Neanderpundit

Back when I took my machinist apprenticeship, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the lunch-bucket was King. Everybody had a classic old Stanley lunch box sometimes with the coffee and sometimes without. But everybody’s lunch was about the same if you were a married guy. Generally have consisted of 3 sandwiches, one for morning break and two for lunch, a bag of chips of some sort, and a Twinkie or a ho ho. Twinkies were summer because they wouldn’t melt, ho-hos were winter. Sometimes you would get a hard-boiled egg for an afternoon snack, sometimes a Snickers bar or similar. Most of the guys liked this arrangement just fine and were very used to it.

It was always fun to watch a young guy transition into this pattern. Most unmarried guys would make their own food or buy food off the Roach Coach.

One such fresh hire got married on a Saturday and on Monday he came to work with a paper bag. At lunch time he unrolled the top of a paper bag expecting to see a Feast spread before him.

His young wife had piled up some Fritos on a paper plate, a hot dog with no bun, put another paper plate upside down on top and stapled it together around the edge.

Of course the entire lunch room roared. He went back to eating off the road to coach the next day, and it’s so until one of the other wives took her side and explain how to make and iron workers lunch.

40 years ago man and boy. Where the hell did that time go?

When I was in my teens I was taught predomintly by Salesians. Many of my teachers had been in some fairly severe and austere posts before they came to the little school in Cedar Lake.

One, in particular, had worked at leper colonies in Hawaii and in Loisiana. The idea of isolating lepers in colonies would seem ludicrous to us today, and indeed there are many people walking around with leprosy now, not quarantined.

it is not easy to transmit leprosy, that is true. It was quite a social stigma, and at the time, it was frightening to many people simply because there was no treatment. So quarantine and isolation were the only things considered to be useful for containing it. As is still the case for:
Cholera
Diphtheria
Infectious tuberculosis
Plague
Smallpox
Yellow fever
Viral hemorrhagic fevers
Severe acute respiratory syndromes
Flu that can cause a pandemic.

Note that this means quarantine and isolation of the people known to have the disease and people known to have carried it.

Not the general public.

I am not happy about being told I need to isolate myself because by any account I am neither contaminated nor communicable. I am FINE with social distancing, I always HAVE been.

I am less happy with people who would trade their freedom for imagined protection from an overhyped, imagined threat. Piss up a rope, you monkeys. I’d always rather take my chances with freedom.

One of them is the nature of my digestive system. It obviously has been a while but there have been many crapblogging opportunities. Here’s a memory I hope you enjoy.

Out on a job, I visit some friends locally who invite me to dinner rather than meet me at a restaurant. I’m always up for a home cooked meal and they are very gracious hosts.

Later that same night I wake up to some intestinal pressure which I hope is gas. I switch to the shit fart detector circuitry to red alert and crack off an exploratory fart. It seems as everything is in the proper third state of matter so I carefully loosen the sphincter and I’m rewarded with a resonant note that Trails off into a deep staccato. I relax because I am please not to have soiled another hotel bed. And then the aroma wafts up from beneath the duvet.

You wouldn’t think that pork chops and collard greens could turn into something that smelled that bad, but it definitely can.

And here I am in a hotel room in Poughkeepsie, breathing my last poison breath, and I never even got to say goodbye to my toaster.