father.  Because he possesses all of them.

 My step father is a fifty year old guitar player and construction supply delivery man. He has five step children, three of them from the woman he was married to before my mother, and none of his own. He complains about how horrible it is to be fat, and yet eats as many as six bologna sandwiches in addition to the three octagonal meals he consumes a day. His weight can only be my mother’s burden, because we have oil on our salads. There are many things he used to do in regard to the work place, and often divulges them at great and unnecessary length, attending to every specific and redundant detail.

For example, he was once a preacher. However much I doubt this fact, almost every night we set at the table and examine scripture. Nightly we hearken to his delayed and stuttering words, marching on through the “um”s as well as the “and a…”s. Night by night, I learn what my lord requires of my through the repetitive and meager vocabulary, of a man who never graduated high school. I doubt that he was preacher because he also claims to once have been a dope headed guitar player in a rock band, the owner of a building foundation and dirt distribution company (which I do believe because we are still in debt to the IRS for it), a tortilla, tire, and scrap metal delivery man, (separate occasions)  and he was stricken with several bouts of pancreatic cancer. But most outstanding reason I think he is full of it, is that I can think of no one who could ever actually enjoy paying attention to that droning voice of his for the better part of a Sunday morning.

I understand that he is an old and over worked man, however I cannot be expected to rationalize with a person who does not know how to spell the word rationalize, nor what the word entails when one is asked to do so. I will say now until proven to be wrong at judgment day, I do not believe Jerry’s theology is correct. He attempts to transform my mind daily with the predescribed nightly devotional, and also the occasional blurb of facts from a book that was written several thousand years ago and rewritten and rewritten by men with agendas, expecting it’s formless filling to soothe my mind.

Were he better at public speaking, I’d expect him to be a politician; he certainly has enough opinions to be one. They are cut, dry and the single way to live righteously, it’s even been said, “the godly way to run a county...” Last time I checked we have freedom of religion and it applies to more than just your vague definition of Orthodox Presbyterian Christianity. Who is he to say how God wants America to be run? And when was the last time he did anything to alleviate the state of this nation besides criticize those who are at least trying to their job? Their Job by the way is doing what we want, not just Jerry Mack Cook who is too cheap and too illiterate to write a letter expressing his opposition to what is being done in Washington. And what kind of a man are you if you know you have the way to fix all the world’s problems, and you just keep that information to yourself? Can you not write a letter to a congress man? Make a picket sign? A Face Book status? A YouTube clip? Something? Because I think the dinner table is an unreceiving and over exposed outlet for what I’m sure is beautiful and well thought out information that we all could use.

 

My step fathers way is the only way. Every idea anyone else has is wrong and may very well doom us all to the pit because we refuse to listen to the truth of misdirection. I cannot stand him, and he annoys me in every mode available.