What In Heck Could You Be Thinking???????

I'm trying to remember the first time I heard someone say...."what could you be thinking."   I think it might have been my brother Rick, but so many times in the course of almost every day......I find myself saying under my breath (or sometimes very much out-loud)......."What the hell could you be thinking?"    A couple of recent examples have to include the knucklehead who decided he wanted to fly across the North Atlantic, carried by 370 helium filled balloons.   What in Hell could he be thinking?    Yes I know he had some balloons carry his sorry butt across the grand canyon or English Channel or whatever....but this guy Trapp, actually got some backing to launch off the coast of Maine, 300 colorful balloons over his head and points it toward Europe.    Here's a surprise..........he didn't make it........Hell he barely escaped the state of Maine...which by the way, right around this time of year is a good thing to think about doing.

Here's another one.     Massport.......the Massachusetts Port Authority makes a decision to conduct some critical and necessary fire-fighting exercises....Just for training purposes, at Logan Airport......ON 9-11.    Yes.......On the twelfth anniversary of Nine-Eleven, the deadliest attack in the history of this country, which killed 3,000 people using airplanes, Massport decides to blow up and set on fire a mock airplane fuselage......flames leaping into the air....in broad daylight.....near the runways at Logan Airport..    YES.....ON 9-11!!!!   All together now....."what in Hell could they be thinking?"

This one however is my ongoing favorite.    If there was ever....a what in hell could you be thinking moment, it has to be the decision to take up smoking.   I've been railing about the smoking phenomenon in this country since I went cold-turkey at the age of 39, following almost 25-years of smoking.   I understand how difficult it is to give it up but the part I don't understand is why anyone would start in the first place.   When I was a kid....we didn't know.  They're weren't any Surgeon General reports....it was "cool" to smoke and yes I got hooked....but Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.....what in God's name is your excuse now?    You know it's bad, the evidence is overwhelming, you know it's going to debilitate if  not  kill you, and it's not unfair to ask....loud and clear......'WHAT IN HELL COULD YOU BE THINKING?"

And by the way, right up there in the category of really dumb decisions....the young people taking up E-Cigs.    Sales of electronic cigarettes have tripled in the past year, the number of high school kids using e-cigs doubled in less than a year.  They are not regulated, nobody knows what's in 'em, and nobody with even half-a-brain should think about suckin' that crap into your mouth and lungs.