As far as the plot itself, allow me to introduce you non-liberal arts majors to a new term — deus ex machina. That’s a cool little Latin phrase English teachers like to bandy about that means “god in the machine.” I’ll let you Google up the etymology of the term, but writers use a deus ex machina for one reason — they’ve written themselves into a corner and the characters everyone loves are all going to die, so something intervenes that saves the day. If you think about every time an Eagle shows up in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you’ll grasp the concept quite well. If you need a “negative example,” think about the entire Song of Fire and Ice series because George Martin not only refuses to use any plot contrivances to rescue a fan favorite character, but actually seems to delight in making sure anyone likeable and “favorite-worthy” gets killed off in some heinous way just as soon as the reader (or viewer for those with HBO) starts to invest a tremendous amount of care and emotion into someone on the page or screen.

But I digress.

The movie was entertaining and I had no idea who the main villain was or where he came from so when we discovered his identity it was a little shocking and quite cool. I like the “kinder, gentler” Spock who is not afraid to love Uhura even though his Vulcan logic and Stoicism presents a few problems for the couple. Christopher Pine has out-Shatner-ed William Shatner in my opinion and the new Scotty is my personal favorite character. He also has what I think are the two best lines in the movie: “You’ll never guess what I found behind Jupiter” and “I’m off the ship ONE BLOODY DAY and look what happens!”

So go see it. It’s worth the money, but if you are a Trekkie, you’ve already been there so this is redundant which means I will now switch to what I REALLY wanted to talk about — will there be another Star Trek movie? Even as we were leaving the theater, people around us were already speculating whether or not a third episode of the retcon would get the green light from Hollywood. To those people I can only reply, “Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle?”

Of course they’ll make another one!

As for why, it’s disgustingly simple — Star Trek is the charter member of the “Pointy Eared Dress Up Movie Club.” Let me elaborate.  In Star Trek, Spock and the other Vulcans have pointy ears; in Star Wars, Yoda and his Whill brethren have pointy ears; Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit  have pointy eared elves; the house elves of Harry Potter are pointy eared; and the Quileute shapeshifters in the Twilight saga possess pointy pinnas.

What do all five of these film franchises have in common? Costumed fanboys (and fangirls). These fans don’t just dress up in the privacy of their own homes. They don’t just bust out Yeoman Rand or Arwen for Halloween either. No, these are grown-assed men and women who will don robes, capes, fake uniforms costing hundreds of dollars, and — most importantly — pointed ear prostheses and go out to a movie theater to stand in line, buy a ticket, and sit through the movie. If you can get grown people who would generally have a little lower embarrassment threshold to go out in public carrying a reproduction lightsaber, phaser rifle, or Elven longsword, you have basically found a legal way to print money As long as the studios will make these movies, they will sell out left and right until these huge fanbases die outright or are too frail to get out of the nursing homes.

The great thing from the studio’s point of view is the movies don’t even have to be GOOD! In fact, I could argue that the movies in these franchises that have the best attendance are some of the worst movies in the series because the fanboys will go see those horrible movies more than once just so they can nit-pick all the “non-canon” scenes and gripe to their friends about how the newest installment of their favorite series has irrevocably RUINED the material because the director had the unmitigated gall to make some obscure character’s hair red when THE BOOK CLEARLY STATES IT WAS BLONDE!!

I remember when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered and every Trekkie I knew at the time was absolutely apoplectic with rage that the bridge crew wore RED SHIRTS!! Didn’t the morons know in Trek-speak Red Shirt = sudden bloody and violent death? I went to college with two of them and either one would shoot you with his reproduction Stormtrooper laser cannon if you dared speak during an episode on Sunday night even though they would spend the hour afterwards almost in tears at how the evil corporate studios savaged their beloved franchise. I can’t tell you how many Star Wars fans I’ve heard who seem to be on the brink of suicide because Lucas sold his film company for several gajillion dollars to Disney and now Disney is going to, “pump out tons of stupid stand alone movies that don’t respect the canon universe at all!” I bet ever one of those movies will be a sell out though.

Printing. Money.

So see the movie and wave to everyone dressed up because you just might work with them . . . or for them!

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

I was sixteen and as a byproduct of such a sage and wizened age, I knew everything about everything and if you didn’t believe me, all you had to do was ask. Mama was 34 — a year younger than my Budge is right now. We were living in “The Little Barn,” which was our name for the 1960-something vintage trailer we called home for several years. It pretty much was a barn, no central heat . . . no heat at all in the back of the house where my room was . . . and no central air, just a window unit mounted in the wall in the living room. The carpet was hand-me-down from my aunt after she’d changed rugs at her place. It was a sight for sore eyes and it rocked like a sailboat in a hurricane when the wind blew, but it was home.

This is what I cut grass with . . . no lie.

Anyway, this particular day was a Thursday right around this time of year. I remember it well because the grass needed to be cut and that was my job. I never particularly looked forward to cutting our grass because my instrument for mowing our 3/4 acre lot was a 19 inch bladed push mower and it was decidedly not self-propelled. This was also in the days before wonder drugs like Claritin, Zyrtec, and Allegra had been invented. I’ve chronicled my battle with hay fever before in these pages so I won’t go into great detail now, but suffice it to say by the time I finished cutting all that volunteer fescue with my Fisher-Price toy lawnmower, I could either endure the rest of the day sneezing and itching or take two Benadryl capsules and slip into a coma. But I digress.

It was a Thursday and I had three things propelling me towards my doom: my new ’79 Mustang, a newly upgraded drivers license, and daylight. A few years later at Clemson University, weekends always started on Thursdays, but a young man tearing out the door after supper on what was still a school night then was severely frowned upon in Mama’s household.

I had one hand on the doorknob with visions of picking up Robby and just wandering around the countryside telling lies, going a little too fast around curves, listening to loud music, and hoping to catch a glimpse of that elusive creature — the beautiful teenage girl. Mama was washing the dishes from supper and at that moment, she was cleaning out the 12″ cast iron frying pan (or skillet to you yankees among my limited readership) she’d used to fry my favorite breaded okra with earlier in the evening. She had just placed that hunk of pig iron on the stove eye where it lived when she noticed me still in “school clothes” and fixing to walk out the door. She turned back to the sink and as she did, she asked me a question — a simple question really — that would change my estimation of Mama for the rest of my life. She said, “Son, where are you going?”

I could have answered with any number of phrases, the absolute truth being best, that I was going to get Robby, put a few hard Community Cash earned dollars worth of gas in the car and drive around wasting time and daylight. That’s all I had to say and the evening would have simply progressed on. Unfortunately, I was sixteen and a boy. I also possessed one of the smartest mouths in three counties and I had a delightful talent for opening it at the wrong time and letting it say the wrong thing. Tonight, my smart mouth shoved my much less bulky good sense out of the way and blurted one word, “OUT!”

Mama paused in her dishwashing and visibly tensed, but she almost immediately went back to the suds in the sink and her back asked me a second innocuous question, “Okay, and when do you plan on being back?” Once I let my mouth off its rather long chain, it had a tendency to overdo things so I missed the chance to have a pleasant evening when I replied with yet another one word answer, “LATER!”

Again, Mama tensed up. I learned later on that weekend that I had just used the same intonation, phrasing, and even voice patterns my Daddy used when he and Mama were dating and later on when they were still married and he was off to do some mischief. Mama HATED that “Out; Later” nonsense coming from Daddy. She didn’t like it any better coming from me, but what happened next is what sealed my fate. She had again started washing the dishes and softly, without turning around, she said, “That’s funny, son. Now really, where are you going and when do you plan on being back? It’s a school night.”

Gentle reader, have you ever had an out of body experience where you have seemed to stand beside yourself as you did something unbelievably stupid and your astral self is screaming at your physical self “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!” But your physical self just plowed right on through that big red mental STOP sign up ahead? Well, that’s how I felt when I spoke next.

I was sixteen and basically grown — in my own eyes — and I had a car Daddy had bought me so Mama had no business telling ME — A MAN — where to go, do, and be back. As Daddy had famously told her himself on more than one occasion “No damn woman is going to tell me what to do.” So, I spoke again and very nearly paid for my words with my life when I said, loudly with all the confidence of a teenage boy who feels ten feet tall and bulletproof, “IT’S NONE OF YOUR (horrible expletive I’d never used in front of Mama deleted) BUSINESS WHERE I’M GOING OR WHEN (second horrible never used in Mama’s presence expletive deleted) I PLAN TO BE BACK! I’M A GROWN MAN!”

In the right hands, deadly weapon.

As God whom I serve is my witness, I didn’t know that little woman could move that fast. In one smooth, swift motion, she pivoted on her left foot, snatched up that cast iron frying pan in her right hand, and stepped and threw a sidearm cookware fastball that would have made Kent Tekulve blush with shame it was so perfect. I never saw it coming until it was too late to do anything about it. That heavy hunk of iron spun a few times between me and Mama and — mercifully — struck me right in the solar plexus with the lip instead of the handle. If the pan had rotated another half turn, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because I’d have been skewered by an iron handle.

The force of the blow staggered me backwards and I caught my knees on the arm of the sofa, lost my balance, and sprawled backwards, arms flailing, to land flat on my back after cracking my skull on the coffee table on the way down. As I lay there in a dazed stupor with my head and chest throbbing in my feet still twitching in the air on the sofa cushion like a mosquito on a date with DDT, I heard the refrigerator door open, something get removed, and footsteps coming towards me. Before I could clear my head at all, Mama slung the contents of the ice water pitcher all over my face and upper body, causing me to sit up and split my forehead on the bottom of the coffee table as I rose.

As I sat spluttering and breathless, Mama put her face millimeters away from mine, which was good because my eyes were having trouble focusing, and said very quietly and carefully, “You will never speak to me in that manner again; do you understand?” I could only nod my most vehement, impassioned assent. Then she said, “When you get your breath back, you get up, change clothes, and go cut the grass, yes?”

My pride was soaked and my head and chest were pained but that skinny bundle of good sense had whipped and hog-tied my smart mouth for a change so all I could croak was, “Yes, ma’am,” as Mama nodded and walked off.

I love her still and God knows I miss her.

Love y’all as well, keep those feet clean, and as you honor or remember your own mothers this Sunday, if you’d say a prayer for me, I’d certainly appreciate it.

Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant to me. I love bumblebees because they are like me — fat, uncoordinated, and addicted to sweets.

Knowing this about me, it will come as no surprise when I saw a bumblebee barely making ripples as he drifted inexorably towards oblivion within my pool skimmer, I didn’t hesitate to reach in bare handed and scoop him out onto the deck. People will tell you bumblebees can’t sting. People would be lying. Bumbles can sting just fine when they want to, but they have a very high tolerance of idiots swatting at them so they don’t sting much. However, if you step on one in a patch of clover while cutting your grandparent’s grass in bare feet, they most certainly WILL sting and it hurts like hell.

An actual Mary Kay award bee from her museum.

Anyway, this particular bumble was in no danger of stinging me or anyone else. I was afraid I’d gotten to him too late. Of all the things about pools I hate, the indiscriminate way they slaughter innocent insects and other animals just looking for  a drink of water is highest on the list. Now, one of my favorite creatures lay probably dying as a result of a collision with one of my most hated possessions. Since it was getting dark quickly and the temperature was already falling, I realized Mr. Bumble wouldn’t make it through the night. Even if he somehow managed to keep the water out of his airways, the chill of the early spring night couple with his sodden state would surely bring the insectoid version of the Grim Reaper to claim him.

So, I did what anyone who loves bumblebees would do — scooped him up and carried him into the house directly to the bathroom. Once there, I carefully tapped him with tissue paper to try blotting off as much water as I could. I still wasn’t having much success though. The problem lay in bumblebee anatomy. If you’ve ever looked closely at most bees, you’ll see they are very hairy. This hirsuteness serves a vital purpose to the bees and the flowers they pollinate by acting as carriers for the pollen to stick to. I’ve seen bumbles emerge from some flowers looking like a big yellow cotton ball so laden with pollen were they. Unfortunately for my erstwhile patient, the same hairs were also matted and massed and holding too much water for the paper towels and tissue to soak up. I was afraid he was fading. He was moving very little, mostly just twitching a leg or an antennae every now and again. The prognosis, even to my inexpert eye, was bleak.

Then, I saw the blow dryer. My brain made the leap of logic nearly instantly. What are blow dryers FOR?! Drying hair of course! And what was wrong with my bumblebee? His HAIR was soaked! So, with no further ado, I cut the blow dryer on high heat and low wind and brought it near my patient. Of course, bumblebees possess significantly less mass than a human head, so he tumbled over instantly. I adjusted the beam of warm air but it was still too strong. Finally, I hit upon covering him with my hand and aiming the dryer on high heat / high wind right at the top of my fingers. That seemed to do the trick. The hurricane force (to a bee anyway) of the dryer stream blunted against my hand, but the life saving heat swirled around my fingers and began to have the desire effect.

DUDE! That was some party.

When I felt him begin to stir, I moved my hand and started holding the dryer at a single spot on the towel, thus heating it significantly. He would crawl — slowly at first but with increasing vigor — over to the hot spot. Then I would move the beam away and heat another spot. We played this game for about half and hour, at the end of which he was quite dry it seemed. His hairs were still rather messy, but even my finest, smallest comb could not hope to bring any order to such a miniscule mountain of chaos.

With him now dry, I again picked him up and took him to the front porch where the last bits of daylight were shining. He sat on the railing unmoving and I thought he still might not make it. Then I hit on the idea of putting him on the azaleas that were in gorgeous full bloom right in front of the house. I eased him onto a large pink blossom and he immediately burrowed head first into the stand of stamens.

That’s where I found him — upside down and motionless — the next morning.  A strange sadness washed over me. I felt a sense of irreplaceable loss as this innocent little bee dying brought Mama’s recent death flowing back to me. I was just about ready to collapse into tears and I reached out to stroke the lifeless little legs sticking up forlornly into the air. Just as I touched one though, it quivered a bit. Heartened, I went and got a piece of tissue and pressed it against all six legs. To my everlasting joy, all six latched on to the bit of paper and I was able to lift the “resurrected” bumble from the blossom. I’m not sure what happened to him. Perhaps he was just tired from the ordeal before or maybe he drank too much azalea nectar during the night.

Whatever the case though, I placed him, tissue and all, gently between two blossoms and left him — now upright — alone to go do some cleaning. When I returned a couple of hours later, he was gone but the tissue remained and a fifteen minute search of the surrounding plants revealed no bumblebee corpses so I’m thinking the little guy made it — at least I hope he did. For all I know, he became a meal for one of the mockingbirds living in the boxwood on either side of the porch. I will choose, however, to believe he is alive and well and living out his short life enjoying the flowers and making sweet bee love to some hot little bumble sheila.

At least, I hope so. I’ve had enough of death for a while.

Love y’all and keep your feet clean.

I didn’t have Mama embalmed. We buried her so quickly there was no requirement to do so and the mortician, who has helped me plan now a total of six funerals, said her skin was so thin and ravaged by years of Prednisone that embalming her would be difficult and probably wouldn’t look right. So I didn’t embalm her.

Embalming has historically served two purposes. First, it enabled people killed some distance from home to be preserved long enough to get them back home for a viewing. The other purpose is more important I think. An embalmed person is a dead person. Fear of live burial was a very real horror for humans down the years. Someone might go into a catatonic stupor only to wake up in a coffin under the earth at which point he or she would either die of a burst heart from panic or slowly suffocate.

Embalming does away with that worry because draining all the blood from a body and replacing it with a cocktail of chemicals including formaldehyde is a one hundred percent guarantee the body that goes into the grave has definitively shaken off this mortal coil.

As I said, I didn’t have Mama embalmed. As a result, I’ve woken up in a sweat a time or two over the last three weeks full of cold, boiling panic that Mama wasn’t dead and woke up in her casket after the funeral and started screaming for me to come help her, but I didn’t hear her so I didn’t go to her. I read Poe’s “The Premature Burial” in an attempt to overload the image in my mind sort of like hyperactive children are given the stimulant Ritalin to speed them up where they can slow down.

It didn’t work and that became a nightmare.

So, it’s been three weeks. On the outside, I seem to have everything together. On the inside, most days and most hours of the days, I actually am managing better than I expected to. More often than I want to admit, though, the thought “Mama is dead” will cross my mind and it will sear into my soul like a white-hot rod of iron and even though I rationally realize the pain is only in my mind, it has brought me to my knees clutching my chest more than once. Every time the pain passes, I can’t help but marvel at the fact I am still alive. If the emotions were actually to turn to physical pain, I’m certain the agony would be fatal.

No one can possibly hurt so badly and not die, and at times I have honestly thought dying would be an excellent idea if only to ease this pain wracking me down into the depths of my soul and psyche. By God’s grace, however, I haven’t died yet. I’ve sat with my head in my hands or plopped down on the floor to just sit and stare at nothing. Eventually though, the pain passes and I stand up and feebly attempt to stumble on because even though I want to lie down and give in to the grief until it kills me and I can join Mama, I cannot; I have responsibilities to others that must be seen and Mama would be disappointed in me if I shirked my duty.

I can say this though, I now understand what the samurai poem means when it says, “Death is light as a feather; duty as heavy as a mountain.”

Christmas doesn’t bother people all that much either. After all, thousands of people are born every second. The earth has over seven billion people on it and they were all born. Atheists and agnostics find it humorous that Christians believe a Child could be born of a virgin, but since they like to get gifts as well, Christmas gets a pass. Over time, it’s even become increasingly secularized.

Whereas a birth doesn’t cause much consternation, a death — now that’s a problem, but not an insurmountable one. People die in droves each moment; it’s not that hard to wrap a brain around. So Good Friday brings more good-natured ribbing from unbelievers who can’t fathom anyone willing to die as hideous a death as crucifixion in order to save the world from something as banal as “sin.” It doesn’t bother the scientific types that someone deluded enough to call Himself the Son of God died on a cross twenty centuries ago.

Easter doesn’t let anyone off the hook that easily. Now the unbelievers begin to rage and howl and use what Granny Wham would call “ugly language” if she were still with us. Easter takes that virgin born Child from Christmas who was killed on the Cross around 33 Good Fridays later and puts Him in a borrowed tomb THEN we Christians have the unmitigated gall to claim that three days later, that Good Friday Crucified, Virgin Born Christmas Child actually ROSE FROM THE DEAD.

I cannot and will not repeat the crudities I’ve seen written in comment threads all over the internet if someone made the audacious mistake of claiming Jesus was Resurrected and now lives and will return and reign. A favorite among lower class trolls is to refer to Him as “Zombie Jesus” and accompany the words with all sorts of offal remarks.

I try to stay calm and turn the other keyboard because I know something they won’t admit — Jesus did rise from the dead on that first Easter morning and I’m dead level certain of it because Christianity survived 2000 years for me to become a convert. Lies and mythmaking could possibly have kept a fake Messiah’s message going for a few years, maybe even some decades. Some false religions, as long as they are tolerant, can survive centuries.

But a religion that demands you base the safety of your immortal soul on the absolute fact a dead man rose from the dead? If that’s a lie, that movement is going to die off as soon as all the gullible people in Jerusalem who didn’t take the time to stop by an empty tomb die themselves. If Christianity is false, it is the greatest, most consistent, and most elaborately testified to hoax in history and from what I’ve seen of humanity, it is much easier for me to believe Jesus rose from the dead than to believe a bunch of humans, no matter how intelligent, could ever come up with something remotely resembling Christianity.

My Mama is dead to this world, but because He lives, so does she and because of that reality, I am not in the fetal position sobbing and thrashing about. I am looking forward to seeing her again one day . . . maybe soon.

Maranatha!

Love y’all!

Going to miss her so very much.

I’m sorry if this is some of my worst writing ever in this blog, but I hope y’all will excuse me since I buried Mama today.

She finally succumbed to complications from COPD Monday night, March 25, 2013 at around 10:30 PM. Budge and I were holding her right hand and my cousin Rhonda who was like a daughter to Mama was holding her left hand when she passed from this world into the next. We buried her next to Papa John in a pale, almost translucent pink casket. We didn’t have a viewing and we only had graveside services. That is how Mama wanted it and since I am her only next of kin, only son, power of attorney, and executor of her will, no one was going to have me do anything differently. I didn’t even have her embalmed because her body was in such poor condition. Fletch — Alan Fletcher — the owner of Fletcher’s Funeral Home in Fountain Inn, agreed with me about not having her embalmed. He said she wouldn’t look right and there wasn’t much he could do. I’m glad, because that’s not how I want to remember her.

I managed to preach her funeral myself, which is what she wanted me to do. I really didn’t have any choice because all the other ministers who knew and loved Mama are in such poor health themselves it would have been hard for them to do it. I read the 23rd Psalm and spoke about the Easter story since Easter is Sunday. I talked about how Mama loved Jesus and how she was ready to go to her Heavenly home. I read a letter a friend of hers had emailed me all the way from Las Vegas. Of course, at the funeral, I transplanted Las Vegas from Nevada to California, but Budge and Deuce caught the mistake in time for me to smooth it over. I had the mortician put a copy of the letter in the casket with her.

Rob — my beloved stepdad — is taking Mama’s loss incredibly hard. They were together for almost 20 years, which was three times longer than she was married to my dad. Thankfully, he’s had family and dear, dear friends rally around him the last few days. I know he has a very long road ahead of him. As much as I don’t want to admit this, I’m actually afraid Rob may grieve himself to the grave with Mama. I know he misses her that much.

For me, the grief has been unpredictably breaking across me in waves. I broke down in the hospital right before she died when it was just Budge and I alone with her as she was fading fast. Since then, I’ve had a meltdown per day, except for today. I’ve actually been happy all day, even during the funeral because it was a picture perfect crisp Spring day. I know the happiness isn’t permanent. I have some dark nights to look forward to, I’m sure. I also have a lot of responsibilities to attend to that will give me ample cause to fall to my knees and wail a gut wrenching sob from my heart for nearly an hour as I’ve done twice already. I’m trying to keep in mind this is all normal and I don’t have to be Superman. I’ve just lost Mama — my best friend, my oldest friend, my main cheerleader . . . it’s normal and okay for me to be bereft, but it doesn’t make it prettier or easier.

Reunited Monday, 3-25-13.

I’m also having to contend with guilt as well. Several times I’ve heard a voice inside me I recognize as my old friend The Black Dog whispering, you could have done more! You should have done more! Why didn’t you move in with her? Why didn’t you bring her to live with you? Why were you not with her more? Why were you reading or eating or playing a stupid computer game instead of sitting beside her in her recliner holding her hand? Why didn’t you cook meals for her? Why did you leave her alone? Didn’t you know she was lonely? Didn’t you know she was hungry? On and on and on this voice spits vitriol and accusation at me and it’s been pretty much nonstop for the last 72 hours.

Of course, there’ve been other voices as well and these have been from the outside. People have told me time and again how proud they are of me for following through with Mama’s wishes and for being strong enough to preach her funeral. I’ve had several people tell me of conversations they’ve had with Mama when she told them how proud she was of me and how thankful she was to have a good son. I’ve had nurses tell me this week of the numerous people they’ve seen die all alone even though family was available.

In the end, I have to decide which voice or voices to listen to. I will say this, though, when I have been at the heartwrenching depths of despair, when I have been sobbing uncontrollably, even in the dark hours at Mama’s deathbed, I’ve found one deep, deep well of strength and comfort — God’s written word. The only thing that has been able to pull me out of the waves of grief that have wracked me with sobs and crushed my soul with emotional pain too great to bear has been reading from the Bible. I’ve read out loud and silently to myself and every time, I’ve found balm in Gilead. For that I am thankful.

I am also thankful for 42 years with the most wonderful mother a boy could want. I am going to miss her tremendously and I’m not even going to try fighting that battle, but I cannot let losing her destroy me and break me in the way losing Papa John broke Mama. I must carry on and if it means I have to limp because I’ve lost one of the major muscles I’ve stood on for all these years, then that is what I have to do. Mama is gone from me, but she is never going to be forgotten.

I love y’all. Sincerely, Me.

Friends don’t let friends wipe with dollar store toilet paper.

I went down to check on Mama recently. She’s been suffering for a good while now with C.O.P.D. and if God is not merciful to her, it will eventually take her from me. I try to keep watch over her and I’m thankful for the hospice organization and my wonderful step-dad for helping me. Now before you go getting bummed out, this post is only tangentially connected to Mama’s health.

Anyway, while I was at Mama’s the salad from the night before and the large bowl of Raisin Bran from earlier in the morning both decided to end their tour of my colon. I told Mama I had to go see a man about a dog then grabbed my phone to have something to pass the time because I figured this might take a bit. The phone was my undoing because I was so focused on pulling up Angry Birds I forgot to check the toilet paper. Big mistake. Now you’re probably thinking the roll was empty, leaving me stranded. Actually, that would have been a better scenario than the one confronting me as I finished my lengthy constitutional because had the roll been empty I could have called Mama from the bathroom and asked her to bring me some paper towels using her scooter chair. No, the holder was full. Unfortunately, it was full of the worst substance known to man.

Dollar store toilet paper!

Now long time readers know I am a restroom connoisseur. Were I to become wealthy enough to build my dream home, I already have the bathroom completely planned out. Budge can design everything else. My exquisite taste in all things water closet related extends to toilet paper as well. At home, having a septic tank keeps me anchored to the pedestrian but adequate Scott Tissue, but I do have a couple of rolls of White Cloud Ultra Soft stashed away for those “occasions” when my stomach has risen up in rebellion and constant use of the facilities begs for something more tender than Scott 500 grit special. When the economy and civilization collapse, it won’t be lack of food, water, or power that does me in; it will be the dearth of bathroom facilities and the end of manufactured toilet paper.

Wonderful but frivolous luxury.

Sadly, the fake dollar store toilet paper ended up in Mama’s bathroom because her illness necessitated turning the shopping over to my step-dad. Now I won’t lie. Money is very tight at our two households. Budge and I have been helping Mama pay her bills for over a year now. Rob, my step-dad, knows this so he’s always trying to cut corners and save wherever he can, which is perfectly reasonable since we are more or less broke. However, as bad as it may be, we are NOT dollar-store-toilet-paper-level broke yet. We can’t necessarily afford luxury like Charmin or Quilted Northern, but we can certainly afford some Scott Tissue. Granted, Scotts isn’t the softest on one’s bottom but at least it is absorbent enough to do the job while being strong enough to not have to wrap a hand in half a roll just to keep the wiping fingers from bursting through mid-stroke.

I don’t know what dollar store toilet paper is made of. Based on its absorbancy, I would guess wax paper, but wax paper is many orders of magnitude stronger than dollar store TP, and that’s where this stuff really starts to wreak. Apparently, dollar store TP is woven from unicorn farts, angel burps, or something else comparably rare and insubstantial. As a general rule, I shouldn’t be able to read a newspaper through a ply of decent TP, but laying a sheet of dollar store rubbish on the funny pages doesn’t even dull the colors much. At the risk of sounding a bit gross, if this stuff is all you’ve got, you’re better off just bare-handing it and cutting out the middle man, so to speak. Dollar store TP is really that bad.

The bare-a$$ed minimum acceptable TP. (see what I did there?)

To make matters worse, this  “paper,” which is so useless in its intended hygienic function because of its lack of strength and absorbancy in the hand turns into some sort of uber-wadded concrete blob once you drop it in the toilet. It might not take poop off a goose, but two or three handfuls of this stuff will clog up a toilet tighter than the Chihuahua that ate a whole cheese and peanut butter sandwich. Plunging only makes the stuff multiply like some sort of soggy, stinky Hydra. Dollar store TP truly is a mystery substance.

In any event I managed to finish up and get myself reasonably ready to reenter the world so I went in to Mama and begged her to have Rob stop buying dollar store TP. She reiterated what I already knew — he was just trying to save us money. My reply was simple and heartfelt. Buy REAL toilet paper and I’ll give up cable and internet or cut us down to one car to make up the difference. It’s like I told Mama and I’m saying it again to y’all, I’m a simple man. I don’t have many needs. All I ask for to make me happy is decent A/C in the summertime to keep my fat butt cool and some good quality TP to keep the same fat butt clean. Is that too much to ask? When the day comes we can’t afford at LEAST some Scott Tissue, it’ll be time for me to start paying close attention to Breaking Bad reruns.

Love y’all! Keep those feet clean . . . and all the other parts as well!

The Holy Grail of TP! It has THREE PLYS and Shea Butter!!!!

Ma Finch looking over a likely nesting spot.

When I went out to get the mail after lunch today, a blur of wings and cheep-cheeped expletives announced what has become the surest sign of spring — Ma and Pa, a pair of beautiful finches, were poking around in the channel beneath our front porch awning for the perfect nesting site. These two may or may not be the exact same pair of birds who have built nests beneath our awnings for the last five years, but I’m relatively certain if they are not the identical two, then they are the offspring of those who have come before.

I’ve consulted Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America and our interlopers are either a pair of house finches or a duo of purple finches. I honestly cannot tell the color plates in the book apart, but then I make no claims to being an expert birder. I do love watching them though.

Each year our avian visitors typically raise three to five obstreperous and demanding youngsters, some of whom I’m pretty sure have returned the next year to build their own nests. Once these little scraps of skin and feathers hatch, entering and leaving through our front door becomes somewhat hazardous. Ma and Pa are always either on the nest or very nearby and they inevitably interpret our need to walk down our front steps as being hazardous to their young. It seems they don’t associate the nesting material we put out for their use and the bird seed we keep supplied with US. I suppose in their minds these helpful items just “appear.”

After about ten days, the little ones are fully fledged. Then the sad waiting game begins. At some point, Ma and Pa leave the nest for the comfort of a nearby oak signaling the gravy train and room service have come to an end. Compelled by empty bellies, one by one the little fuzzballs hop up on the edge of the nest and launch themselves skyward. So far — knock wood — we’ve had a 100% success rate with flying.

This year’s Ma again. She seems to be checking out the view.

Two springs ago, however, we did have our first holdout. He (HAD to be a male I’m sure) was the runt of the nest of five and when Ma and Pa pulled back and the other nestlings left, he decided the newly roomy nest was to his liking and he showed no signs of leaving. For two whole days, he remained in what he’d adopted as his bachelor pad. I figured he would have gotten hungry, but one evening during the holdout, I caught Ma bringing a care package to him. Pa wouldn’t have approved, I’m sure. After two days, however, he must have gotten lonely watching his four siblings swooping through the air nearby. I was lucky enough to be sitting where I had a view as he finally decided to climb to the lip of the only home he’d ever known and launch himself into the blue. It wasn’t the most graceful first flight, but it was enough.

Three years ago, we had an awning built over the back deck as well and no sooner had its paint dried than another set of the same species moved in. This location, however, has more in the way of hazards than the front porch; so much so that Budge wants me to put up a rubber snake or something to discourage potential nesters. See, out front, if a little one doesn’t make a successful first flight, we’ve got several azaleas and boxwoods very close by he can climb up in and try once more. Out back though, if he doesn’t get it right the first time, one of two things is going to happen. First, he could land in the pool. For the record, finches swim about as well as I do. If they miss the pool, though and land in the back yard, they have to contend with Keaudie and Jack and while Jack at 14 isn’t nearly as fast as he once was, he can still outrun a fledgeling. Luckily though, we haven’t had any casualties yet.

This is Pa from last year. He’s a little blurry because I never could catch him perfectly still.

Even as I type this, Ma and Pa are twitching back and forth from one end of the awning to the other. Hopefully, they will take the hint we left them in the form of last year’s nest which sits at the OTHER end of the porch and build down there. I’m sure it will be less stressful for them and I won’t have to worry about losing an eye when Ma goes frailing into the night to protect hearth and home as I try to enter the front door!

Hope the weather is treating you great wherever you are and make sure to keep those feet clean!

Love y’all!

Silence is deafening, isn’t it?

I can tolerate all manner of offensive behavior without much protest, but three things will consistently anger me beyond my ability to remain silent. They are, in no certain order, lying, abuse of animals, old people, or children, and bald-faced hypocrisy. From what I keep reading in the news day after day, I firmly believe many politicians and American citizens are out-and-out hypocrites on the subject of illegal immigration.

The English Pilgrims and Jamestown colonists got off the boat in modern-day Massachusetts and Virginia, respectively, and they would have died to a man if not for the grace of God and the kindness of the native Indians of their regions. How they repaid God’s grace is a matter of debate, but how they thanked the Indians is a matter of historical record. Smallpox infected blankets, lies upon lies, and blatant disregard for Indian culture and natural rights. Down south, the Spaniards were much more direct. A conquistador would simply ask “Do you have gold? Good, we will take it all. Thank you. Now, you are our slaves, carry your, I mean, my gold to the ship.” Then, a wonderfully pious priest would ask, “Do you believe in God? Who is that? He isn’t the real god. Convert and we’ll let you live or cling to your stupid backward ways and we’ll torture you until you convert then kill you so you can go straight to Heaven.”

That was just the 16th Century.

Deemed savages because they didn’t understand or practice ownership of land and didn’t worship the Christian’s God, by that name anyway, they were worthy of extermination. The cry of the public was “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” By the 21st Century, Indians controlled less than 1% of the continent they once stewarded and tended. Well, folk, karma is a bitch. If the Hindu reference bothers you, then how about a Christian reference from the Apostle Paul in Galatians, “Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap.” That’s where the hypocrisy begins.

We took this land by force in the fervent belief that it was our Destiny and now some of us are pissed off people from all over the world, but mostly from Mexico, want a piece of the pie. We stole the whole cupboard and pantry and we grudge others the crumbs. Our ancestors set out in rickety ships to “find a better life” and they brave burning deserts with no water to do what? “Find a better life.” What made our ancestors so right and the new “illegals” so wrong?

People want to say, “Well, if they want to come here they should go about it ‘the right way.”" Why? Why exactly should they follow any of our laws and customs? We didn’t follow any native laws or customs to take what we wanted from them? Why do we howl so loudly now that what went around has come around? People want to say, “but that was different.” How was it different, exactly? Because they were brown instead of white? Because they weren’t “cultured?” That doesn’t fly.

It’s “different” because THEY AREN’T US.

The big argument people love to use is “They’re taking all our jobs!” Really? Just exactly what jobs are these people stealing? When is the last time you saw an illegal looking Latino individual (whatever that means) working a job you would want to have? Let’s see, landscaping? I’m sure hundreds of good strong Americans are just lined up to fill all the landscaping jobs once we deport the illegal Hispanics. I mean, who among us doesn’t want to spread truckloads of mulch, cut grass, and dig irrigation trenches in 100 degree heat?

The fact is, the only jobs the vast majority of so-called illegals are filling are the jobs business owners can’t fill with anyone else. I have an acquaintance who owns his own full service car wash. It’s not pleasant work. Wiping off cars on a slab of concrete in blazing heat and freezing cold with dampness all around is my picture of misery. He’s in his 33rd year of business. According to him, the first twenty years he filled his lines with college students home for the summer or high school dropouts learning a hard lesson.  The last ten years, though, he can’t get the college students or the dropouts. The work is “too hard.”

So, he fills all his positions with Hispanics and adores them. Both men and women are always neat, clean, prompt, and hard-working. He doesn’t have to do nearly as much supervision as he once did because all his workers are a community. They live together, eat together, and go to and from work together. They police themselves, and as he puts it, “They push a lot of cars through and make me a lot of money.”

Speaking of them being “together,” I have listened to so many good Christian people make fun of some Hispanics because they pack three and four families into a single wide trailer or a ridiculous number of them ride in a single car. Okay, riddle me this then all you stand up comedians, what kind of life and living conditions are these people LEAVING where being packed up like sardines, surviving off whatever they can get in cash, and generally being looked down upon by the people they serve is BETTER? If how they have to live here is BETTER, what in the name of all that’s holy are they getting away from?

The bottom line is this country was founded on the idea you could come here with nothing, work your fingers to the bone for a long time, and eventually “have something”. It’s called The American Dream. Why are we, a country of rebels and entrepreneurs, so incensed at a newer, hungrier wave of people coming in to grab a share of the pie? At least, we can be relatively certain they don’t plan to exterminate us as we did those who were here before us.

Something to think about. Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

Waiting for a big hunk of rock or iron from outer space wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have abundant evidence all over the world of our celestial lifeboat’s storied and tragic history with big hunks of rock and iron from outer space. Even casual scientific readers and fans of Disney’s Dinosaur are familiar with the Chicxulub Crater most astro-geologists believe is the remains of the Earth w/ asteroid collision that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and even that little slice of joy pie pales next to the supposed impact that produced “The Great Dying” or what scientific types call the Permian-Triassic Extinction. That impact, if it actually WAS an impact (some scientists disagree), over 250 million years ago, wiped out 95-98% of ALL LIFE ON EARTH. Gives a whole new meaning to “being the 1%” doesn’t it?

Trees near the Tunguska Event epicenter 20 years after the blast occurred.

If all that doesn’t bother you much, consider this — yesterday’s explosion over Russia isn’t even the biggest explosion the largest country in the world has ever seen. Within living memory (albeit a very small, very select, and quickly shrinking number of memories) SOMETHING blew up in the sky over the Siberian forest near the Stony Tunguska River and flattened half a million acres of the aforementioned forest. The most likely culprit is a meteor “only” 100 feet in diameter FIVE MILES over the Earth. We’re talking a boom bigger than a Hiroshima / Nagasaki type explosion almost four decades before the birth of the Atomic Age. Luckily the blast occurred way out in the middle of B.F.E. A similar event over any modern city today would flatten the place and, keep in mind, that’s just a baby meteor.

Apophis the night it was discovered in 2004. The asteroid is indicated by a faint circle drawn around it.

Thanks to NASA’s efforts to catalog near-Earth objects, we know some big hunks of burning rocky love are wandering around the neighborhood close enough to Earth orbit to eventually wander into our path and impact us. Some of those are big enough to reset the biological clock on this  Pale Blue Dot back to ten minutes ’til bacteria. I live in fear of something out of a movie like Asteroid, Deep Impact or Armageddon. As recently as March of 2009, a Tunguska sized asteroid passed within 44,000 miles of Earth. That’s WAY closer than the Moon. Then we wait and see what happens in 2029 when a rock named Apophis for the ancient Egyptian god of destruction will, theoretically, pass between the earth and SOME SATELLITES. For all the laypeople like me in the audience, that translates in to “holy crap that was close!” Just to put some extra stress spice on the worry cake, if Apophis passes within a tiny (in space terms) area known as a gravitational keyhole when it swings by in 2029, its trajectory will change just enough so that its NEXT visit in 2036 will smack Earth head on. BTW, for anyone wondering, Apophis is what astronomers refer to as a “planet killer.”

I know a lot of people think I’m nuttier than Aunt Alice’s Black Walnut and Rum cake for worrying about getting hit by an asteroid. After all, as smart as the governments of the world are, they could protect us, right?! Right?!! Most governments are like ours and can’t agree on Coke or Pepsi for a lunch break drink, much less possessing a level of organization on a planetary scale to halt the end of the world as we know it (cue Michael Stipes). Well, just in case your faith in them is about like mine, check out this video of what COULD happen if we encounter something like Apophis and remember it’s ALREADY happened before . . . twice . . . at least. If that doesn’t keep you up tonight just consider scientists estimate we would need at least ten to fifteen years of lead time  to have any chance of altering the orbit of an asteroid with Earth’s name on it and that’s IF we see it coming. Astronomers warn of asteroids whose orbits bring them “out of the Sun” towards us will be impossible to detect until it’s entirely too late to do anything but put our heads between our legs and kiss our butts goodbye. That is unless THESE guys can help us:

Guys? Y’all got this, right? Bruce? Guys?

And on that cheery note I will close with saying, Love y’all and keep those feet clean because if we’re going to be vaporized by an asteroid collision, we’ll need clean feet and fresh underwear.