Neanderpundit

Was the constant bleat of my former neighbor Roger, a drunken layabout who often bitched all day about the tall grass and then sent his wife out after she got off work to mow it.

I often thought to myself, Really, Roger? Suppose you would get out of that bottle for your kids? Put down the smokes? Toss out the one hitter? get a job? Stop making your wife support your useless ass? Buy some clothes for your kids instead of making them garbagepick at goodwill?

No, what Roger actually meant was “I’ll do anythiing for my kids if it’s not too inconvenient, looks heroic, and doesn’t involve too much exertion”.

Many of the people I know, they get this. Unfortunately a powerful lot of people do not.
“I love my country. I would do anything to keep the freedoms my forefathers fought for”

Really? What are you doing today? Are you whining about how someone else is doing it wrong? Bitching about the choices we have, or the lack therof? or are you finding ways however small to fix it?

Trust me, you don’t want a bloody revolution. As often as not, the wrong people end up on top, in those. And frankly, most people are ready, willing, and able to capitulate the moment their cable quits. If you’re not capable of dealing with the drudgery of the tedious and arduous war of attrition and subversion, and the soul sucking futiliy that it brings on a day to day basis, if the shit hits the fan you aren’t going to be much use either. Love your country? Love your freedom? Will you do anything? How about if it’s not easy, convenient, heroic, or fun?

an old Polish Priest- Father Stan- when I grew up, in the seminary I attended. He spoke english but haltingly, and spent a lot of time trying to get migrant workers fed and clothed and housed, at least temporarily. He was a big beefy Santaclaus of a man, white beard and broad shoulders and a gut predominantly constructed, I suspect, of vodka. He would get a couple dollars here and there from local patrons, rent a U haul and drive it to the big army surplus place in Indianapolis. There, armed with the spirit of a turkish carpet merchant, he haggled for bulk pricing on overcoats, pants, longjohns, etc, and would come home with literal piles of clothes. While he lived, I don’t think anyone ever went through a winter cold, in our area. He would sell the clothes to people that had a little money, or trade them for a few hours work. So our town was full of polacks and wetbacks and other displaced people wearing a strange mix of GI OD pants and shiny boots and Finnish Arctic parkas and russian wool trenchcoats. They worked anywhere they could get work, and they were warm.

God bless him, anyway. Still, he washed all those clothes before he distributed them, in the school’s big laundry, and lord, was it ever a mess. he wasn’t concerned so much about the look of the clothes as the cleanliness, so he just tossed all the shit in the washer together, with predictable results.

It was a school tradition- well, we were trying to make it a school tradition- to put a pair of really ugly boxer shorts on the bronze statue of the school’s founder, and we had done it often enough that we were getting good at it. Tired of having to crawl up onto the plinth to take them down, Fr Moskal finally rigged up a sensor to the statue, whenever you touched it an alarm would go off in the Priest’s quarters and a spotlight would go on.

We did not yet expect this.

When we got to the statue, a pair of purple polkadotted boxers at the ready, armed with needle and thread and tape (You had to sew the boxers on, you couldn’t exactly get the statue to lift one leg at a time) we managed to get all the way up onto the plinth before setting off the alarm and turning on the spotlights.

The faculty had been training for this for some time, thiough I don’t think they expected the extremely early hour (we were doing this before matins, and I suspect they were prepared for a more late night encounter) So all fourteen of them showed up on the front steps of the school, in full view of the floodlights. Father Stan had on his red drop-flap union suit, Fr Ernest his boxers, Brother Tom in his Y fronts, the rest in a combination of differing underwear/sleepwear.

We were used to seeing them all in blacks and dogcollars, so the sight of them in underwear was shocking enough, let alone underwear that had been stained the colors of the rainbow (assuming the rainbow was all Olive Drab and Grey) which was wrenching. The OD mottling and general grey of the assemblage, ranging from athletic brother Tom to the rotund Father Ed, was enough to give a pubescent kid nightmares and made me swear off gay sex right then and there, there was and has been since nothing I consider less attractive and erotic.

Fr Ernest had his shotgun- he half expected kids from another school doing this, and when he discovered it wasn’t, he was very annoyed. He marched us back up the school steps- quite literally at gunpoint- and phoned and got all our parents out of bed, which was a fate worse than death in those days. I know I got tuned up at school AND at home that day, and it was a tuneup I won’t forget easily, though still mild compared to the sight of all those Men of the Cloth in their BVD’s

blissfully free of lawn maintenance, I am gonna have to mow or be dealing with a bigass mess.

I suppose at least the garden will be green, the tomatoes look nice and there are plenty of bean blossoms.

I would plant the whole backyard in sweet corn, even the slope, but I know the damned raccoons would be in there eating like crazy. Not many people have ever experienced real, fresh sweet corn an hour after it’s picked, it loses a huge amount of it’s flavor and sweetness, and once you’ve had it this way you get spoiled for the crap at Jewel. If I could leave the daughter out there with a 22, I think I’d be OK, but otherwise I’d lose the whole crop. So tomatoes and beans it is, for the forseeable future.