Between Holidays

Well, are you going to thank me? I did spare you a post about how Thanksgiving is the best holiday of all time, I didn't hector you about losing the Christmas spirit to our consumer culture, I passed on calling New Years a holiday for amateurs, and I kept my Valentines Day sour grapes to myself. Seriously, weren't you get sick of this moralistic twit blogger constantly telling you the right way to think or the proper way to feel? Aren't some of my holier than thou pronouncements enough to make you want to reach through your computer and give a good slap to my overly round head? "What the #@$%! you blogging piece of ^%$$#*."  Christmas has all that great family stuff plus presents, just because some people act like jerks doesn't make it a bad holiday. Mmmm presents! Besides blogger boy you know you like presents too; you just like stuffing your face more. New Years is fun! Wouldn't you like February 14th more if there was a remote chance that you could get laid someday?

Please Oh Lord, my your gifts involve face stuffing.

I guess I have to plead guilty on this one. The holidays show up, I get kind of jazzed and I want things to conform to my view of the world. Which makes the holidays vastly different from... July 12? Sept 22? March 28? Everyday? Duh! Truth be told the holidays tend to stir up a ton of regret about how little I've managed to make my world conform to my idea of the world. So, because I didn't do bigger things with my life I hector you about perceived things that you do wrong with yours. Wow, smug, condescending, arrogant and riddled with regret. Happy Holidays. Although today is St Paddy's day, isn't drunk blogging the best?

Words to live by... if you're Hitler

So here is where this blogger, and maybe you,  goes wrong. Words and meaning aren't always as clear cut as we would like them to be. This isn't lawyerly BS either. Is the above quote the affirmation of a wise old timer that has lived a full throttle existence, or a get out of jail free card for a sociopath? It is of coarse both while also being totally false. No Regrets? Are you kidding me? Regret comes to you about all kinds of events for all kinds of reasons and you cannot talk yourself out of feeling them. Like if you bumbled your career path and now the people that write your pay check know you had better do the monkey dance when they snap their fingers or learn to like homeless shelters. Only you didn't take good care of your health and now the monkey dance hurts in physical as well as emotional ways. Or maybe the only woman you have been interested in for the last 20 years is gone because you had too many rules about age differences, economic differences, plus you couldn't bare for her to see you do the crippled monkey dance for you corporate masters.... so, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."

Damn! 3 years to plan health care and we still forgot to hire the computer guy!

It happens to the best of us. So, we finally get around to what today's blog is really about which is the things that you can get for less than a buck that you should really be thankful for. In fact it is a product of your extraordinary existence that you have the luxury of thinking that diamonds or cars or appliances are more valuable than this stuff. It's all material stuff too. Rock solid pick it up and use it stuff. No found "wisdom" in bold fonts superimposed on colorful backgrounds to hammer home meaningless points and puff up the ego of blog boy. So...

Ain't they purti...

I know, I know, I know... I just got done talking about things that make life better than diamonds (for the record diamonds are stupid and unless you can get some pinhead to give you money for them they add no value to your everyday existence)when I whip out a picture of ... not diamonds. That kids is a close up picture of table salt. Mmmm salt! Think about eating. Think about eating 3 times a day. Now boil some unsalted water and cook an unsalted chicken in it. Eat. Wow! Does that ever suck. Try other things; pasta, corn, green beans, all without salt. Try a salt free diet. Try not to rip your tongue out in despair. You spend an hour or two every day eating, seven days a week three hundred sixty-five days a year for the duration of a seventy plus year life. Salt/no salt, Pleasure/no pleasure. Salt brings you 4.5 years worth of 24/7 pleasure for about 2 bucks a year. Screw heroin, I want salt.  How big would a diamond have to be before you'd trade it even up for 4.5 years of pleasure. I didn't think so...

Oh yeah, give me the good stuff.

I don't know what people did in the olden days, but I'm pretty sure I don't ever want to find out in person. Wikipedia suggests leaves, corn husks, corn cobs, stones, broken pottery, moss, ferns, rags, sand, fruit skins, the left hand, and the always comfy seashell. While we are trading in diamonds and pleasure maybe we can also put a price on reducing yuck. Six billion people times at least one load a day times six billion rather foul corn cobs is one hell of a lot of yuck. It is yuck to the power of OMG! Yuck as a way of life. Yuck that you can never get away from. Yuck!

What you going to do with your blue ray phone now?

I am not saying that a 70 inch HD television won't bring you pleasure, I'm just saying that when you are "ahem" trapped in a moment, where you lept before you looked, and now everyone at the morning meeting is wondering where you are there are other things that have more value. Maybe some Ivory...

You'r missing the point here...

We are talking about cheap (and legal). It's bad enough that we covet rocks and metals, how messed up is it that there is a huge trade in pieces of dead animal when the ivory with the real value is...

Invented 2000 years ago it took until the 11950sbefore most people started using daily.

How great is this stuff? Could we even live as we live today without soap? Would we even want to? Think if everyone smelled like the smelly kid from 5th grade. How about those gym lockers in high school? Maybe you wouldn't care if your date was like that fat sweaty guy at Walmart who's wearing the same gym pants for the 3rd day in a row. ( Wait, that's me! This could explain the mysteries of my love life) Maybe. Face it, soap is the bomb with the added bonus of keeping us healthy as well as smelling good. That's right, when it was invented nobody knew that smearing yourself with rendered animal fat that had been exposed to an alkaline solution would keep  disease away as well as the stink but hey, bonus!

Which is why I go to Walmart dateless.

Of coarse that brings us to an even bigger prize: clean tap water. No, not the bottled stuff almost all of which has come from...wait for it... a tap. Yeah it gets filtered by the corporate giant that is happy paying pennies a hundred gallons ( subsidized by the government) for something it can sell to you for $1+ per pint thereby legally stealing your money, but if you live in most parts of the US or Canada the tap stuff is just as good if not better. (your public water supply is checked for heavy metals your bottled water is not) (because corporations don't pay to do things the government does for them for free). And can you do this with bottled water?...

You can drink it, bath in it, play in it, flush with it...Tap water WooHoo!

So with less money than the pope spends on funny hates you get a years worth of wet and clean with the added surprise bonus of fewer colds and less gangrene. Pretty sweet deal, Huh? ...and we aren't even talking lush sinful flavor yet. That's because we're really getting into the luxury realm now. My next favorite score could run you a brutal $75 a year if you are a real addict. Even more if you fry with it but then you can subtract the cost of vegetable oil and your house will smell better than your naughty bits after an encounter with soap and water.

Plus you can totally believe it's not butter. 

Butter, Mmmm butter! It's a party in your mouth. Salt gives everything a chance to be good. Butter, Mmmm butter! gives everything a chance to be great. Invented in cave people times for God only knows what reason (cave people did not have toast) butter, Mmmm butter! was only a way to get a few more days out of milk for most of its' existence. Milk lasts what? a day without refrigeration? In cave days stretching that to a week when no other food was on the horizon was survival. Well the survival of your ancestors and the evolutionary need to enjoy getting fat kept butter around long enough for me to deem it the one possible proof that there is a benevolent God. Plus in a pinch it makes a wonderful marital aid.

Once you're all buttered up, and you think you are in a private place, and you let a wee bit of whiskey loosen you up, and the happy gene kicks in, isn't a bit of music just the thing? Now I know you can spend big on tunes, the current Stones tour starts it's tickets in the thousands of dollars, but for personal consumption isn't that lame wheezing you do in the shower some of the best s%^t ever? At least for your personal consumption? Why we sound good to ourselves when we don't sound good to anyone else is a mystery but isn't it a cool gift from the powers that be?

Suck it rock stars, I'm listening to me.

I need no more proof than any season of American Idol ever. We just love, love, love the sound of air blasting through our own pie-holes. And not just because it's free, but because it feels good. In fact all bodily functions feel pretty good when you... Time to stop the blog. The Old Bushmills is taking me down a path where no family blog should go. So write tonight, edit tomorrow. Maybe blog again if I can convince myself it is worth doing. You could send me salt, butter, TP, soap and tap water if you are feeling generous, or a song would be nice.