My Mind Wandered

Somewhere around 1995 Allen Jackson came out with a song called “Gone Country”. I loved that song, despite the bad grammar; I went around singing it all the time.

“She’s gone country, look at them boots…” 

 Today I’m singing a different tune.

Yesterday I got out of my car and walked into the post office. You would think I could have seen something that big.

I’ve gotten clumsy lately. I don’t know why unless it’s because I’m losing my mind. I told Hubby the other day that everything was making me crazy.

“I think I’ve gone crazy,” I said to him.

“You’re not crazy, Honey,” he soothed. “You just have a lot on your mind.”

“Don’t try to make me feel better,” I snapped. “I think I have enough sense to know when I’m crazy!”

He looked at me like I might just have a point.

Stress. It’s nature’s way of supplying you with the extra energy to get more things done than there are hours in the day in which to do them.

And worry. How many of you worry about everything? I worry about the kids, the grand kids, Hubby, the dogs, the bills, the taxes, the company that sells those defective coffee makers that burn out after about two weeks. Did you ever buy one of those?

I hate it when I get up in the morning and find that the coffee maker has died sometime during the night. I have to have my coffee. It’s like putting gasoline in a car. I don’t care how many times I say “I think I can, I think I can.” This little engine can’t run without coffee. 

And we can’t win every argument, even when we know we’re right and they’re wrong. We can’t go through life and never expect to have a confrontation with another person, even though that person is someone we barely know. Unless, of course, we never go outside of our homes. Sometimes we just have to give in and be the statue and let the other person be the pigeon. I hate to argue. I hate controversy. Have you ever tried to reason with an ignorant person? It’s like trying to hang gravy on the wall or make syrup stand up straight.

I’m the type of person who will do just about anything to keep the peace. I try to remain calm, hold my tongue and smile. Brawling is so unrefined, so uncouth and so “third grade elementary school”. However, I can brawl when the situation calls for it.

I don’t like to get angry. But some people won’t stop until they’ve pushed the other person over the edge. I don’t like me when I’m angry. Nobody else likes me when I’m angry either. I tend to get a little violent. I shout and make hand gestures and get in their face. Okay, I would run head on into a speeding train if it kept on pushing me until I lost my temper.

I can’t tolerate unreasonable people. You can try to communicate rationally with them, to agree with them to a point, but it only makes it worse. If you give some people an inch, they think they’re a ruler. When dealing with this type of person it’s best to stick your fingers in your ears and say “Neenerr! Neenerrr! Neenerr…I can’t hear you!”

I’m still hearing the sound of the Cicadas but they have all left. I’m the only one who keeps hearing this shrill high-pitched drone in my ears. Do you think it might be due to the fact that I have gone crazy? 

Look, don’t argue with me…I know I’m crazy. I’m not stupid you know. Besides, I don’t have time to argue. I need to buy some hair color; look at ‘them’ roots!

***

We buy stuff with money that we don’t have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get. By the time we get our stuff paid for, it’s broken. Then we go out and buy more stuff.  That is the definition of the word credit.

Today I would like to discuss the history of credit and how it all came about.

Credit has been around for centuries. It started with the early cave man. Uugg wanted a fancy stone club like the one his neighbor Oogg had. He believed it would make him a better hunter. After all, he worked as hard as Oogg did and he deserved a nice club. Besides that, he had more children. So off Uugg went, down to the local Stoneware Store and bought one on credit. He promised to pay for it in three easy installments of two dinosaurs per month for the following three months.

Uugg used the club to kill dinosaurs which he gave to the Stoneware Store for two months. By the third month he and his family had starved to death and the store owner came and took back the club, his cave, and his one surviving child. This was all legal since the credit application had been written and signed in stone. That’s why people stopped paying for stuff with dinosaurs and began using those shiny chunks of rock called “gold nuggets”.

When it was discovered that the shiny rocks were valuable, everyone began digging them out of the caves. Incidentally, this is the way “house cleaning” was discovered.

After a while and much digging by everyone from all over the continent, the shiny rocks kept getting harder and harder to find. It was also difficult to flash your wealth around because the sacks of rocks were so heavy. This is why Quasimodo became known as “The Hunchback”. He was the richest man of his time, but his back had become terribly bowed over from carrying all these sacks of shiny rocks around. Even though being weighted down with riches sounds like a good thing, it really can become a hazard, so people began using paper.

The paper was easier to carry. It wasn’t bulky, which made it easier for Robin Hood to rob the rich and give the money to the poor. The paper money was undetectable when Robin Hood stuffed the millions he stole inside his tights. Folks just thought he had huge thighs. However, all the kings men as well as the poor began manufacturing their own money. They cut pieces of paper from the Wall Street Journal and Sears & Roebuck catalogues. Soon everybody had so much paper it became worthless. Robin Hood stopped robbing people since his tights were now full of money which  nobody wanted. This caused him to waddle like a duck whenever he tried to walk, and that is how the term “tight wad” came about.

By now the government decided to take over control of all the money. They called it Internal Revenue. They began to make the money out of green paper only.  They put pictures of dead presidents on the front and a picture of a building on the back. They also wrote a lot of numbers and Latin words on it. They decided to call it “cash” which comes from the Latin word “munie” meaning “the root of all evil”.

Thousands of years later man was still using this green paper, but it was slowly becoming worthless. Unless you had a sack full of this paper you couldn’t buy anything. And carrying around sacks of this stuff made it difficult to use public transport. Besides, the airlines kept losing it. It also takes a long long time to acquire a sack of this paper stuff called cash, so that is why we now buy things on credit.

And that, Dear Children, is how the term plastic money came about.  And that is the reason we now live in a world of debt, politics, and collective ignorance.  It’s so easy a cave man can do it.

*************

It won’t help me any because my RSS feed isn’t working,  but still you should visit Humor-Blogs.com that is if you enjoy reading humor at its funniest!

The only thing I hate more than a stinking nasty house fly is…mm…having my eye gouged out with a fondue fork.

Flies are the nastiest creatures on planet earth. In fact their natural habitat is anyplace  where there is decaying organic matter or waste, which is the polite word for the droppings left behind by animals and chickens. This is where flies breed and grow.
According to my research, warm summer conditions are best for the development of the house fly, and it can complete its life cycle in as little as seven to ten days. As many as 10 to 12 generations may occur in one summer. That’s a lot of dirty flies buzzing around covered in “organic matter”.

When I was a child growing up in the country during the 1950’s it was common for the folks in the area to raise hogs, chickens, cows and horses, and to have “organic matter” spread on their gardens in the early part of the planting season. The flies were in hog heaven. They went forth and multiplied…many times over.

Air conditioning was something few if any homes had during that time. One was lucky to own a small window fan to create a breeze on the hottest days of summer. The window screens back then were made of wider weave than they are now and they often got torn in places by rowdy kids. (not me of course…the others were the rowdy kids). This was the prefect entry way for the stinking nasty flies to get into the house. That and us standing with the screen door open until Mama yelled at us to “get in or out one; you’re letting the flies in!”

Mama was continually spraying fly spray, swatting them with a fly swatter that she carried on her hip at all times much like a cowboy packing a six-gun. And she used fly paper strips.

She would hang the long strips which were covered in sticky goo in each room of the house. I wish I had a nickle for every time I climbed on a chair and got stuck in one of those icky gooey strips, my hair all wound up in with the flies that were sticking to it. I would stand there screaming until Mama came and un-stuck me and washed off the life threatening, horrible, “my-gosh-your-liable-to-get-diphtheria-or-smallpox” germs. Of course this didn’t do much to alleviate my disgust for the nasty creatures. I would shiver for hours afterward.

So now, one day last week I was sitting at my desk and I hear this buzzing sound. I immediately thought to myself, “housefly!!”  The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere near my right ear. “Buzz, buzz.”  I slapped the air around my head and the noise stopped. I typed a few more words and “buzz, buzz” - next to my ear the same as before. I went into the utility room and got the fly swatter. As we all know (well those of us who are familiar with a pesky fly), once you get a newspaper or a fly swatter the fly goes and hides until you put your weapon  down.  I guess twenty minutes went by when suddenly “buzz buzz”…the sound near my right ear came again.

Frustrated and angry I jumped out of my chair and began slapping at the air around my head with my hands and the fly swatter, slapping at my hair and basically acting like a crazed lunatic. Finally after I had slapped myself silly, the buzzing sound came again just as my granddaughter walked into the office. She reached above my head and took something off the shelf over my desk.

“I forgot my cell phone and left it here,” she said.
At that moment I heard the fly buzz again. “Where is that dang fly?” I shouted, my patience gone.

“Mamaw-Honey, that’s my cell phone. I have it set to vibrate,” she said. “Ha…it does sound like a bee buzzing around. How! cool! is! that!”

I just looked at her and said,  “?”

– Humor-Blogs has flies!–

My name is Shadow and I am the DOG. Most of you know me as The Black Lab, the owner of the people named Leeuna and Hubby. Since my mommy, (she calls herself “mommy” when she talks to me…snicker, bwahahahha, snort..how dumb is that?!)  anyway she is tired so I thought I would help her out and write the column for her this week. 
 
I hope I don’t make too many mistakes but I am typing this real fast, using both paws so I can get it done before she catches me at her computer. Geesh! It’ll be the same old thing like when I ate her boots. She’ll get that wrinkle between her eyes that reminds me of a little Shar Pei I once knew. She’ll tug at her hair and make it string down over her eyes like that Shih Tzu’s hair over at the trailer park.

Anyway, I really wanted to clear some things up. Mommy has been telling some pretty tall tales on me lately and I think I should take my turn here. First off, it wasn’t my fault that she broke her ribs that day at the river. I can’t help it if she is so clumsy she falls over on level ground. Actually, and this is between us, she is so clumsy she couldn’t stand upright in a phone booth. You should have seen her the day she walked into that ladder. Knocked herself flat down…and I was in the house minding my own business. Well actually I was chewing on the TV remote but we don’t need to bring that up.

Now. Everyone who has ever seen me knows that I am the Elvis of the K-9 World. I’m so good looking I can’t stand myself. My hair is shiny black and I have big brown eyes that could melt the heart of even the coldest poodle who ever lived. I can even curl my lip over my teeth the way Elvis did.  Wanna see me do it?

Thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, imagine my shock and horror when my people brought this little fuzz ball thing into the house and told me it was a “puppy”.  Ha! It looks more like a gerbil. I thought it was a new chew toy, but it started jumping on me and I realized this thing was alive. So now, I — The King , the Elvis of dogdom –  have been banished to the  OUTDOORS. 

Yeah, I know. I’m still reeling from the shock myself. They bought me an Igloo to sleep in and told me that I would have fun playing in the fenced-in yard. Well, alright. The sound you aren’t hearing right now is the sound of one paw not clapping.  Imagine them tossing a dog like me out of his own bedroom. And I have missed the last two episodes of my favorite TV show “Animal Cops”.

My people still come outside and play with me all the time. We play “fetch”, “rip-that-shirt” and “knock-down” and frankly I’m enjoying the outdoors a lot, but don’t tell them. I like to put on my sad face and make them feel guilty.  It gets me extra dog bones.

Well, I gotta run now. The German Shepherd who lives next door has scheduled a singing this evening. Of course I’ll be doing my famous “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” song. The whole neighborhood loves us.  They yell, and throw their shoes, and fire shots in the air. Its a real happenin’.

I hope you enjoyed the column and if she doesn’t find out about me messin’ around on her computer I might write another one soon.  In the mean time, Elvis has left the building.

Thankyouverymuch.

Maybe I’ll just move over to Humor-blogs!