Tag: Humor

In Defense of Compartmentalization

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV,  your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk. 

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens. 

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives. 

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons. 

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk. 

Hallelujah: The First Frost

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

In the South, most people say “cut grass” instead of “mow grass.” Cut sounds a bit more aggressive and more accurately reflects our feeling toward vegetative maintenance after a long growing season. By the time our first frost date arrives, it seems like we’ve been cutting grass for a short eternity. I usually look forward to cutting grass in the spring, but by fall, it’s drudgery and my spring eagerness has turned into a general aversion toward chlorophyll.

Growing up, one of my first “jobs” was cutting yards with a push mower. I think this was supposed to instill in me a good work ethic, but mostly it started a pattern of poor life choices in regards to my means of generating income. Just to get my push mower to my main client, Mrs. Ernestine, meant I had to push it half a mile, uphill, past several houses with formidable canines. Most of these dogs were not well educated in laws regarding property lines or speed limits on public thoroughfares. I suppose it is rare for a push mower to break the speed limit, but you have to remember that the speed limit on small town streets was only fifteen miles per hour in those days, and I was a lot younger.

These days, even with a zero-turn riding mower, cutting grass is not merely as simple as jumping on the lawnmower, cranking up, and riding around in circles for a few hours. I’ve got to move all the stuff scattered around the yard—dead branches, Thomas’s bike and assortment of Fisher Price yard ornaments, and the cage traps I have deployed across the yard to try to thin out our local skunk herd. Then I have to walk to the barn to get my portable air compressor to pump up the front tire on the lawnmower. Then I have to fill up the lawnmower with gas. Likely, the gas can will contain ten drops, so I’ll have to journey to the gas station.

Some folks may wonder why I don’t just forgo grass in favor of a permaculture landscape. Rest assured, there is nothing more permanently cultured in my yard than wiregrass. You can’t kill it. If an asteroid plunged to earth and struck my house, in a matter of months the crater would be carpeted with wiregrass. It is an unstoppable force. Likely, that is why the dinosaurs went extinct—all the other vegetation withered away, and the dinosaurs just got tired of grazing wiregrass. Or, possibly wiregrass ate the dinosaurs.

The only thing that seems to phase wiregrass is frost. Hallelujah, we got our first frost last night.

a flat front tire and four empty gas cans–seems like a metaphor for my attitude toward grass.

 

Thoughts While Counting Ceiling Tiles

~ sanebishop ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I counted ceiling tiles. That’s when it dawned on me that perhaps the greatest discovery of all time was when a primitive biped, beset with an infinite number of stars to count in an expansive night sky, sought shelter in a cave and found counting stalactites by a dimming fire to be more conducive to falling asleep than counting stars. That is not to belittle the primitive biped; back then numbers didn’t go as high, hardly past twenty-three, so counting to infinity was a tough ask. Counting stalactites was more attainable, and thus mankind advanced to the caveman era. 

After cave dwelling for a few eons, mankind progressed to the agricultural era. It was brought about primarily by the tanned-hide ceilings of tents. With nothing better to stare at than a tanned hide, early tent dwellers realized they could count sheep in their heads in lieu of counting stalactites or stars. Thus, humans started keeping sheep in fields where they lay, staring up at the ceiling of tents while enumerating their herds. 

Eventually, humans wised up and realized they could stop counting and following sheep around and instead built more permanent domiciles with walls made out of sticks and stones and baked mud and ceilings made out of asbestos, both in smooth or popcorn form (I suspect popcorn ceilings arose from a subconscious desire to return to simplicity, specifically the rough ceilings of the stalactite era, when you needn’t need a thirty-year mortgage with a 6% interest rate to live in a cave). 

Since then, ceilings have come and gone. At one point, high ceilings were popular, especially in old farmhouses that depended on airflow through windows as the primary cooling strategy. Then came the era of the ranch house, with low ceilings. Now vaulted ceilings with exposed beams are quite popular, especially old rustic beams with knots, a few termite trails, and wood borer holes–I think this aesthetic has something to do with the post-modern desire to sleep aboard a pirate ship. Maybe soon, we will have barnacled ceilings, with faux barnacles to count. 

Sometimes it is good to remember that, beyond aesthetic considerations, the primary purpose of a ceiling is practical–for counting things when you can’t sleep. Some people still count sheep while trying to fall asleep as a vestige of the agricultural era (and some people actually still keep sheep, which is considered a more serious mental illness), but counting things at night is innately, if not exclusively, human. It is nothing to be ashamed about. It may be the only thing that separates humans from other lifeforms. Well, that–and the ability to laugh.

photo of night sky

The Ebb and Flow of Honeybee Governance

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

Nobody has ever accused me of being an expert in economics or modes of government, or really anything for that matter, but the best I can tell is that, with communism, everybody is miserable, but with capitalism at least 1% are filthy rich (and presumably happy)–and that gives the rest of us 99% hope that we could be the 1%. And hope is a wonderful thing. It could be a little misplaced in scratch off tickets or the dream of becoming filthy rich by beekeeping, but I’m a firm believer that hope is better than no hope. 

Sometimes I wonder if honeybees hope. They do odd things from time to time, like sail over the horizon in October (strangely I caught a swarm a few weeks ago), that make it appear as if they are sometimes influenced by some sort of delusional hope, much like the pilgrims sailing over the horizon in hopes of a new society. What discontent must have been brewing in that hive for those bees to swarm in October, to take their chances on the hope that new environs would be more conducive for their happiness. It is not their genetic instinct to swarm in October. Maybe a rabble rousing and inspiring bee instilled hope in her sisters. Maybe they decided to pack up and go on a voyage to flee an oppressive and tyrannical system of governance. 

People have often been curious about the governing structure of honeybees. Aristotle thought bees were a monarchy ruled by a king bee (Matt Phillpot at Honey Histories has some good posts on the king bee theory). Then other folks came along and said I’m pretty sure that the king bee just laid an egg, at which point, people believed that bees were a monarchy ruled by a queen (and that Aristotle should have stuck to metaphysics). Then Charles Darwin came along and pointed out that the queen is really just a figurehead used for breeding purposes, that the monarchy is just performative, kind of like the current British monarchy (though both get perks like a lot of royal jam and jelly). Darwin basically posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy, bees were communists at heart, made up of individuals who work for the good of the group, not for personal gain. Then Cornell Professor Tom Seeley came along a few years ago and posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy and underneath the sub-facade of communism, bees are actually red-bloodied, freedom loving bugs who prefer democratic self-governance. You’re darn tootin’.

But who the heck really knows. My theory is that bees’ form of government ebbs and flows over time. Maybe at the time when Aristotle was writing about king bees, the bees really were governed by a series of kings, many of which were named Henry, who turned out to be pretty murderous fellas, so they decided to let a couple of queens have a go at governing, only to find them slightly less murderous, so they tried a new system of government led by bolshevik bees, only to find that job opportunities were pretty limited in scope: you were either an abdomen-licking attendant bee to the Supreme Leader, a peasant worker bee, or a drone who got murdered in the winter. Then the bees experimented with democracy for about 250 years, only to find its great strength–hope–was also its ultimate downfall. A huckster drone, peddling authoritarianism disguised as hope, coalesced a large following of bees, disillusioned by the price of eggs, to vote for him again, at which point he started doing a lot of fun authoritarian things, like rounding up non-native bees, deploying national guard bees on the citizenry, and accepting lots of untraceable foreign honey for meme crypto tokens.

Of course, this pretty much brings us to the present day, so time will only tell what happens next–but here’s hoping the bees can get their act together, before they go back to square one and replace hope and freedom with a system of oppressive and tyrannical king bees.

Is it a king, queen, president, or orange authoritarian? Time will only tell.

Gossip and Gravy Biscuits

~ sanebishop ~ Leave a comment

There is a saying in the country, “Put on clean underwear in case you’re in a car wreck.” The idea behind this saying is that it might be embarrassing if first responders caught you wearing dirty drawers. 

I suppose the other idea implicit in this saying is that first responders are, well, are prone to gossip and might spread that tidbit of information throughout the countryside, which may be why Congress passed the HIPAA privacy law. First responders are now legally bound not to divulge information about your dirty underpants, unless you consent for them to do so–so be careful what forms you sign. 

Some first responders circumvent this law by also being farmers. It is a gray area to be sure, but it has generally been understood in this country that farmers are allowed to gossip with impunity, especially if the gossip takes place at a gas station grill in the morning, while all the farmers are strategizing and coordinating their daily movements and activities. Thus, if I ever need to know what is going on in the county, I always call one of my neighbors, Jimmy, who happens to be a first responder, farmer, and daily patron of Beam’s Country Corner, the best place for a breakfast biscuit in the whole county. Beam’s also carries 100% non-ethanol gas, so you don’t have to worry about clogging up a carburetor, though clogging an artery might still be a concern, especially if you’re fond of gravy biscuits. 

 You will always hear Jimmy, before you see him–he usually sits in the rickety booth at the back of Beam’s Country Corner, the booth closest to the coffee pot. Some farmers at Beam’s refer to Jimmy endearingly as the Mouth of the South (a throwback to Jimmy Hart, who coined the moniker as Hulk Hogan’s ring manager), but I consider that an insult since Jimmy is an important source of information beyond just a local and regional reach.

I’ve never met a man who knows as many people (their families and family histories and family secrets) or as many politicians (their benefactors and supporters and political secrets) or as many cattle (their sires and pedigrees and possibly their secrets, though cows tend to hold their cards pretty close to the vest). He knows everybody, two-legged and four-legged in the county. 

In my opinion, every community needs someone like Jimmy. For one, with phonebooks now a thing of the past, if you need a cell phone number for someone, you just call Jimmy and he will give it to you. He will also give you a treatise on that person’s life, so if you’re in a hurry, it’s better to text him. Second, if you need to know if your cows are on the loose and roaming the roadside, you can call Jimmy and he’ll confirm whether it’s your cows, plus he will give you the latest information on their movements and whereabouts. 

In short, Jimmy is an invaluable resource. Hopefully, you know someone like Jimmy, but even if you don’t, you can rest assured he knows you.