Just back from the Florida Folk Festival

Just back from the Florida Folk Festival. Got talking with a woman there who made a lot of sense, as people often do until they bring up politics. “So what’s wrong with Obama?” I bit, always willing to take my brain where no brain has gone before. “Why can’t he produce a birth certificate?” “I believe he has,” I offered. “It took him long enough.” Just to push the topic a little I asked her why he should be required to produce one at all considering no other recent presidents have been. This stuck her for a bit, like how could the answer not be perfectly obvious to me. Eventually she grumbled, “Look at his name,” to which I replied lots of Irishmen have been born in the United States. She really had nothing to say to that.

Land of the Free and Home of the Chickenshit

First Tony Bennett had to publicly apologize for being an American stating his opinion and now it's Ozzie Guillen. And apparently Guillen's doing it for a bunch of very sensitive Cubans who are in Miami on the pretense of valuing freedom! Maybe I've been misinterpreting this concept of free speech so frequently touted as the great thing about living here. I think it actually means they just don't tax it yet.

Better Treed than Feed

Courageous is he
Who steps from a tree
Only to land undefended
Smack on the ground
With lions all around
None of whom he has befriended.

Foolish is she
Who follows down he
To give him a kiss for his daring
And turns all around
with a fierce looking frown
to count all the lions she is scaring.

Eaten are they
In the usual way
Who are heedless of lions below them
And hope to escape
Without laceration or scrape
From lions that don't even know them.

Puffin

If a puffin was a puffin, what would he be a puffin on?  Perhaps if a puffin was sitting on a pipe he would be a puffin on it. 

Still beats digging ditches

I was signing and distributing books a couple days ago at Barnes & Noble and the first customer to approach me seemed like a sure sale; talking about how he read A Land Remembered in one sitting and how he just loves Florida books. In retrospect I'm thinking he loves them almost as much as a good old Klan rally.

So there he was, holding my novel on his way to purchasing one and he says he just has to ask me one question: Did I vote for the current president of the United States? When I heard that I knew, from experience, that he would not like my answer.

The fact is, I don't vote except when I'm on the ballot but my boys, disenfranchised by age as they are, asked me to help Obama in their stead. Had they, in their impotence, required of me a McCain vote, I might have girded my loins and granted that. So I said to the prospective customer I sure did, to which he responded by putting my novel back on the stack and walking away.

Not an author to tolerate rudeness, especially from a non-buyer, I said, “That's awfully fascist of you.”

He said, still walking away, “I just don't want it.”

To which I said, “This is America, isn't it? You're not supposed to punish people for the way they vote.”

“Now that I know where you're coming from,” he said, turning half around, “I just don't want to expose myself to your writing.”

There you have it. I can understand if people don't want to expose their brain to crap, because every word you read goes in there and who knows what damage it can cause? I mean, look at this sorry lot of us that got exposed to at least twelve years of reading school curriculum. I'm pretty sure there's a connection. Think about it – only animals that can read go to psychiatrists.

My problem with this guy is, I'm pretty sure he regularly exposes his precious brain to crap of an order I never could dream of achieving. Maybe, like many of those worshiping at the altar of crap, he was simply afraid to contrast it with anything else.