QUICK QUOTE OF THE WEEK

 Conner-Boy (7) said, "Poppy, I think I pulled a muscle." His Poppy reassured, "Conner, you've got to have muscles before you can pull a muscle."

ASSET MONGER

Add one free moth eaten horse . . . 

Due to recent world events I was forced to block several of my closest most intimate social media acquaintances of a certain philosophical stripe. It wasn’t personal. It was political. I couldn’t take the risk that my social media stranger-friends were spies for the IRS.

I mean I’ve reached the height of success as defined by my society. I don’t have to work. Someone else pays for my health insurance, and I get to travel to other places that are not in my zip code and look at things.  I am a kept woman with a hobby farm and chickens. That kind of success can let loose the dogs of envy and paranoia—also the queens of cat fighting.

So I blocked the buggers.

Besides, they scared me.

List of reasons I had to cover my assets:

Number One -- I have assets. There’s a goat and a free horse. The free horse has muck itch in her mane and thrush in her back hooves and is a little moth eaten, but not everyone in America has a goat and a horse, and that’s just not fair. And fair is very important to my recently blocked Facebook stranger-friends. So either get everyone a horse or they want me to shoot mine. That about sums it up.

Number Two – I have used the word tea party and patriot in a sentence. In fact, for several years I had an actual tea bag in my purse, which is wildly suspicious because I don’t drink tea.

Number Three – I married my high school sweetheart. We’ve been married to the same ‘each other’ for thirty plus years. I don’t hate him. I don’t hate his male genitals. I don’t envy his male genitals. I don’t hate or envy others of his genital persuasion or facial hairiness. I like the idea of boys and girls and babies organized into functioning units called families. It’s behind the times and stuffy, but it works for us. I recognize that this is a wildly controversial worldview and smacks of the year in which I was born—also conservatism. 

Number Four –When it all goes to yuck, I don’t want the IRS coming to eat my goat. And it will go to yuck (according to six thousand years of documented historical precedent.) I’ve spent the last twenty years preparing for yuck: World War Next, Charlie the Hurricane, Great Wall of China collapse, barbarian horde attack, Detroit, zombie squirrel apocalypse. Yuck. And it’s only one goat.

Number Five – I have no interest in keeping my neighbors from shooting off their guns or their mouths. However, I also have absolutely no interest in paying long distance for the consequences of them shooting off things—like their own big toes. I like to help people face to face and not through the slightly less personal avenue of the IRS tax code.

It’s sheep and goats time—literally.

Lines are being drawn, sides chosen, like minds located, tribal tattoos debated. The folks who managed to cross wild oceans, open new scary lands, leave junky European hometowns, and tame the wilderness of Detroit are making plans, and they’re not going to be telling the folks that spy for the IRS. They’re just going to get up and go with their goat and their free horse.

Big, whiney babies need not apply.

Linda (Lady Patriot) Zern

     

 

  

It's My Funeral and You're Invited

Please Note:  As far as I know, I am in perfect health and any rumors of my impending death are pure gossip and heartless taunting.

My kitchen cabinet knobs do not match, and I love that they do not match, even though it drives Phillip, my son-in-law, batty. 

He has informed me, “As soon as you’re dead, I’m changing out these goofy, eclectic, bohemian knobs.” (That is the official title for my decorating style—eclectic bohemian, which means I’m just this side of a gypsy queen and not adverse to bleached animal skulls as chotchkies.) 

Phillip always looks itchy when he tells me about his de-knobbing of my kitchen on the event of my death. He mumbles about burning my giant gourd that flips open on a hinge, but I think it’s just idle gourd burning talk. It’s those knobs that really bug him.

I love those knobs for giving me a reason to live.

“Hey, Mom, come here and listen to the music we’re going to play at your funeral.” Adam, my teenage son, looked pleased and proud as he played the tune he had picked out for my funeral service.  It was a wonderful, sentimental, joyful choice. I wept. It made me sorry I wouldn’t be there what with the excellent choice in music and my son-in-law in attendance, counting down the minutes until he’ll be free to take the knobs off my kitchen cabinets.

The subject of my death and funeral seems to prove an endless source of amusement for my family; they’ve already decided that in place of a eulogy, they’ll be holding a “Mock-ogy,” which, apparently, is not dissimilar to a “Roast.” First, they’ll play that really cool music and then someone will stand up and announce, “Let the mocking begin.”

Since it’s my funeral, I have a few suggestions for my enthusiastic, smart aleck family. And since I have an irrational fear of being IN something, UNDER something (for example I have an irrational fear of being in a car under the water, or in a New York City subway under New York City, or in a box under the ground) I would like to be buried above the ground. Perhaps I might be buried in a pyramid, assorted safety deposit boxes, catacomb, or eagle’s nest in the back pasture.

My preference is the eagle’s nest, and I would like to be rolled to the nest using the little red wagon with the jittery wheels. An America flag should be flying at half-mast from the back of the wagon.

Crying is right out! Very few people look attractive crying, and I won’t have it. There should be folk dancing, but I’m not sure when to fit it into the schedule, and since Phillip is going to remove them anyway, I’d like to be buried with my knobs and my thesaurus.

Please consider this posting a legal expression of my final wishes.

The advantage of having garnered the reputation for being a little eclectic and a lot bohemian during one’s lifetime is that people expect to see graffiti on the walls inside your house and bowling balls in your garden, and if they show up to your funeral they won’t be surprised by the free coupons to Golden Corral that will be handed out at the door.

 Linda (Gypsy Queen of the Buffet Line) Zern