Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

going to work?”
    “Ozzy Osbourne made it,” they told me.
    Ozzy was able to pull it off on reality TV, so he’s given hope to all of us. I’d never really watched many reality TV shows and knew nothing about them, but I was 100 percent convinced Duck Dynasty would never work. It just goes to show how little I know about today’s world, because I was dead wrong. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people are so attracted to our family. Maybe it’s because we live our lives like people really want to live, how we all used to live before everything got so busy, busy, busy.
    Duck Dynasty has made us a little bit more famous, but it hasn’t changed much of anything about us. Miss Kay and I stilllive in the same house on the Ouachita River outside of West Monroe, and I’m still driving the same truck and hunting with the same guns and dogs. Of course, we still go to church every Sunday morning and I’m still reading my Bible. If anything has changed, it’s that it’s a little more difficult to go places, like driving down an interstate or walking through an airport. If I’m driving somewhere, someone might drive by and recognize me (undoubtedly because of my beard). They’ll get on a cell phone and call their friends, and then when I stop to take a leak, I’ll have to sign autographs and pose for pictures for about thirty minutes.
    When we went duck-hunting in Arkansas recently, we stopped at a Walmart to buy our out-of-state hunting licenses. We were in the sporting goods section of the store when some people recognized us, so we started posing for pictures and signing T-shirts. When it was finally time for us to leave, three African-American girls approached us.
    “Well, girls, I didn’t know you soul sisters were duck hunters,” I told them.
    “We don’t care about no ducks,” one of them said. “You’re ZZ Top, ain’t you?”
    I guess not everyone in America watches Duck Dynasty .
    Miss Kay and I haven’t done too badly, and the good Lord has really blessed us. We’ve been married nearly fifty years and our boys have grown up to become loving husbands and fathers,the kind of men I wanted them to be. Our business is in good shape, even after I had my doubts about where it was going. But when the boys took over, they breathed new life into it, and it’s still growing. Not many are as fortunate as we are, with all the trouble in the world.
    Since I turned over the reins of my company to my sons, I keep busy with hunting and fishing and speaking engagements. God provided those. The appearances give me an opportunity to preach the gospel, which I feel compelled to do. I’ve also had a chance to learn from all the people I’ve met—and the chance to travel all over the country. I hope I’ve helped those who have heard the gospel.
    Where do I go from here? The time is near when the dust will return to the earth and the spirit to God who gave it. I’m ready for that, but not quite yet. I have a lot of speeches to give, a lot of blinds to build, a lot of Duck Dynasty episodes to make, and who knows how many more duck seasons to hunt.
    Maybe the greatest thing is that I’ve been able to live life the way I wanted. Following Jesus has been a blast. The Lord has blessed me mightily.
    It is what makes me happy, happy, happy.

LOW-TECH MAN
    Rule No. 1 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
    Simplify Your Life (Throw Away Your Cell Phones and Computers, Yuppies)
    W hat ever happened to the on-and-off switch? I don’t ask for much, but my hope is that someday soon we’ll get back to where we have a switch that says on and off. Nowadays, everything has a pass code, sequence, or secret decoder. I think maybe the yuppies overdid it with these computers. The very thing they touted as the greatest time-saving device in history—a computer—now occupies the lion’s share of everybody’s life.
    Here’s a perfect example: I owned a Toyota Tundra truck for a while, and I got tired of driving around with my headlights on all the time. If I’m driving around in the woods and it’s late in the evening, I don’t want my headlights on. I tried to turn the lights off and couldn’t do it. I spent an hour inside the truck with a friend of mine trying to turn off the lights, but we neverfigured it out. So I called the car dealer, and he told me to look in the owner’s manual. Well, it wasn’t in the book, which is about as thick as a Bible. Finally, about ten days later, after my buddy spent some time