Snow Daze

Society has stopped. Snow stopped it.

I’m in my recliner looking out at the snow. The glare off of the white blanketed lawn makes my bifocals darken a little but not enough to make it hard to see my episode of “Diagnosis: Murder”.

The grass reaches through the snow. The snow is about 2 inches deep with drifts bordering on nearly half a foot deep. The drifts are so deep that your feet would get cold it you tried to walk across the lawn in flip flops. Outside is just brutal. It’s not fit for man nor beast. I know this because my Grandson hasn’t been in school for over a week. I know this because church attendance is low and Netflix attendance is high. I know this because I only go out to get the mail and to attend the boot sale at Rural King.

I sit up and peer out at the devastation. I pull my attention away from the snow apocalypse just in time to save my feet from being crushed by a 13 year old on a hoverboard roaring through the very room he is not allowed to ride in. Did I mention there’s been no school for over a week? I took a deep relaxing breath as the cat screamed in pain and the hoverboard ca-thumped into the wall.

Times do change. Societies collapse. Communities lose their nerve. Children become sissies. We used to be tougher. Is that my opinion? That is fact, and I can prove it. Get on your phone thing or your phablet and look at Facebook. Check my timeline and you’ll see my proof.

The newspaper clippings are there. It was January 25th of 1978 in Indiana. Hulu and the Internet were just a dream in the mind of 29 year old Al Gore. Incidentally, Al also gave us the iconic saying, “A zebra doesn’t change its spots”. The barometer read 28.23’ Hg in Michigan, which is the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded on the central United States. That’s lower than an Illinois politician that’s fresh out of tax money to waste. That’s lower than a telemarketer without a call list at dinnertime. It’s really low.

The wind blew around 100 miles an hour. The wind chill was -60° F. It snowed around 40 inches in some places but drifts were literally up to the roof tops and the power lines. Lots of people lost power and water pipes froze. Cars were hopelessly buried and would stay that way for weeks.

Where I was stationed it was even worse. Horror of horrors, the cable went out. The TV showed nothing but electronic snow. There was no Netflix, and VCRs cost over $1,200, which for me was like a year’s pay. Nobody but politicians and telemarketers had one.

The next day, the 26th of January, a Thursday, I ran out of cigarettes. That’s when stuff got real. It’s weird what an addict will do to feed the addiction. I walked across the frozen, desolate base to buy smokes. It’s a good thing I knew where I was going, because I couldn’t see. It’s also a good thing that the Air Force issues arctic gear or I’d have died. The surgeon general should post a warning that smoking could cause frostbite and hypothermia.
I got the smokes and made it home. I waited.

Three days later I ran out of food, but the smokes held out so I was good.

Eventually a rescue squad used snowmobiles to deliver food. We got a chicken, milk, bread, corn flakes, and a carton of Camels. It wasthe best meal ever. We gradually dug out and life happened. The cable came back on and Barnaby Jones solved crime.

I overcame the blizzard for the noblest reason, to get smokes. Nobody would do that today. Back then, everyone did similar things because we weren’t sissies.

I think the kids did school work. I don’t specifically remember schools being open, but I bet they were. Just like I had the tenacity to brave the blizzard, parents were brave about getting the little darlings out of the house.

So here we sit, the boy not learning a thing except how to get on my nerves. Here we sit all weak and sissified because a little snow. Here we are with our Netflix from Al Gore without the gumption to go to school or walk to get smokes. What will become of us?

Suck it up and do stuff even when the lawn is coldish. Get out and live. Oh, and stop by. I have a list of things I need.
Fini.

Romance For Beginners

Some of you may know that I’m spending my geezer years eating pie and raising a Grandson, or maybe he’s raising me. I’m new to this game. I only had girls, and boys were a creature that sent flowers to the girls and ran when I caught them on the property. Now I’m responsible for one. If you believe in Karma you probably think I deserve this because of my being mean to a plethora of young men over the years. It’s true that I tortured the potential suitors of my daughters. It’s also true that if a boy hung around the house I’d put him to work. When my girls were teenagers I rarely had to mow or change my own oil.
So Boy 1.0 is officially a middle school, junior-teen adolescent cisgender male. In case you’re wondering, cisgender means his daily life reflects the gender on his birth certificate. In other words, he’s not insane. You gotta love the modern activist trendy-talk.

This life stage involves fewer toy cars and more incidents with razors and buckets of axe cologne. I’m serious, I think he’s got a mud bucket full of axe and he takes a dunk at odd times. It’s hard to breathe when that stuff is aloft. His young teen world also involves some male arrogance which makes him puff up his chest. The arrogance makes him think for a moment he can take me on. He also pays attention to a creature he calls “girls”.
Teen boy and girl relationships are exactly the same as 50 years ago. They’re the same, except for texting and Snapogram and Instachip or whatever. Come to think about it, the technology has made teen years a lot more time-consuming than half of a century ago. No teen has the chores we geezers had. No teen has to slop the hogs, get in the coal, and work in the salt mine like I used to do. They type and will end up with thumb arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome. Not the same thing.
Boy came in the living room and interrupted my episode of “Swamp Thing”. He announced that he and girl are “Going out”. I asked, “Going out where?” He rolled his eyes like I was the stupidest person on the planet. “We’re going out. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend. Going out” he explained. It seems that “Going out” is the same thing as “Going steady” or “Dating Exclusively”.
I asked him where they were going, and he said “Nowhere”, which to me defies any interpretation of “going out”.
In compliance with the new normal of courting, the girl sent the boy a photo via messaging. Girl put on makeup before she took the picture. Boy’s response was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Boy texted back, and I quote, “What’s wrong with your eyes? Did someone beat you up?” When asked about it, he really thought she’d been hit in the eyes. He didn’t understand why she was upset.
Eventually he went to church with her. Well, he sort of went to church with her. I delivered him to the church she attends and picked him up. Even though it’s winter I kept the truck window rolled down in a failed attempt to breathe around the cologne vapors. I hope they kept the church ventilation on high because I’m sure he filled the sanctuary with his man-scent. I didn’t see any gas masks or decontamination booths when I picked him up, so it must have went well.
Boy and girl have since broken up. In his words, she “dumped” him. Other than meeting up at church, they never went out while they were “Going out”, and now never will. It’s all very confusing. The only differences I can detect are that he’s not texting as much and I can breathe better. He’s still puffing up his chest, but it does him no good. I caution him that he could end up looking like he has makeup on, but he won’t have any.
Fini.

Take the Ball and Go Home

I stopped at the supermarket in a part of a city I don’t frequent. The neighborhood seemed OK, but was exclusively not white. I needed to stop, and stop I did even though I stood out like a sore thumb. When I walked up to the door I noticed something odd. I noticed something I had never seen before. The glass door was plastered with signs. You couldn’t have gotten another piece of paper on it anywhere.
All of the signs were hand written in marker on brightly colored printer paper. With a dozen signs on paper meant to stand out, nothing stood out. All of them screamed loudly trying to outdo each other. Every sign was negative. They all started “No” or “Don’t”. They’d have done better putting a huge “No” and then listing everything not to do. The store proprietors wanted no customers with backpacks. No children without adult supervision. No smoking, no guns, no knives, no weapons of any sort. I guess that baggy pants offend the owners, because that’s prohibited too. What else, let’s see. Oh yeah, no loitering. Loitering was a big deal because it was prohibited at least 3 times.

Reading all the orders put me out of the mood of doing business there. I wondered why anyone would want to shop there. I completed my business but never went back. I drive by occasionally but have no desire to patronize it. To me it’s obvious that the company doesn’t like, or value, or trust the customers. The people shopping there, and there are always a lot of them, aren’t welcome. Their money is welcome but they aren’t.

Maybe all businesses in minority neighborhoods do business that way. Maybe the clientele has nowhere else to shop. Maybe I make too much of little things, but I don’t think so. I think that the customers should not spend money there. I think they should vote for businesses with their wallets. It’s like the grown-up version of refusing to play and taking your ball and going home. They should say, “I don’t like this game. I’m not playing.

That long lead-in brings me to my current concern. Mainstream network TV hates me and my way of life. I first noticed it years ago with Jay Leno making fun of working class rural whites. He used terms like “rednecks” and “trailer-trash” or similar insults. I actually wrote to him at NBC but of course I received no response. I dropped the issue.

Now I and my ilk are insulted constantly on network TV. White people, especially rural Christian whites, are the butt of all jokes every day. Even dramas characterize us as inept and ignorant or just plain mean. If we express displeasure in any way we’re called racist.

Tonight on Fox I saw on “The Resident” minority characters taking charge, which is OK by me. What I don’t like is that they have to overcome the white character that is portrayed as evil and stupid. It’s constant and flagrant.

The next show, a reboot of 9-1-1, has more of the same. The good black female police person threatens and overcomes the dim witted overweight white cop. While I can deal with my fair share of that attitude, the constant cultural engineering is offensive to me.

That same racist attitude is prevalent on any network anytime. They always work hard to insult me and the things I care about. I won’t even get into the late night talk shows that have spent every minute of every monologue every night making fun of our elected leaders. I can, and have, accept a little ribbing but the constant attacks are angering.

It’s a little like the store owners we talked about. The entertainers don’t like me and don’t want me around but they’re happy to take my money. I know this but I’ve been giving in for a long time. I patronize the companies paying for the shows. I actually watch the drivel, which is approving it.
So what can I do? I guess I could just sit back and wait to see what happens, but that technique hasn’t worked so far.

I’ve considered buying stock in the offending networks, which will give me a voice in what happens. If a lot of people that think like I do buy a share or two in Fox or ABC they can influence TV.
One of us can do a petition on change.org and share it with like-minded folks. People do that for all kinds of things. My Grandson shared one about Snapchat, so any subject is OK. Several hundred thousand rural white people could voice their concerns pretty loudly. Then again, we did that when we elected Trump and people lost their minds over it.

I submit to you that the best way to show our displeasure is to “take our ball and go home” by not watching the offensive shows or spending money with the people that hate us. If the big insurance company loses thousands of customers because they’re financing hate towards rural white people, they’ll have to stop or they’ll not get paid.

We all complain about “The View” but it’s still on TV. If we stop buying the widget that is advertised on that show, the widget maker will take her ball and go home leaving “The View” on the cutting room floor.
Maybe we should each let our wishes be known so we can shop without being hated. We can watch TV without being insulted. We can refuse to play.
Fini.