Adaptive Curmudgeon

You’re thinking I gave up aren’t you.  You should know better than that!  I said a wise man would give up.  I didn’t say I gave up!

I drove to a friend’s house.  It was nearby and therefore a great excuse to procrastinate.  On the way I calculated angles and turned over the problem in my head.  Eventually I realized I’d passed my friend’s driveway and gone several miles too far.  Who thought chainsaws and trees would become a mental game?

After my truck, the Little Pony Trailer, and I executed a laborious U-turn on a narrow road I pulled into my friend’s driveway.  A party of ladies, including Mrs. Curmudgeon, had just finished butchering chickens.  (Excellent timing on my part!)

Everyone was covered in gore (if you’ve never butchered chickens you have no idea!).  Also Mrs. Curmudgeon had suffered a painful hornet sting.  Good times.

To my surprise everyone was in high spirits.  A job well done will do that!  I was given a delicious iced tea and some snacks.  You gotta’ hand it to women.  If a bunch of guys had just finished butchering, the only refreshment would be a stale bag of chips and a case of lukewarm beer.  Also, and this is key, they listened to my tale of woe about the killer tree that was going to decapitate me and destroy the house.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t give a shit but they nodded politely and kept pushing food at me.  If it had been a gathering of men everyone would have advice (all of it bad) and this would be followed by many tales of people who had been disemboweled, dismembered, or at the very least gotten hammered in the balls by a disagreeable trees.  Once I was totally paranoid I would be kicked out the door with three beers in my stomach and orders to get the tree on the ground and quit whining like a little pussy.

Eventually the man of the house arrived and I begged to borrow some chains.  Soon the “Pony Trailer” was laden with 50 pounds in chain.  Then I took a spin in his new Bobcat.  I’m pretty sure the closest a normal human being gets to personally owning a fighting robot is a tracked skid steer.  It’s good to be alive.  We amused ourselves driving it around and listening to the delightful churn of hydraulic awesomeness.  (My old tractors are to his new skid steer as a skateboard is to an aircraft carrier.)  Eventually I could delay no more.

I set out to deal with the tree with a heavy heart.  I had a plan so things moved quickly.  Soon I had two chains and a tow strap strung from my truck to my first problem; the blasted, leaning, still hooked to the top of the tree, exploded top.

The best way to damage a truck is to loan it to a friend.  The second best way is to hook it to something immobile and slam the drivetrain around.  Caution was in order.  I inched the chain back, quailed, then inched forward and got out to survey the situation.  Lather rinse repeat.  Each time I made subtle progress.  Each time the splits in the tree seemed more ominous.  On the fourth iteration I got the top separated from the tree and inched it a couple feet back.  No trucks were harmed in this process.

Meanwhile, farm animals (which are free range) gathered to observe my progress.  I wound up unhooking the chain under the watchful eye of six chickens, a dog, two ducks, a goose, a pot bellied pig, and a very nervous Mrs. Curmudgeon who was clutching a cell phone and wondering how much life insurance I have.

With the preliminaries done, I moved the truck so far from the tree that it could have been filled with grenades and the truck would be safe, grabbed my saw, and started muttering about how I should have become a rodeo clown.  I decided I needed another break…

Last year I met a maple that tried to kill me.  It insulted me and managed to get entangled in everything in sight.  I thought very carefully about every move and eventually prevailed.  The tree became firewood.  Yay team Curmudgeon!  (Just for the record, cutting firewood is a perfectly reasonable hobby but it can make you dead.  This is how it differs from other recreational activities; like bowling.)

Recently a friend called with another tree of malevolent nature.  A tree top had blown out and the remainder of the tree was leaning ominously.  Would I come over and administer the coup de grace?  I, being the stupid macho idiot I am, thought “what’s the worst that can happen” and cruised over with my truck and trailer (which is now known as the Pony Trailer).  Free firewood, huzzah!

When I got there my heart sank.  The tree was not a small one.  By “not small” I mean big and ugly.  Yeah I know, everyone has a story about how they dropped a Sequoia using a penknife.  In fact I’ve felled bigger trees too.  I’m not looking to get into a pissing match.  I’m just saying there was a lot more kinetic energy than I’d expected and none of it was lined up for an easy job.

Big doesn’t necessarily mean bad ass but this tree was just plain messed up.  It was close enough to a house to hit it and big enough that it could crush through the roof and keep going until it hit the foundation.  Just for fun there was a garage in the opposite direction and an outbuilding blocking another felling route.  Did I mention the power lines?  All in all I decided I had about 40 degrees out of 360 where it was safe to land and about 25 of those degrees were pretty risky.

Not only was the top blown out but it had been blown out in the past; possibly twice.  Each time the tree had regrown and had put up chunks of its big heavy crown in ways that were both off center and unpredictable.  Plus, and this filled me with foreboding, the tree was split.  One split went about 1/3 the tree’s length starting at the top.  Another older split went much farther, possibly most of the way to the ground.

For those of you who don’t know how felling a tree is done, let me explain that the sawyer (that’s me) uses the tree structure to control the tree’s own descent.  Just like an evil banker, we remove solid support until the whole thing is irreparably out of balance and it comes crashing down; exactly where we want it to go.  If we do it right we get to feel smug and superior; also like an evil banker.

Directional felling starts when the sawyer cuts some of the tree to put it off balance.  That’s the wedge that gets removed first.  Then he cuts the opposite side of the tree.  That’s called the back cut.  If he’s doing everything right the back of the tree is under immense tension because it’s holding up much of the tree’s mass.  Once the back cut is deep enough the whole tree starts easing over.  The sawyer, being both awesome and skilled, gets of out Dodge along his predetermined escape route and makes it look like a sashay in the park instead of a pell mell retreat from disaster.  Traditionalist like me yell “timber” because it’s fun.

It can be done wrong.  If the wedge is miscalculated the tree will sit back on the back cut and pinch the bar.  The technical term for this is “screwed”. Sometimes the sawyer miscalculates the lean of the tree and mass overpowers the effect of the directional cut. The technical term for this is “royally screwed” or sometimes “dead”.

The important part is that the sawyer tries very hard to NOT sever all the wood because that’s his control surface. It becomes the “hinge wood” between the wedge that makes the tree want to fall over and the back cut that lets it go.  If a sawyer severs ALL of the hinge wood he’s created a twenty ton, sixty foot high, reverse pinata.  It’s going to hit something somewhere but without the hinge to guide the speed and direction of the fall… it’s a shot in the dark.

Which brings me back to those splits up and down the trunk.  In effect the hinge wood was already severed so my control may or may not be hindered to a greater or lesser extent and I didn’t know how much and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.  This tree was a grenade with the pin already pulled.

I sized it up for a long time.  I had a 15 degree target zone.  The tree was leaning in the general vicinity of the target zone but the top was so mangled and so far up that I couldn’t deduce where the weight really was pulling it.  Just to turn a Rubics Cube into the Enigma Code about 1/4 of the top was blown out and leaning on the ground.  It was large, heavy, reaching to and touching the ground, and still physically hooked to the the tree a little over 40 feet above my head.

Suppose I cut the tree and it started going precisely into the 15 degree “landing window”.  Would it drag along the blown top?  I doubted it.  I thought the massive weight of the blown top would “hold it back”.  If it did I’d be hosed.  If a tree (or anything) starts falling in a certain direction and you hold it back (but not enough to keep it upright) strange things happen.  It will necessarily swing to an unknown but often very significant degree.  Thus, altering it’s decent either to the left or to the right in mid fall following whatever rule of physics happens to be in charge as momentum, inertia, mass, and bad luck all roll the dice.

In this case a shift “to the left” meant a crushed garage and “to the right” meant a kitchen shoved into the subbasement.  A wise man thinks before he does something unwise; that’s how you know they’re wise.  Duh!

I got back in my truck and left.

Recently I went to two rural country fairs. You can learn a lot about America at a county fair. Here, in no particular order, are random observations:

• I expected to see herds of mutant whack jobs in the style of “People of WalMart”. You know what I’m talking about; fat ugly cretinous losers in overstretched fluorescent spandex screaming obscenities while stuffing their faces with deep fried everything. I had my camera ready. (Strictly for research of course. Certainly not to mock them on a blog. That would be bad.) Surprisingly, it didn’t happen. Yes, it was a cross section of rural Americans and of course, nobody was discussing Descartes or dressed like Gordon Gekko. Even so, very few looked or acted like weirdos. One lady wearing a crude Kid Rock T-shirt was all I could find and she wasn’t a big deal. The whole scene was rampant with normalcy.

• To the woman who had a Kid Rock T-shirt that said “Let’s get shitfaced”. Really? I’m not shocked by a rude T-shirt but I’m shocked someone so lame would wear one. Once you reach a certain point in life it’s time to use the offensive T-shirts to wax the car. When you look like Florence Henderson from the Brady Bunch it’s time to give up with the “rebel yell” because you’re not fooling anyone. (I’ll bet she drives a minivan and has photos of grandkids in her purse.)

• There were no teenage girls wearing pajamas at either venue. Thank God!

• One fine woman had cutoff jeans and a halter top that would make a country song weep with joy. Thank God!

• Everyone under a certain age apparently has something tattooed somewhere; in order to express their individuality. On the other hand, the trend of youths getting pierced until they look like they’ve been hit with shrapnel has finally run its course. There was a distinct lack of outlandishness. A time traveler could step out of 1950 into a rural fair in 2013 and recognize it as normal. Try that on a street corner in Manhattan.

• Fairs are for children. All children were having the time of their life. Adults are there to fork over cash to the kids, eat food their doctor would disapprove of, and look at the farm critters. This is how it always has been and how it always shall be.

• Despite what Al Sharpton would have you believe, all races and creeds share something in common; a universal love of fried stuff on a stick. Nor are rural hicks running rampant like the media and race baiters (such as our president) describe from their fevered imaginations. Everyone got along fine; because it’s a fair dammit! Interracial war didn’t break out in front of the ferris wheel and us unstable gun toting rural hicks didn’t accidentally burn down the cotton candy machine. People surrounded by hay bales and cowshit don’t get too serious about anything. Congress should aspire to such humility. (Exception for old ladies: see below.)

• There is nothing cuter than a little kid showing her prized bunny.

• They still give out awards for vegetables!

• They give out prizes for kid’s Lego creations. I call bullshit.

• Horse people (mostly kids I think) have a whole lot of gear per horse. Also, it’s flashy enough to suit Liberace. There must be an innate urge to outfit a horse with the equivalent of chrome mudflaps and ground effects lighting. Cows, sheep, chickens, goats, pigs, and poultry are apparently owned by more level headed people.

• I take that back. Chickens get flashy too. Have you seen some of the chicken breeds? Most are just feathered sandwich meat manufacturing devices and some are “heritage breeds”. But a few are an argument against human manipulation of genetics. (My chickens don’t go to the fair. They go to the freezer.)

• If you walk past a pen with baby lambs and don’t reach down to pet one you’re a monster.

• The rides are almost certainty the very same machines I might have ridden long ago. Apparently fair rides last forever? Where is the new stuff? Did fair ride technology top out at the “Scrambler”? Is it a liability thing? One ride had murals of a futuristic far off time called “The Year 2000”. They play the same music as when they were new; regardless of what modern teenagers download to their MP3 player, the bumper cars still play Led Zeppelin.

• Something about the smell of horse stalls and fried food makes $5 lemonade seem reasonable.

• I have no idea what 4H represents but those kids keep their animals clean.

• I like to see real agriculture carried on in all it’s dirt laden and commerce based glory. Pigs, chickens, cows, and various other edible creatures were auctioned, bought, sold, and traded. Many were scheduled for slaughter. Many of the same were the property (and profitable investments) of children. The pig barn at a rural fair supports more trade than a State University!

• Several old ladies had one building for their own stuff. Competition was as fierce as it was cutthroat. I got the heck out of there! You don’t meddle with Gladys’ quilt or Florence’s preserves on fair day. They live for the fair. If you knock over a jar of jelly and cost someone a ribbon you might wind up sleeping with the fishes.

• I really wish I could afford a Kubota. I’m just sayin.

• Flyover country is still vibrant. Suck it LA!

Recently I went to two rural country fairs in two adjacent counties. Both fairs were similar in size but they were in very different venues. One was in a town that’s poor, very rural, and the county itself is sparsely populated. The other (only an hour’s drive away) was in a small “city” that’s far less poor, and the county’s population is about triple it’s neighbor. It was practically a controlled experiment!

• At the “poorer” fair I drove up in my truck, parked in a field, and walked into the fair. No money changed hands and nobody cared where I parked. I didn’t see any “staff”.
• At the “richer” fair I was intercepted at the paved road and waved into an elaborate multi-lane queue. The queue was manned by a fleet of volunteers outfitted with matching t-shirts, reflective vests, and scowls. I handed an utterly humorless, reflective clad, future TSA employee $5. She wouldn’t look me in the eye and dismissed me with an imperious wave. Then I was shunted from one grim, menacing, volunteer to the next until I parked exactly where I was “ordered” to park. I counted seventeen volunteers in all. They all acted like the pre-fair warm up was to get kicked in the spine before attending their Mother’s funeral. I’m not sure why one fair got by with an open field and the another needed a militia to collect $5. Nor am I sure why volunteering to “help” park cars makes you desolate and hardened. It simply it is what it is. (Note: both parking fields were roughly the same size and equally filled. Despite what you’ve been led to expect, “chaos” did not break out in the unmonitored field.)

• Dogs have fleas; fairs have politicians. At one fair the Democrats and Republicans had (nearly) adjacent booths.
  • Democrats were giving out bumper stickers (I forgot what they said).
  • Republicans were giving out little copies of the Constitution! Rock on!
  • The Democrats just had a stack of bumperstickers. Want one? Grab it.
  • The Republicans made you answer a trivia question (American History) before you got your Constitution. Racists!
  • The Republicans gave candy to children (but not adults). One pre-teen kid didn’t want candy. He dutifully (and correctly) answered his question and received his Constitution. I practically exploded in joy.
  • America Fuck Yeah!

• At the “poorer” fair I bought a raffle ticket for a gun.
  • There’s always a gun raffle.
  • As is customary, the profits go to charity.
  • I always buy a ticket.

• At both fairs but especially the “poorer” one there were booths run by many churches.
  • Soulless heathen that I am, I couldn’t differentiate the difference between booths.
  • The assorted denominations seem to get along fine. I’m glad because a religious war at the fair would feature old folks with heart conditions and it could get ugly.
  • They all wanted to save my soul. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.
  • A few went overboard with graphic anti abortion stuff. I avoided them like the plague. Even if abortion is murder we don’t need an ugly poster near the cotton candy booth.
  • One was giving away free water. Don’t drink the water!

• At the “poorer” fair I bought a raffle ticket for 1976 snowmobile. I hope it runs!

• The “richer” fair had mounted cops and periodic ATV patrols by the reflective vest club.
• The “poorer” fair appeared to have no staff anywhere.
• Crowds at both fairs were identically happy and very well behaved.

• Both fairs had live music and it all sucked. Nobody minded.

I love being a rural hick! I’ve lived everywhere but I once wound up locked down in a city too long. It did me harm. Thankfully I bailed out from “the city composed entirely of debt” well before the inevitable (and obvious to anyone who isn’t Paul Krugman) real estate bubble popped.

Buying a homestead was my ticket to an anti-bullshit lifestyle. There I planted my flag and began a novice’s long journey of discovery about why my tractor wouldn’t work.

Every day I breathe deep of the inherent freedom. You can, if you try, dodge a certain amount of politics by staying away from people. While the East Coast is fretting about Big Gulps and the Left Coast is hosing up everything, I’m contentedly stacking firewood in flyover country. Flyover country is where reality still reigns. (The geographic rule of thumb isn’t foolproof. Fly over country is a swiss cheese remainder after each city predictably taxes itself into the ground to finance it’s lifestyle as a minimum security prison. Doubt me? I mow my lawn with a tractor and have a shooting range on my yard. Try that in any city anywhere. In fact, if you seek freedom you’re more likely to find it in the Gulag than Detroit. Nor is it wise to hunker down in tax free and gun loving Chicago.)

Being free is a lot of work. Two steps forward and one step back. After several years progress has been made: chickens peck at the lawn, I can usually keep the driveway plowed, the woodshed is full, etc…

Every journey is a matter of steps. How would I know I’ve fully made it? I guess I won’t. On the other hand last week I saw a signpost that said “still on the right path”.

I went to the fair and met a friend there. The friend has a kid. The kid has some pigs. One of the pigs is “mine”. As I’ve done before, I’ve pre-paid this year’s bacon. The money I paid this spring paid for not only my piglet but a few others, and plenty of feed for them all. The kid raised them all and stands to make a tidy profit. In turn I’ve got bacon waiting for me this fall. I’ve commissioned the creation of a freezer full of bacon.

I’m a patron of the bacon!

At the fair I met my bacon. He looked pretty healthy to me. Just over 200 pounds of him. He snorted at me. I snorted back.

My bacon’s caretaker had some questions about logistics. Did I want my bacon delivered?

So soon? Was the bacon ready?

My bacon looked up at me. Good thing it can’t speak English.

Why not let my bacon mature a little more; fatten up? My bacon’s caretaker, the kid who’d won a ribbon based on her pen full of three pieces of bacon, agreed. The bacon would grow several weeks more. Happy Curmudgeon!

I arranged delivery of my bacon to the butcher for later in the fall. Which butcher? Why the butcher that also does my venison. Venison doesn’t stand around while you discuss logistics. I have to shoot the venison and bring it to the butcher myself. My bacon gets to ride in a trailer, lucky bacon.

I left the fair extra happy. There’s a world of difference between buying food in a grocery store and commissioning two hundred pounds of ribbon winning bacon several months in advance. The world would be a better place if we all got to meet our bacon and say hi to it and talk to it’s caretaker. That way you can decide when and where it will eventually wind up with a side of eggs. (Our farm fresh eggs I might add!)

Life is better when you’ve got a freezer full of bacon in your future. It’s how you know you’re on the right track.

Back in the stone age I had a newspaper route.  This was back when it was considered a good thing for youths to work.

One effect of my righteous, underpaid, non-minimum wage, child labor paper route was that I read the paper every morning before school.  I learned a lot:

1. “Journalists” at my crappy paper were terrible at reporting the news.  I later learned this applied to nearly all “journalists”.
2. “Journalists” at my crappy paper might as well tattoo “I am a Marxist” on their otherwise hollow foreheads.  I later learned this applied to nearly all “journalists”.
3. For some reason, people like to read about sports.

I chalked up #1 to public schools.  As a kid, I experienced public schools as warehouses and factories of intellectual mediocrity.  (It is as true now as it was then.)  “Journalists” sounded exactly like my teachers.  It was all there; everything from biased suppositions, to  illogical conclusion, to a weak application math.  Each day’s paper varied in quality but excellence was rare and thick layers of condescension were constant.  I simply assumed “journalists” were the end product of public schools.  I’m not sure my opinion has changed.

I chalked up #2 to insecurity.  I assumed people who write cannot do.  What’s worse, people who can’t do are naturally antagonistic to those that can.  The natural breeding ground of socialist thinking is people who can do little and yet think very highly of themselves.

As for #3; “sports journalism” remains a mystery.  It bored me then and it bores me now.

Optimistic youth that I was, I assumed that crappy newspapers (like mine) would fold.  They would be replaced by superior newspapers.

I was wrong.  Either “journalists” are unteachable or their corporate nest is too fouled.  Eventually they killed themselves off.  The few remaining print outlets are zombies shambling around losing money until they finally collapse.

If I had to point out when their demise was essentially unavoidable I’d call it the presidential election campaign of 2008.  That’s when the press quit even pretending to be journalists and became fluffers for whatever party advocated the biggest government (territory currently staked out by the party of D).

They earned themselves the title “legacy media” while newer forms of reporting crushed them.  In 2011 I mentioned that Newsweek, a piece of the Washington Times Company, was officially worth $1.  It’s demise was essentially “fait accompli“.  This is what I wrote:

“The press truly pulled out all the stops for their guy in 2008.  I felt dry humped and discarded.  I was not alone.  The press periodically abandons all pretense of objectivity but this time was different.  It bit them on the ass and they’ve lost their shirts. Newsweek claimed we are all socialists now and crashed so hard they were sold for $1. The Washington Post’s profits dropped 50% in one quarter. The New York Times was trading at $48 in 2004 and now it’s trading at $8. There’s nothing new about a biased press (ask Orson Welles) but now is when events have run them down like dogs.  Their refusal to adapt is a self inflicted mortal wound.”

So two years later has the Washington Post learned anything?  Did they adapt?  Of course not.  Recently they passed another benchmark and were purchased for $250 million, far less than their supposed value at their apex.  Their stock price has reflected their long slow glide path from a Watergate contact high to irrelevancy and the company is grasping at straws:

“As soon as it was announced that The Washington Post would be bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, shares rose by 5%. This means that investors trust the abilities of a man with zero experience in running a newspaper more than they trusted the liberal family that owned the paper for four generations.”

Wow, that hurts!  Let me repeat that because I like the way it rolls of the tongue.

“…investors trust the abilities of a man with zero experience in running a newspaper more than they trusted the liberal family that owned the paper for four generations.”

Ouch!

The chimps that run the “legacy media” killed their host.  I suppose they’ll all get jobs as teachers now.

I have obtained photographic evidence that Pony conventions exist.  (In case you thought they were a figment of my fevered imagination.)  I blurred the photos because… well mostly because I found the “pixellate” button my my photo software.

I enlisted a team of current and former world leaders to interpret what you’re seeing.  Enjoy:

Photo 1: I’m pretty sure that’s not his real hair.

I’m mystificated.

Photo 2: Some sort of commerce.

You didn’t build that.

Photo 3: A happy shopper.

I’d hit that.

And for a summary of the overall situation I turn it over to our future planetary overlord Vladimir Putin.

Rainbow ponies remind me that my childhood was a sad one.

You’ve got to be shitting me!

“I’d like to borrow your trailer.” A friend was asking to borrow my utility trailer. She uses it all the time. I don’t mind. In fact, “asking” was something of a misnomer since the trailer was already hitched to her idling SUV and we were standing around it chatting.

It’s a darned nice trailer. From my point of view a good trailer is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise imperfect world. She agrees. She also brings it back in exactly the same condition as it was when she picked it up. So it’s no big deal.

“Yeah sure.” I was thinking about something else. Being me, this could be anything.

“I’m going on a long trip this time.” She continued. (Usually the trailer only goes on local jaunts to the lumber yard or the landfill.)

“OK, check the tires before you go. They should have plenty of tread.” Was that a squirrel in the tree?

“Indianapolis…” She explained. Whatever. I didn’t care. I was thinking about fishing bait, or taxes, or spark plugs, or something else. Lets face it, there are a thousand thoughts in our heads all the time and very few of them involve Indianapolis.

She continued…

“It’s for a ‘My Little Pony’ convention.”

!!!

My brain went on high alert. Time slowed. Mental focus snapped to attention like a laser beam.

Did I hear that correctly? No! It couldn’t be.

There are certain things which merit immediate and definitive response. For example; tiger attacks, car crashes, and gunplay. This was a similar moment.  I had just been exposed to an unfathomable “thing which should not be”.

My brain alerted the rest of the body; ‘Something is amiss. We have received information which is inconsistent with logic, reality, and the human condition. In the next two seconds we’re going to run like hell or kill something.’  My stance changed.  I became deeply aware of my surroundings.  I sniffed the air.  It was ‘go time’.

I spoke carefully because this was important. “What.  Did.  You.  Say?”

“A ‘My Little Pony’ convention.”

Oh God, she’d really said it! Klaxons went off in my brain.  The Earth shook.  Time and space had no meaning.

I tried to come to my senses.  Ponies?  I dredged up a decades old mental image of a hideously cartoonish, rainbow colored, sparkle laden, children’s toy.  A pony… possibly a unicorn? Animated? Plastic?  Plush doll?  I couldn’t recall. All I could recall was mutant eyelashes and the manic dopamine smile of something with an IQ less than furniture.

Aren’t My Little Ponies the kind of saccharine sweet, mass marketed, brainkill that causes anyone over age two to recoil in horror?  Even in my youth they caused boys to freak out and hurl their GI Joe at the wall.  Any girl mature enough that she was not currently scampering around in a fairy costume would react similarly.

This person talking to me, who heretofore has been sane, should feel the same.  Aren’t we all mildly annoyed that such things as “Little Ponies” still exist?

And what was this concept of a gathering?  A group?  A herd?

“A”… I grasped for words. “…convention?”  Still reeling from the alien concept of ‘Little Ponies’ I tried to imagine a ‘Convention’.

Unbidden, my mind envisioned 1770’s patriots in white powdered wigs debating an experimental future government; the ‘Continental Convention’. I relaxed a millimeter.  Then I realized that my mind was simply leading me toward safe havens.

I shook my head and tried again. I saw sparkly ponies. I saw them en masse! Sparkly ponies en masse… right here on the planet where I have to live! My knees felt weak.

“Yeah, a bunch of people get together and trade and sell ‘My Little Pony’ stuff.” She continued.

“In Indianapolis?” Was there something in the water?

“Yep, that’s where it is. A friend of mine has a display booth. We were going to strap it on the roof but it’s a long trip so I volunteered your trailer. I hope you don’t mind.” She seemed to be speaking English but the words made no sense.

“There is ‘My Little Pony’… commerce?” I stammered.

“Apparently. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Um… You’re talking about the children’s things? The little horses with rainbows and shit?” I just wasn’t getting it.

“Yeah, it’ll be weird eh?”

“Weird is a matter of degrees. I might think it’s weird that a meteor hit the garage roof. I might even think it’s ‘weird’ that an orangutan broke through the window and did a puppet show with live cats. That’s nothing! In the case of a ‘convention‘ of children’s rainbow horses that involves commerce ‘weird’ is totally inadequate.”

“Well I’m in it for the road trip. I’ll take good care of the trailer.” Then she hopped in her car and zoomed off.  I think I heard my trailer weeping.

My wife had witnessed the whole thing. Inexplicably the idea of Little Ponies en masse hadn’t fractured her psyche.

“That really does sound weird; but what were you saying about orangutans?” She gently coaxed.

“A convention… Rainbow. Sparkly…” Words stopped coming out.

“It’s just a gathering. Like when we rode to Sturgis.” She tried to calm my nerves.

“Leather clad bikers… Rainbow sparkly ponies…” A juxtaposition formed and took a dump in my skull. “Aaacckk! You’re not helping!”

Mrs. Curmudgeon, realizing I would need hours of therapy, steered me toward the porch. I sat on the swing. A beer appeared. I drank. I tried not to ponder the fact that the world where I live, which has a blue sky and gravity, is also inhabited by adults who are avid fans of sparkly ponies. In Indianapolis.

I survived but I’m not the same. This information is a thing which cannot be unlearned.

Now you know it too. We’re all screwed aren’t we?

The written word is as uplifting as it is awesome.  It’s a major part of my life.  I love my Kindle.  The heaps of books growing organically throughout the house fill me with contentment.  I read constantly.  However, I don’t think that makes me special.  Most smart people read a lot and many idiots do too.

I do more than read, I write a goddamn blog.  People apparently read it.  My writing hasn’t caused anyone to have seizures.  It must be at least tolerable.  You can call me an asshole but you can’t call me illiterate.

Like most adults, I know that the written word is merely a means to an end.  We understand the soul is not inherently enhanced by using letters.  At best, literature is flavor and catalyst and at worst it’s a mental escape capsule but it’s never the whole enchilada.  The mundane concerns of Earthbound existence really are the meat of our brief lives.  We suck it up and get to it.  We grapple in the dirt with reality.

Literacy is a stepping stone, nothing more.  Occasionally someone misses the point and earnestly calls to us; “join me in unreality”.

“Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being.”

“The English major at her best isn’t used by language; she uses it. She bends it, inflects it with irony, and lets hyperbole bloom like a firework flower when the time’s right. She knows that language isn’t there merely to represent the world but to interpret it. Language lets her say how she feels.”

“To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person.”

So there you have it.  Drop out of the workforce and take on massive student loans and you’ll eventually become a human being who can say how you feel.  Why does this remind me of teaching a toddler to “use your words”?

It’s an excellent essay.  You should read the whole thing.  Let all 1853 words about the super cool awesomeness that is formal study of English wash over you like a Diet Sprite spilled on your shoe.  Let the author drop their thoughts in your cranium like a cat dropping a turd in a box.  Let the concepts rain down from on high like drool from the mouth of a gold plated unicorn.

Then shake that shit off and get your ass back to work!

Watch out for pretentious yahoos trying to make you into a human being.  First of all there is the implied assumption that the prospective student isn’t yet a self realized individual.  Who wants to service an ego so inflated that it considers would be apprentices nothing more than a mass of unformed dingbats?  Second, unless you’re an utter moron you already know how to read.  Finally, if you take on five digits of debt to learn to “say how you feel” you should emerge with a notepad full of euphemisms for “screwed”.

It takes a long career of navel gazing to pretend literacy is the whole purpose of everything, everywhere, for everyone. Reading is fine but it’s not the point.  The point is living.  Four years “learning to be a human being” at the foot of a self proclaimed literacy God won’t put you very far down the road to adventure.

A.C.

Hat tip to Maggies Farm.

I’ve written about the 55 MPH speed limit before.  It, like the AMC Gremlin and possible annihilation by Soviet missiles, was an experience.  It made an indelible mark on my psyche.  So much stupidity.  So much misery.  And that’s just the Gremlin!  Frankly you could make an argument in favor of the Gremlin.  It was, after all, better than walking (or death by fire).  Speaking of fire, there’s a point to mutually assured destruction too.  The point being we didn’t do it.  The 55 MPH limit, therefore stands alone.  It was so pointless, so universally ignored, so immensely loathed, so without redeeming qualities… that I can’t fully communicate its inherent pathos.  Ironically, the hate was so complete that there aren’t many references to it.  It’s as if America just wants to forget the whole ugly episode and move on to better things; like going bankrupt on a grand scale.

The lack of references is often the way fate of things that are both everywhere and without logic.  Here’s an example from today; nobody writes operas about TSA gropings.  Why?  Because everyone knows they suck, everyone puts up with it, and nobody but the fully and deliberately obtuse try to pretend that it’s not bullshit.  Who writes about bullshit while you’re swimming in it?

Perhaps someday we’ll get our collective heads out of our asses about the TSA.  If that happens we’ll probably forget about the blue gloved idiot wonders as much as we forgot about Carter’s brilliant innovation in transportation.

Would that mean future people simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend the futility of the TSA.  How do you explain a mall cop feeling up grandma and seizing a kid’s juice box?  How do you explain the 55 MPH speed limit to those who haven’t  experienced it?  How do you explain Leukemia to a hummingbird?

Never Yet Melted warmed my heart when they unearthed an old comic from the era:

The worst offenses against humanity should be punished by making the guilty drive across the Great Plains at 55 MPH with nothing but an AMC Gremlin and AM radio. Particularly evil offenders should drink Tab while doing it.

Never Yet Melted, like me, recalls 55 MPH as a law that nobody obeyed and compares it to modern fallacies.  Hat tip to them for the image and reference.