I have to write something. I’m going crazy just sitting here. I am still sick as hell and I have been confined to bed for at least the rest of the day if not the rest of the weekend. I tried to get up this morning and that lasted about an hour. Now I’m lying here coiled in a ball, re-reading an old H.P. Lovecraft anthology. I feel like I am wasting the day by just sitting here dormant. There is so much I could be doing, but even the slightest movement or even the smell of food makes me wretch. I can’t go anywhere and I can’t do anything. I have to wait it out and be a sloth. It’s funny, I haven’t eaten a single thing in three days and I’m barely even hungry. I’ll try a piece of toast later but even the thought of that turns my stomach…
So, what’s going on in the real world while I wait here to die?
In just under a year (364 days when I started writing this earlier this week) “over the air” television broadcasting will be going away. You will no longer pick up TV stations from a set of rabbit ears. I’d be upset if I was more attached to the TV. Like if I had one in an ice-fishing hut or an RV or something. Has it been so long? I remember when cable TV was new and considered a luxury. Now cable or satellite is a requirement. Progress or greed?
I think I am going to enroll in the police academy and become a cop. I think if I could set my own patrols I could really make a difference, make the roads safer for us. By “us” I mean all of us that are safe/competent drivers. I will have a regular job but when it starts to rain I’ll become like a superhero. I’ll drop what I’m doing and put on my cop uniform (no cape or spandex) and drive around the highways of America in the storms and pouring rain. My sole function will be to find and kill those assholes that drive around in the rain with their flashers on. Oh FUCK someone should skin them alive and drop them in a casket full of salt!
And for some reason it seems to be a worse problem on I-10 more than any other highway I travel. Ok, I know Hurricane Katrina really messed things up and destroyed your lives but you do NOT need to turn your flashers on every time you use your windshield wiper fluid! These people are dangerous and they are fooling themselves into thinking that they are helping out the other drivers on the road. It is illegal for a damn reason! When conditions are already hazardous and visibility is low I don’t need the added aggravation of figuring out if you are stopped in the traffic lane or are just some dickhead driving with your flasher on (in the left lane I might add!!!!)
These people should be targeted and terminated on site. No trial, no jury. They endanger the safety of the rest of us and personally get on my nerves, destroy them at will. The Emperor of Earth has spoken.
Ok, on to something a little more lighthearted… Christians can’t understand sarcasm. This was discovered by me in a purely scientific study where I polled one person and applied the results to every living being sharing this characteristic with him. I was driving along I-10 and in Mobile, Alabama my RF modulator goes out because of a very strong signal in the area. Rather than flipping my modulator to another station I just flipped through the radio stations to see what was going on in the world.
I settled on a station where a guy was ranting (in the nicest possible way) about a group donating money to build churches in China. He was upset because in order to build a church in China you have to sign an agreement with the government to blend in with the Chinese culture and this means you can’t spout off that all non-believers are going to burn in Hell. This guy on the radio had no stake in this, he wasn’t part of this venture in any way. He was just pointing out from his microphone pulpit that it was wrong and that all of his listeners should call these people (he provided the phone numbers) and tell them that it is wrong to omit parts of the word of God just because they signed an agreement with a hostile government.
It was fun to listen to him and his callers go round and round about how awful it was and how they were going to shut down this whole atrocity. Then a young woman called in and asked what “Jesus said about Hell”. The guy responded with “Well, the Bible says…” and she countered with, “I know what the Bible says but I want to know what Jesus said about Hell”. This went round and round for a few minutes and he cut her off. I knew where she was going (and obviously so did the talk-host) and he wasn’t going to get drawn into this.
So with time on my hand and more than just a little bored, I made a phone call.
I expected to be screened and found out so I didn’t have much planned in what I was going to say. The person answering the phone simply asked where I was calling from and reminded me to not waste any of the Lord’s time with the usual “Long time listener, first time caller, I love your show” type of stuff. Just get to the point so we can share God’s love.” I was flabbergasted at how mechanical it all was. Before I was ready I was on the phone with the host. I stammered out that I was “Bob from Washington” (Hey, I had to improvise in a hurry!) and that “Doesn’t that silly girl know that the Bible is the word of God and therefore the words of Jesus? If the Bible says that elephants are pink then that means Jesus says elephants are pink!” I expected a hang-up, a dial tone or at least an argument. What did I get? “Amen brother, I agree with you 100%”. No shit. He believes anything the Bible says, no matter how ridiculous and when this is tossed in his face, rather than wake up he dives deeper into his psychosis and congratulates me on “believing” the same thing. Scary.
I don’t know the entire story yet but I smell a shitty decision. Wal-Mart has been battling with the image of the “American Corporation” with all of the news shows showing that they buy cheap crap from China and everything else. Right or wrong, it has been trying to maintain its image of an American store for a long time now.
The face of America is changing (and I personally think a lot of that it DUE to Wal-Mart and the consumer greed mentality) and the symbols of America have changed from “Baseball, Mom and apple pie” to “PlayStation, parental guardian and McDonald’s apple pie, two for a dollar”. Well there are very few things I can think of that are more symbolically American that Girl Scouts. Teresa just got the call this morning that Wal-Mart corporate offices has revoked all of the permits for the Girl Scouts to sell cookies on the store sidewalks. Not that they decided not to issue them, that would have been questionable but reasons could have been given, excuses could have been made and no trouble would have followed. They agreed (like every other year) to let the girls have their cookie booths and then cancelled them on the day they were to commence. That means that each of the troops have ordered and taken delivery of extra cookies they thought they would sell and now they have no where to sell them. Meaning that the troops will be left with cases of unsold cookies and that comes directly out of the troop profits.
So Wal-Mart loses nothing, Girl Scouts loses nothing. You know who loses. The girls. They want to take a trip? They want some new art supplies? They want to go to a sporting event? Sorry girls, no money in the bank but we do have extra cases of cookies. What Wal-Mart just ensured is that instead of going to a museum they’ll sit around and eat the extra cookies so we’ll have a bunch of uncultured, fat, diabetic girls running around…
And finally for some more earthly news… Last weekend I took the trip down to south Florida to attend the first HawkFest. I was hoping to get there for a couple of days but work made it look like I wasn’t going to be able to go at all and then at the last minute I was able to make it for the weekend. I packed up some food and a sleeping bag and drove down hoping to enjoy some all-night drumming and dancing. When I got there I was surprised at how isolated the area was even though it is in the middle of a developed area. I was able to spend some time hanging out with people, getting to better know some friends, old and new. I wasn’t allowed to eat my dinner because two different camps insisted (almost to the point of being insulted if I refused) that I eat with them. Thanks a lot to all of you. I had packed some apples and stuff to make sandwiches, instead I ate steak and salad. Oh oh oh, twist my arm…
The drumming was incredible as was to be expected considering the “professional” drum circlers in attendance. It was fun to watch the excitement and there was plenty of time to join in when the testosterone burned out. We finished playing around 5:30 and I crawled into the back of the truck and laid out the sleeping bag. It may have been uncomfortable for a couple of minutes but I went right to sleep and in the morning I didn’t have to pack up a tent. I also didn’t have to worry about being up in time to start cooking breakfast. That was a REALLY nice factor. No schedule/no duties. Just hang out and have fun, enjoy the experience. Oh it was so nice.
Back to reality, we will be short one of our kitchen crew at the upcoming festival and we considered asking for a volunteer, hopefully someone that could do breakfast so we would catch a break Saturday morning. Well the first response I saw was from another drummer. A little counter-productive? We’ll ALL be tired and cranky… So the more we talked about it (We=the remaining kitchen crew of Teresa, Zephyr and me) figured out that we could pull off getting the meals cooked and served if only we could get someone to clean up and do dishes at dinner. Our missing crew member doesn’t do mornings/breakfast so she volunteers to take care of the evening cleaning, freeing us up to get out of the kitchen after we close down dinner. Anyone out there want to come to a really cool festival, meet some cool people and drum/dance every night until the cops show up? I’ll pay half your admission cost and you do all the dishes. Sound fair?
Whew! I told you all I needed to do was write a little. I still feel like crap but now I can go back to reading and maybe fall asleep, maybe dream a little…
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
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