Don’t even have a camera? Oh, paper bag in the middle of the road!

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o’ cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an’ all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t’ corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our ‘ole in the ground; we ‘ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
ALL:
They won’t!

I’m sure you can get a working digital or analogue camera through a pawnshop or other second hand outlet. You really sound like you enjoy the hair-shirtiness of it all, though, so I won’t get in your way.

We don’t enjoy Twisty because of her Purity (that’s your schtick) but for her brilliant writing and her ability to shed light so wryly on a variety of topics - and the fact that she’s damn funny. So, off you go, have that aspirin and lie down,love.

We considered them a symbol of George Wallace etc. whose ideas were quite prevalent in MD in the day… (the Dem who ran for governor against Spiro Agnew in 1964 had as his slogan “A Man’s Home Is His Castle.” The implications, Twisty, I’ll let you run with that. It is really spooky to think it made Spiro seem like a truly great guy)

Anyhoo, one drug-addled night we decided to take anger, and since these things were mostly made out of plaster, we drove around and took turns smashing them to powder with a sledge hammer. Adolescent boys really like to smash things as you know, and this seemed like a very smart way to assuage that.

So finally it was my turn. I jumped out of the car and sized up a particularly large jockey (in “Security MD” right down the road from Fiddlersburg, these are no longer on the map btw) and gave it a really good whacking smack on the head.

The funny thing, this one was cast iron like the one you show, and the paint was still fresh so it wasn’t obvious to me in the dart. The result, if you’ve ever seen one of those Warner Brothers cartoons where a toon beats something immovable with a big mallet and the vibrations go thru his body wa wa wa wa…. that’s just what it’s like! Man did that hurt

You bring back so many tender memories, Twisty, great blog as always!

But I’m not about to go off yelling about how liberals are elitists because Twisty wants a horse and can afford to take a drive into the hill country, ya know?

It appears that you don’t have whatever gene it is that gives us our basic human ability to deny, deny, deny. And it is denial that lets us get along with each other and ignore the enormous piles of bullshit that hold up our society as we currently know it.

1. Not only do I not eat meat and am totally unable to afford haute cuisine - I don’t even have a fucking camera to take pictures.

2. I also can’t afford to take drives through the countryside because I can hardly afford gas to get to school and work. I have to decide if it’s worth five bucks in gas to go visit certain friends. Yes, this is a result of personal decisions I’ve made, but shit it’s annoying having someone talk about the suffering they endure agonizing over their fossil fuel consumption when I’m actually actively trying to get rid of my car and start catching the bus and having to make big sacrifices.

3. I always feel like maybe I’m not cool enough to post comments on this blog or something. Like, “oh shit, what if I use ablist language!!!” Good fucking god. This is ridiculous. Apparently y’all are accepting of everyone as long as act exactly as you want them to.

4. The only difference between the gentleman farmer and the “dissident” is that the happy go lucky one isn’t feeling superior to some other woman and calling her racist to all her like-minded friends on the internet.

5. I now understand why my roommate always says that liberals are the new conservatives.

6. All of your posts not specifically related to women’s issues seem to be all about proving that you can be just as honky as as any dude.

[b]7. This whole post is just you saying that even though you’re just like some honky, you’re better than the other honkies because you you’re aware of how honky you are. That just makes you the biggest honky of all.[/b]

8. I’m ashamed of myself for implying in a comment on another thread that the Pentecostal guys I knew were some kind of ignorant fools when they always treated me with respect.

So now I’ve decided to go back to shooting the shit with some real people in real life who aren’t so fucking honky that the have to spend all their mental energy trying to affirm to themselves that they’re not and stop acting like I need to discuss things with some special group of special people on the internet. Now I’m just going to keep having fun conservations with the born-again Christian guy and just let him know that I think the Chick lit tracks are offensive but I still enjoy his company - he already knows that I don’t think I’m going to hell. At least I know that he’s not too REVULSED by my inferior belief system to associate with me. He still treats me like a person.

There’s nothing radical about this. It’s the same old bullshit yet again.

Then again, had I been successful, my intent might have been misinterpreted by any passersby. Also, it appeared that someone was at home, and folks here in Richmond, Virginia (particularly those inclined to possess “lawn jockey” statuettes) just love their guns, so perhaps it’s just as well.

In somewhat related news, I just heard a rumor (which I’m still trying to confirm) that CNN’s Hispanic-Hater-In-Chief Lou Dobbs will be visiting our fair city somewhat soon. In the event I can persuade myself to actually leave my house for the occasion, I may attend protest with signage to the effect of “Zero Tolerance For Ethnic Cleansing.” (Because even though I hated that phrase when I first heard it, as it seemed like a way to nice-fy genocide, now it seems like a potentially useful way of conceptualizing the current anti-immigrant fervor.)

(*goes back to hiding from the entire world, save for the aforementioned dog and a few hominids in my immediate vicinity*)

P.S. Twisty: I had been using your blogging hiatus as a vicarious justification for my own. Now what the hell am I supposed to do?