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Let’s All Go to the Fair (‘Kay…) as If I Had Faith in Humanity to Begin With

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not sexy

I think that might be a skunk on her right thigh.

One does encounter the frightening side of humanity at the Ohio State Fair- or any other public festival-type gathering.  It wasn’t as alarming as I have observed in years past, or perhaps I’m getting a bit jaded to the freak show.  The Marion Popcorn Festival is coming up, which makes the Fair look positively tame.  I’ve also found that it’s a lot easier to take pics with the Note 3 than with a traditional camera because people just think you’re texting or something when you are really taking pics. Maybe that’s mean of me, but I run even worse than I fight.

smokin red

Toasty tobacco flavor!

I wonder if Red here is disabled or if she just figured it was worth $10 to ride around in a Mart Cart all day.  I think she weighs less than 300#, so they probably don’t let her ride the cart in Walmart.  She is setting a lovely example for her (grand?) son though.  Even while she is lecturing another offspring (?) spousal unit (?) on the dangers of wearing just socks without shoes in public.

red with sox

Told ya ta wear some shoes, dumbass!

The dog had Barbie dolls with better hair than poor Red.  I say “the dog” because Suzie, the deranged Dachshund my parents had when I was little, appropriated certain of my sisters’ toys for her own personal use- when she was done eating their socks and underwear, that is.  Suzie didn’t like very many people, but she adored me.  Go figure.  I never had a problem with her, but my sisters couldn’t touch her, or get their toys back once Suzie decided she liked them.

I figured, with Suzie, possession was 9/10.   If Suzie wanted it who was I to stand in her way?  Although I could do anything with Suzie, including getting toys back from her, I wasn’t about to do that for either of my sisters.  I liked Suzie better than either of them.

shorts n boots

Shorts and cowboy boots?

I saw a number of people at the Fair wearing cowboy boots with shorts.  I don’t know why this particular fashion choice bugs me, but it does.  At least she’s not wearing Daisy Dukes. And she was nice enough to cover up her back fat, unlike this unfortunate girl:

gratuitous back fat

Girl, you need a rear view mirror.

Perhaps I am being a bit harsh on fashion choices- after all I dress for comfort most of the time, and especially so if I am going to be traipsing along outside in the heat.  It wasn’t as hot as it normally is which may have cut down on the freak factor this year.

smokey

The talking Smokey the Bear is freaky though.

When I was a little kid I always wondered about Smokey’s preoccupation with forest fires.  I knew too many kids who were only too happy to fry ants with magnifying glasses (yes, I did do that) or set stuff on fire with Zippos (Steve-o,,,)  I always wondered why Smokey talked about not playing with matches, but never mentioned Bics or Zippos or magnifying glasses.

Zippo_light

Not a flashlight substitute, either.

Then again, central Ohio is a swamp and it’s usually raining, or there’s some form of precipitation at least every other day or so,  so wildfires generally don’t happen, and when they do, they generally don’t spread much.  However, the perpetual dampness never stopped the slumlords from burning down non-profitable rental properties to the point that in certain locales it is expensive and well-near impossible to get home owner’s or business insurance.  There’s always accelerants, you know, if you really want something to burn.  Too bad the ass-pilots that use them usually have very little understanding of forensic science.  They can tell you doused the place with gasoline before you torched it.

Smokey seems a little quaint and outdated for these times.  Nobody wants to intentionally burn down forests, because you can’t get insurance on a random forest. Maybe Smokey should be talking about arson?  “Hey, kids, only you can decide not to burn down your non-profitable rental properties, ” or, better yet:  “Hey, kids, don’t drop your crack pipe and burn down your crack house!”  Especially if you just spilled gasoline on the floor.

Ponderous-Dachshund

Mi underwear – Su underwear?

Somehow, some things just aren’t meant to be shared.

I haven’t thought about poor Suzie in a long time.  She was always in fragile health and died at the relatively young age of 7 years. I believe her early demise was largely due to being willing to eat vast quantities of anything, including socks, underwear, marbles, Army men, and things my mother served that were sort of supposed to be food.  Mom’s cooking was rather disastrous a good deal of the time, so there was a lot of food left over to go with Suzie’s Chuck Wagon.

chuckwag70

On second thought, maybe we should have just eaten the Chuck Wagon.

mmmm…Meaty!  in a meat by-product-y sort of way…

 

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like (Tacky) Christmas, and a License for Bad Behavior

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wpid-mntsdcardDCIMCamera2013-11-29-12.54.46.jpg.jpg

I knew my pink skeleton from Halloween could become a year-round decoration!

I adore tacky Christmas decorations.  I like the nice ones too, but I can identify with “decorate with what you can find.”  A discarded Bud Light bikini bimbo cardboard display from last summer’s beer promotion at the drive thru can be made festive, if that’s all you have.   Some rednecks up in the west side of Marion did that one year and I’m still kicking myself in the ass for not having a camera handy to capture that moment.

budlight

Just hang some tinsel and beer cans off of her (like pasties) and you’re all set!

Dad absolutely loathed the holidays when we were growing up, and because we were poor, he waited until the last minute to begrudgingly allow us to put up anything.  One year I stuffed a left over live Christmas tree from one of those tree lot sales after it had ended (on December 23rd, because there were no decorations in the house) in my ’72 Super Beetle and brought it home and set it up.  Dad didn’t like it, but I think he let me go ahead and do it just because it was so much fun for him to watch me unload this nice, crooked, sappy, spiky tree out of the passenger’s seat of said Super Beetle in the middle of an ice storm.  He has a sick sense of humor too.  The tree ended up a bit less than five feet tall and resembled a Charlie Brown tree- but it was free.

Now I have an artificial tree, and it’s pink.  Jerry is afraid that a real Christmas tree is a fire hazard (coming from Mr. Let’s-Drink-a-Fifth-of-Wild-Turkey-Then-Start-a-Fire-in-the-Fireplace-with-Gasoline) so I decided to humor him.

small pink tree

Tastefully tacky?

Jerry can be quite the asshole with absolutely no provocation or logical explanation at all, but any kind of holiday is a sort of license for bad behavior for him.  If he can show his ass, get me upset, or otherwise make a Drama Queen Scene, that’s when he will do it.  Every holiday.  Especially Christmas.  I’m better off to go to 12 Noon Christmas Eve service at church, and then get out of town for the next 36-48 hours.  Guaranteed.

holiday-badattitude

He wonders why on every holiday I beat feet and go somewhere else to wait it out.  Holidays are the few times a year where going to my oldest sister’s actually is a more attractive option than staying home.  This is even taking into consideration her obnoxious in-laws (and I thought mine were raised by wolves) and the fact that she beat the hell out of me every day for the first thirteen years of my life.

Yesterday (Thanksgiving) was no exception to his holiday angst.  I figured if I was out of the house by 8 AM I would be OK.   He had gotten really shitfaced Wednesday night so I figured he would still be sleeping good when I took off. Unfortunately he had set his alarm (?) for 6:30 (he doesn’t get up that early when he has to work) so I got the full “Where’s my breakfast?” and “What did you do with my pills/smokes/underwear/any other item that I normally never touch?” rant.  I was in no mood for his little tirade, and I basically told him he could shove his smokes up his ass and eat shit for all I care.

brat tantrum

56, going on 2.

I’m still waiting to see if he has the locks changed today and/or if he throws my shit out on the lawn.  That wouldn’t surprise me, because Jerry is the poster child for conditional “love” if that’s what you call it.  I stopped believing in the concept of romantic “love” many, many years ago.  As long as I run and fetch and kiss his ass, he claims to “love” me.  But the minute I assert any type of resistance to his constant shit-slinging, he goes on and on about how I don’t do anything for him, ya-da, ya-da, just like a brat child who doesn’t get his way.  I put up with his shit mostly because I’m old, and for the sake of the dogs.

I don’t understand why this brat child in a geezer’s body, who would have absolutely no clue how to do more to maintain himself than the most basic of personal hygiene, wants to threaten me.  That’s not very smart on his part.  Before you tell me to get out, be careful what you wish for.  You might just get it- and when I am done, I am done.  Just ask my ex.  Only this time I won’t show nearly as much mercy, and I will get a better attorney.  You don’t want me to channel my inner ruthless bitch.  Trust me on that.

forgiveness

I guess I just have to forgive stupid, because I can’t fix it.

Sometimes I wish I could just go from Halloween and skip to about May 1.  I am not a terribly big fan of the holidays, mostly because of Jerry’s bad behavior.  I know I need to sincerely examine why I put up with it because my tolerance of it defies logic.  On one level I’m smarter than that, but on another level, I am letting my emotions govern my behavior. “Following my heart” and showing mercy have always gotten me into trouble.

I’ll see how he behaves tonight.

Protect Your Unit, A Midsummer’s Nostalgic Musing, and Radioactive Waste!

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Yes, the world is this effed up.  Have the welders come out and weld your AC unit to something- like brackets encased in concrete- to prevent it from being stolen.  Air-conditioners get stolen around here for two reasons: 1. (summer) people are hot, and 2. (winter) they contain copper.

I enjoy this sign, even though the thought of anything happening to my AC unit would provoke me to acts of extreme violence.  I am glad my AC is in a place in which it is bolted to its base, and you would necessarily encounter dogs to get to it. The girls do not approve of interlopers.  Even though I don’t even want to think of some stupid ass ripping off my AC,  I still love the double entendre.  At first, until I saw the line that said “Stop Air Conditioner Theft,”  I thought it was another entreaty from the county health department to encourage the sexually promiscuous to take steps to prevent the spread of venereal diseases.

Yeah, I think even if there were such a thing as Facebook in the 1930’s, you wouldn’t want these test results broadcast on your profile.

I mean, even if your test results indicate you’re syphilis-free, broadcasting that would indicate that you’ve recently put yourself in a position to contract all the other STDs.  What about the STDs that might not show up on a test?  Or maybe you’ve caught a strange new funky one that is currently unknown to medical science?

This is sort of a Nancy Reagan campaign for preventing VD:  Just Say NO!!!!!  Especially when you don’t know where she/he/it’s been.  Hell, that chick could be a dude- and vice versa.

That actually happened to one of Jerry’s friends.  Granted, this guy is the kind of guy who would look better if he shaved his ass and walked backwards, and he has a taste for hanging out in titty bars and swilling rotgut liquor.  He was asking for waking up next to something so hideous he’d want to gnaw off his own arm to escape, so such a scenario was just waiting to happen.  Even the biological females this guy dated were, shall we say, the kind of girls Freddie Mercury would sing about.  He didn’t realize he’d spent the night with a she-male until the next morning.  I wonder what the tip off was.  Maybe he went to cop a feel and ended up with a fistful of morning wood.  Or maybe “she” was taking a whiz standing up. That might have been his sign.

I guess it depends on your perspective.

I don’t have a problem with the transgendered.  If you’re a guy and you want to go through life dressed like Joan Crawford, or Oprah, or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, I could really care less. That’s got to be a really confusing way to go through life, though I will say in defense of trannies, women’s clothes are a lot more interesting.

Tell me RuPaul’s outfit isn’t more festive than a wifebeater t-shirt, distressed jeans, tube socks and Velcro tennis shoes!

Men also have it easier with hair removal.  They can pull off the unibrow look, or even a ZZ Top beard, so in theory men don’t have to fart about with hair removal at all.  Women, on the other hand, if they are civilized, the only hair permitted to remain is the hair that grows from the scalp, a finely sculptured eyebrow, and eyelashes.  The rest of that nasty body hair has to go, at least in my world.  Women should not be hairy.  Unless they’re Italian. Or bull-dyke lesbians.

Men’s restrooms are a lot less crowded though, and all a guy really has to do in the morning is his 3 esses- shit, shower and shave, though I would fit some dental hygiene of some sort in there.

Dudes, you are lucky in one regard.  You can whip out your wang and let it fly anywhere (though I would not recommend the electric fence.) Women can’t do that, unless they like pissing all over their own pants.

I just thought I was riding along listening to Journey, Foreigner, Metallica, Billy Squier, REM, etc.  I had no idea.  I’ll need to check the car for Hitler before I leave.

Grandma avoided the carpool thing like the plague.  She worked at the ordnance factory during the war and it was several miles from where she lived.  She managed to get by on her gasoline ration by buying a motorcycle.  Since 1940’s cars got maybe- if you were lucky- 12 miles to the gallon, a motorcycle, even those nasty old Harley-Davidsons, would have been more fuel efficient.  There wasn’t any room on the back for Hitler, either.

 I bet this ride was cold as hell in winter, but Grandma was thrifty, and I’m sure she didn’t want to ride to work with Hitler either.

Grandma never did disclose what she did at the ordnance factory.   All she said about it was that they weren’t to discuss what they were doing there with anyone, ever.  She had the fear even 60 years later- when all the powers that were are long dead-and she took that knowledge to her grave.  I do know that whatever it is she did she was paid well for it, (the workers earned up to $50 per day, depending on where they were assigned, which was equivalent to $623.34 in today’s money) and she received a small pension from the US Army every month until she died.  I have to wonder if it was hush money, but she wasn’t telling.  The rumor mill- and at least one local author- says that the Scioto Ordnance Plant was involved with the Manhattan Project and with other experimentation with atomic energy.  It wouldn’t surprise me because the location was so remote, and at that time only easily accessed by rail.

The creepy part about the ordnance factory is that the county bought part of the land back- and built a school on it.  The school got closed down when the kids started getting leukemia and all other weird sorts of cancer.  People got paranoid and called in the EPA and they did find all sorts of fun chemicals including radioactive waste, on the school grounds.

Guess what, kids?  School is kind of cancelled today.  Betcha didn’t know it, but now we have something in common with Chernobyl.  We glow in the dark too!

Maybe it is better for me that I went to school with the poor kids in town, even though I got to have the Inner City Behemoth High School Experience without having to end up in Cleveland.  The high school I went to was built over an Indian graveyard, and my parents’ house (shit, the entire east side of Marion) is built on a poorly drained swamp,  but as far as I know neither place was built on top of radioactive waste.

Another one of those things to be thankful for.  I didn’t have to go to the cancer school.  I went to the random stabbing and beating school.  It works out.