Done Stopped Preachin'

 

      A Louisiana grandmother sat in the aisle seat located on the right side halfway between the front and back rows of her small Baptist church. That morning the preacher was cranked up about venal personal sins.
     "All of you that are drinking beer are in danger of hellfire!" he roared.
     "Amen!" Grandma shouted back, glancing over at Grandpa.
     "And all of you who are drinking that moonshine whiskey that Tolley O'Flaherty sells out of the still behind his barn are preparing your souls for eternal damnation!" he shouted. Scattered hands went up across the congregation.
     Grandma turned a sharp look at Grandpa and in a level voice fraught with meaning responded with a ladylike growl. "Amen brother. Preach it!"
     "And all of you brothers wasting your money smoking cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco have fallen into Satan's trap!" the pastor soldiered on down his list of condemnations of sin. A goodly assortment of female hands went up.
     "AMEN!" shouted Grandma tottering to her feet and shaking her fist. "You tell 'em, Reverend!" she croaked.  
     Finally the preacher fixed a stern eye upon the rest of the huddled parishioners. "And don't you dare let the Lord catch you dipping snuff!" A gasp ran through the crowd.
     Grandma sat down abruptly, apparently stunned. She looked around at her friends and neighbors, about half of them nodding in agreement and the other half frowning along with the whiskey drinkers and cigar smokers.
     "Hmmph," Grandma shook her head disapprovingly and turned to Grandpa, "Preacher's done stopped preaching and done started meddlin'.

© 2004 by Tom King (from a story told me by a friend)

Are Sharkicanes Next?

A few years back, some cocaine fueled movie producers got together and bounced around some ideas for a movie. They thought, maybe comedy or horror or science fiction - something like that. Jaws made a lot of money and shark movies boiled off the franchise in doves. Someone else suggested a disaster movie. A lot of people love disaster movies. Then someone who obviously was one toke over the line, said, "Why not combine Jaws and Twister; call it say, "Tornado-sharks!"

"It doesn't have the ring of a good disaster film."

"What if we have a tornado pick up a whole bunch of sharks and drop them on people in Los Angeles?  Call it Sharknado!"

"Brilliant!" shouted the third producer. And it was off to the races with sequels that struck LA again, Florida, and sent the hero, surfer and bar owner Fin Shepherd and his surfer chick girlfriend April all over the world. Wherever they go in the 5 sequels more sharknadoes would break out around them. The world is destroyed except for Fin who then time travels in the last installment, rescues a bunch of key people and saves the world.

Now, I don't want to upset anyone, but I watched a documentary about tornadoes a while back and I'm concerned. Apparently, if these two hurricanes cranking up in the Atlantic and Pacific cross paths, there could be water spouts that draw sharks up into the hurricanes and when these hurricanes make landfall sharks actually could be dumped all over what the movie producers called "The Feast Coast"  from Florida to Texas. Now, this isn't the problem that I'm having exactly. I know that between gangs with stores of illegal guns in LA and Texans who are some of the most heavily armed Americans. So both places have adequate ammunition and sufficient stores of spices to handle the situation. 

 

The problem in the states that will be struck would be working out the bag limits on flying sharks. I can't afford to get into any trouble with the game wardens. Can you even shoot flying sharks, when they exit the sharkicane or do you have to wait till they make land fall? Is there a tag I need to buy in the event of a 2020 sharkicane? 

 

If anyone has any information about how to get flying shark hunting licenses, let me know. It will be very much appreciated. 

 

© 2023 by Tom King

Life on the Edge: Childhood Adventures of The Flying Dingbat Brothers

My brother Donnie atop the Mizpah Gate at SW Junior College 1969.
Campus security was not amused!

We always liked high places. We lived in the treetops in our yard - big oaks with brittle branches. Mom finally quit looking out the kitchen window. The view must have been worrying for a mother. Her two sons, who seemed to believe they were either Tarzan or Cheetah, would inevitably be swinging from the branches of the brittle old post oaks in our back yard or making like a gibbon, swinging arm over arm from branch to branch of the Chinaberry trees. We were pretty good at it too, though Donnie was somewhat better than me. My mom one day found one neighbor kid dangling from the Chinaberry with a broken bone (leg or arm, I don't remember). He had attemped the arm over arm trip round the Chinaberry that my brother and I used to do, only he was scared so he tied a rope around his leg in case he fell. 

He did!

It's fortunate he didn't tie the rope round his neck. Mom cut him down and called Edward's mom and he went off to the doctor. Nobody got sued for childhood stupidity fortunately. We were safe anyway as we were too poor to sue.

This is pretty much my youthful
self-image back then.

My kid brother, God rest his soul, and I made a ramp by our driveway on a little rise. We would come tearing down the street on our bikes, hit the ramp and go flying. My brother, not the finest bicycle mechanic in the world, followed me over the ramp. He sailed up into the air (we used to get a couple of feet in altitude out of a jump) and as he left the ramp, his front wheel came off. He hit the ground, forks first, and sailed over the handlebars. But gymnast that he was he managed to tuck and roll up to his feet. He looked around and spied the front wheel rolling off across the neighbor's front yard. He sprang to his feet and took off in hot pursuit, managing to catch it before it ran out into the cross street half a block away. 

My brother was the epitome of cool, unlike his awkward older brother. I have two pictures somewhere - one of me and one of him doing a hand spring over a heavy sawhorse we had purloined for the purpose. Donny's image was captured at the peak of the flip, perfect form, toes pointed, back straight headed for a 3 point landing. I was better at photography than gymnastics. The picture of me shows a gangling kid, long torso, short legs, sort of a skinny flying troll look. I looked like someone had flung a bag of loose bones over the sawhorse. I was headed for a -5 point landing and a face plant. I told my brother his looked so much better than mine because I was the better photographer.

 

How Donnie actually looked!

Life back then was high-risk and a ton of fun!

Our friend Leslie Gilley had a great long rope that hung from a huge tree overhanging a usually dry creek bed in the pasture behind his house. I asked him how often he replaced it. Since his older brother had installed it years ago and the knot was above his climbing ceiling when he was 12, he told me, "When it breaks."

We would climb out on another limb that over hung a bend in the creek, grab the rope and swing out over the creek bed, back and forth until it slowed down enough to slide to a stop in the gravel that filled the bed of the creek at that spot. One day I climbed out on the limb with the rope, leaned back and launched myself out into space. As I approached the bottom of the swing where momentum reached its zenith, I heard a crack above as the rope parted. I hit the gravel in the creek bed butt first and at pretty good speed. Fortunately, I've been blessed with very tough bones and nothing was broken.

Leslie's comment was, "Hey man, you broke my rope!"

I answered, "I'd have been happy to let you break it."

My brother, the gymnast, decided he was going to do a triple flip on the trampoline. He finally did it, but got a bunch of bruises and sprained his neck along the way. One day he was late for school on Monday. Mom flipped back the covers on his bed and found him sleeping in his skivvies and covered with bruises. Turns out he'd been motorcycle racing, had run off the track, through a barbed wire fence and crashed in a gully sans bike. I'm not sure Mom knew he'd been doing motocross or that he could ride a motorcycle for that matter.

In the middle on the bottom,
where else would I be?

I thought I'd outgrown being stupid until I became a staff member at Lone Star Camp and was introduced to water skiing. I got to do a lot of stunts in our weekly ski show, I think, mainly because I used to do such spectacular wipe-outs. Remember: not as coordinated as my gymnast brother.

I was once jerked off my skis (on purpose), but then lost my swimsuit while being dragged around the lake (not on purpose). I had worn a Speedo under the suit and managed to catch it on my foot. As I was dragged on my back by the dock where a row of preacher's wives and kids sat watching the ski show. For a bit of comic relief, I stuck my foot up and passed the audience with my swimsuit waving from my leg like a flag. One of the minister's wives asked me afterward if I had done that on purpose. I told them it was part of the show. We all laughed and laughed.

I've got so many stories about my brother and I and the disasters we suffered doing risky things. I once kicked myself in the back of the head while trying to barefoot ski. We did pyramids for ski shows. I was the center guy at the bottom. When the pyramid collapsed at the end, accidentally or on purpose, guess who got fallen on?

The point of the story is that I look back on my misadventures fondly. I've been almost run over by a motorboat, jerked off a lifeguard tower by a ski boat, and was nearly immolated during a campfire skit of Elijah and the Priests of Baal (Donny was in on that one too.) My best friend kicked loose a 500 pound boulder that hit me square in the chest while we were free climbing a 40 foot cliff over the Brazos River. Not sure how, but when the stars cleared up I was hanging from a scrub of a tree 30 feet above a field of rocks as the boulder bounced down to the river, clearing out a path through the saplings..

As a grownup I risked 5 nonprofit startups unpaid, wrote more than one million dollars in grants, became a nonprofit consultant, a freelance commercial writer and am working on publishing a novel (the sixth book I've done). I taught self-defense for staff of a mental facility treating often violent kids from diminutive 3 year olds to 17 year old football players and one powerful 300 pound Samoan kid. I wrangled 20 horses, read a book on how to break horses and trained several to ride. I cut trails with emotionally disturbed kids and rode 5 days a week, 5 hours a day and never lost a kid. I took youth groups camping and led canoe trips down swollen Texas rivers. I taught canoeing and swimming and rescued a drowning steer from the overflowing Trinity River in a canoe with the help of a junior lifesaver girl I'd just graduated the day before. WE SAVED THE COW!

My wrangling days....

We made some memories and took some risks. My Mom had two ADHD boys and she raised us just right. We were allowed to take risks and we took 'em. She didn't hover. We grew up to be good people with the right blend of courage and kindness. My brother and I once extricated the car of a church singer from stuck high centered on a curb with the front wheels dangling in a deep mudhole. After we leveraged his car from the mud, Donny and I then walked home in the freezing rain afterward. And no, he didn't offer us a ride (we were on foot) because we might get mud on his mother's car's upholstery. Walking home, wet and shivering across a pasture waist high in wet grass, my brother and I felt like we'd won a battle against evil. After all, Steve did make it in time to sing for vespers. We made it home to a hot shower.  

I lost my brother his sophomore year in high school, killed by a stupid prank by a friend. Christmas, the night before he died, we sat up late talking about how we would do Christmas when we grew up and had families. He talked about his plans to work on improving his grades so he could go back to church academy with his friends. We used to fight like cats and dogs. I can't remember why we wound up in wrestling matches. We quit doing it when things got too dangerous and chances of hurting each other became too real. 

In that last day, however, my brother and I bonded as we never had before. And when Christ comes to take us home, I'll be looking around for my brother. We're still not done swinging on ropes, skiing, climbing trees and sailing. I never got a chance to take him out on my Hobie Cat and catch a full breeze and tip her up on one pontoon. 

Oh, the things we'll do once we have forever in which to do them.

© 2022 by Tom King

Tom king

 

Now, I know How Snow White Felt

I love the woods and lakes and anywhere the wild things live and play. Our next door neighbors have a beautiful patio that one service guy calls "Narnia". Squirrels drip from the trees and squadrons of birds hang from Dan and Suzanne's feeders. He buys peanuts in 50 pound bags for the squirrels. I've seen chickadees eat bird seed from Dan's hand. Squirrels climb up into his lap. He's like a hairy-chested Snow White.

He's left me in charge of the squirrels on occasions when they go off on vacation. The squirrels have come to accept my presence, but not to quite trust me close up. Imagine my disappointment when I went next door to find Suzanne and Sheila (my wife) sitting on the patio with a table full of squirrels next to them begging for peanuts. Sheila had one on her shoulder. It kept coming back, climbing up in her lap and plucking peanuts from her fingers. I wanted a squirrel to jump up in my lap too, but while she was there, they preferred her lap to mine. She won't let me post videos of her, so I have been waiting to talk Little Red into climbing up so I could show it to my grandson - perhaps to lure him to come visit us in Washington State with the promise of feeding wild squirrels.

Today, after Dan and Suzanne left for Idaho, I went over to feed the squirrels. The red squirrel I call "Little Red" approached me with a puzzled look. Deciding I was the only one around, he took a leap of faith and landed on my knee. After that he ran back and forth stashing peanuts and leaping up on my leg for another one for the rest of the afternoon. 

 The squirrels all have personalities. Little Red won't take cracked or dirty peanuts. He prefers perfect peanuts.  Two-fer, a gray squirrel won't leave without two peanuts tucked under his chin. If you're slow with that second one, he'll snatch it out of your hand. Cressie has a crescent shaped scar on her back and Lightning runs at full tilt wherever he goes.

I was able to video Little Red's first jump onto my leg. It may seem stupid but that has been the highlight of my week. Another little peek at heaven for me.

© 2021 by Tom King

To Drink From a Trough - A 48 Year-Old Promise

The pictures, sadly, came out kind of dark, but
this is us 48 years ago in the PFA chapel.

It's been 48 years since the Saturday night that I picked an azalea off the bush by the Pine Forest Academy chapel door, pinned it to my lapel and stepped inside for the ceremony in which I joined forces with the love of my life "for better or worse." It was a moment that would certainly change our lives forever.

 

True story, Sheila was so nervous that day that she had trouble reciting the vows. She's always suffered with stage fright, but was doing okay repeating the vows after Pastor Reiber*, who was using an older traditional set of wedding vows. However, when he prompted her to repeat, "Unto thee I plide my troth," my Sweet Baboo, who has trouble with English accents and archaic words had no idea what he was saying and did the best she could.

"I promise to drink from a trough...." she mumbled. She tried to deny she'd said it later, but I had proof. This was 1974, well before the advent of VHS recorders, but someone had thoughtfully caught it all on a cassette audiotape. I played it for her several times over the years and it's undeniable that that's what she said. I no longer possess the evidence because, somehow, the tape mysteriously disappeared during one of our moves.

Headed back down the aisle. Sheila looks a
little green around the gills. Me? I look like
the cat that swallowed the canary. But then
I hadn't just promised to drink from a trough.

At any rate she's never kept that part of her vows. I've asked her about it and all she'll say is, "I don't see any trough here!" Those horse (or cow) troughs are expensive and there's no way I'd hold her to it if all I could muster was a pig trough. A cow trough seems unnecessarily demeaning. The least I could do was provide something suitable for a beloved filly. Said trough would, of course, have to be clean and previously unused in any case. There's no way the woman is going to drink after farm animals. I wouldn't expect her to.

 

In the 48 years since, I have not been able to provide an appropriate trough, I've let her off the hook for all these years. To this day, however, when we get into a fight and I'm losing, I comfort myself by visualizing a big old Farm and Ranch Supply delivery truck rolling up and offloading one of those big round steel horse troughs.

I figure after she's completed her last vow, we could use the trough as an above-ground swimming pool. It is, however, quite unlikely that in this world we'll ever own horses or that I'll ever have enough extra money to waste hundreds of dollars on an appropriate drinking vessel, so I suppose I'll let that vow slide. She's done quite well by all the other vows she's made. I can't complain.

She's a keeper and I intend to keep her around for billions of years after Jesus comes (with time off for good behavior). And, since I do like horses, I may even come up with some sort of trough one day. Just to make her laugh. I'll drink from it first, of course.

 

© 2022 by Tom King

*Interesting note: Pastor Milton Reiber, who married us that day in the Academy chapel in Chunky, Mississippi, was pastor of the Meridian SDA church. He also served as pastor for the Pine Forest Academy Church where I was going to serve a year as boy's dean and Sheila was going to be a nurse. When I told her who the pastor was, my Mom recognized his name. It turns out that, decades before in Tucumcari, New Mexico, Elder Reiber, was also the pastor who baptized young Clara Bell (Mom) and her sister, Tilitha. It's funny how Adventists can go almost anywhere and find connections to other Adventists.

I Have Found My Haberdashery!

As a native Texan, I've gotta
have this one.

For some reason, my Sweet Baboo doesn't like my loud Hawaiian fat guy shirts. I'm not sure why. I think they are quite fetching, but they do tend to disappear one by one over time. I've found a couple in the trash. I'm sure this was by accident. Anyway, I really love the shirts of the islands. I'm a bit colorblind, so I like my colors to be vibrant. I'm sure many of you enjoy vibrant colors, so in the interest of keeping my readers, many of who must share my taste in things like clothes, music, religion and politics, informed of cool things that might make them happy.

Here's one!

I'm not being paid to advertise for these guys. I just like these shirts. My birthday is coming up April 19, so I'm gonna buy one of these for me and try to wear it on special occasions when my wife doesn't want me to look like an overweight homeless guy. I don't think color is unpleasant. The trouble is, I married a superhero. She has super hearing, super vision, super touch, super smell and ESP for all I know. The woman can smell a gnat passing gas at 200 yards. We have to black out the windows in daylight because the light is too bright coming through the windows. Scentsies are everywhere to control the smells. She puts cotton in her ears to subdue the sound. And she knows what I'm doing or thinking even if she can't see me.

As a conservative American I like
this one. The dinosaur will make
my grandson happy.

My wardrobe has always been a bone of contention. I'm partially color blind. I have trouble with subtle pastel color differences and very dark colors like deep blue, dark purple, black, dark red and almost any very dark color. So my color matches are often very off. My hearing is relatively normal and with my allergies, my sense of smell is not very good. I love brightly lit spaces. 

My favorite loud Hawaiian shirts stand out visually to my poor darling like flashbulbs going off. The poor thing  suffers from sensory overload most of the time. I try to save my loud shirts for when I'm going to be outside. If she's with me, I make sure she remembers to wear sunglasses.

Our home has mostly Earth tones with furniture, paint and decorations so far as colors go and it's pretty calming. When we play music, it tends to be of the sort that puts me straight off to sleep. She used to create mix tapes for nap time at the day care center we operated. The kids tried to stay awake, but once the music started, they started dropping off as if they'd been gassed. The woman is an expert in how to create calmness.

My grandson will really dig it when
Poppy shows up dressed in sharks.
The boy loves anything with
a lot of sharp teeth.

 

Unfortunately for my beloved superhero, she married a klutz whose unsuperhero skill is ADHD.
  It takes loud sounds, loud colors, exciting action and smoke alarms to keep me focused. And don't ask me to do any housecleaning. My work does not, cannot and ever will meet superhero habitation standards. I can empathize with Lois Lane. I really can.

I try to keep my shirts a little more low-key. I like shirts with ocean/island themes but they tend to be a lot more loud and glaring in color, so I've quit buying them. I can get away with the patriotic ones above because they have a lot of Earth tones. The shark shirt has a lot of black and the sharks themselves tend to have more muted colors.

I picked two shirts (below) that have a favorite picture theme that we both love - lighthouses. These are pretty much black and white and gray, so the colors are calming. Good for my superhero sweetie. Good for her hyper hubbie.

© 2021 by Tom King

PS: It's almost my birthday.

Jazz Up Your Resume When You Go Job-Hunting After CoVid-19

© 2020 by Tom King

Sensei Sheila and the Karate Guy

The Government Will Save Me!

On Rescuing Democrats in a Hurricane

Texans impacted by Hurricane Harvey are not out of the woods yet, but Texans are coping. We are a sturdy, stubborn and innovative people.  I saw a picture this morning of a half-submerged house where the family had staked out camping tents on the roof and had food and water and camp cooking stuff up there with them waiting out the flood waters. THAT is how Texans behave in a crisis.

I remember stories from Hurricane Katrina of volunteer first responders with boats being turned back by New Orleans police because the mayor had ordered that only government agencies be allowed into the hurricane ravaged city. As a result people sat on their houses for days waiting for the Feds to arrive. Apparently the (also a Democrat) mayor of Houston refused to evacuate. Lets hope HE knows enough to let friends and neighbors lend a hand. (Note*** Apparently he does - see below). As it is, Texans still have managed to hold down the loss of life from Harvey to single digits so far while Katrina claimed more than 1800 lives. They never were actually able to count all the dead.

There's an old story I just made up about a Democrat whose home was flooded during Hurricane Rita. He was sitting on his roof watching the waters rise and suddenly got religion. "God," he prayed eying the rising water. "Send the government to save me!"

A while later the water was over his front porch and a neighbor floated by in a big yellow raft. "Come on," he cried out to the Democrat. "I'll get you out of here."

"No," the Democrat cried. "I'm waiting for FEMA. They'll have a trailer I can stay in and it’ll have a television." The neighbor shrugged and paddled on.

An hour later the water was halfway up the windows of his house. The head deacon from the church down the street came by in a canoe and offered to take him to safety.  "No!" the Democrat shouted back. "I'm waiting for the Coast Guard to come. They'll have warm blankets and hot food on board for me."  The deacon paddled off.

An hour later the water was at the eaves of the roof and he was getting nervous.  A couple of fishermen in a bass boat came chugging down the street and pulled up to his roof. “Get in, the water’s rising fast,” they urged.

”No, that’s okay,” the Democrat shook his head. “The National Guard will soon come and rescue me and take me to an evacuation shelter where there will be beds and food.” He waved them off.

An hour later he’s sitting on his chimney completely surrounded by water which is over the edges of his roof. He’s seen an alligator from the nearby bayou swim by a couple of times.  “He hears the thump thump thump of a helicopter overhead. It pauses directly above him and suddenly a sling drops down beside him.

”Put your arms in the sling and we’ll pull you up,” a voice shouts through a bullhorn.  The Democrat looks up and realizes the helicopter is from one of Exxon’s Gulf oil rigs. By this time he's losing faith in the government to come and rescue him, but he sticks to his ideological guns.

”No!” he shouts back. “I can’t trust you people. You’re destroying the environment. I hear that the Sierra Club will be sending helicopters to rescue people. This disaster is caused by global warming. They should be the ones to rescue me not the ones who caused it.” And he refused to climb into the sling. The helicopter pulled up the sling and flew off to rescue others.

The water rose and eventually washed the Democrat and his house away. The sheriff’s department found the Democrat floating face down in the swamps along the coast once the waters receded. Next thing the Democrat knows he’s standing before the judgment seat before the Pearly Gates, his clothes all soggy and covered with mud. 

“What happened?” he demanded of the recording angel at the desk when he got to the front of the line.  “I asked for help from you people,” the Democrat complained. “Isn’t that your job to save people. I think you guys are seriously falling down on your responsibilities. I want to file a complaint.”

“A complaint?” the angel asked incredulously. “We sent you a raft, a canoe, a bass boat and a helicopter. What more did you want?”  Then the Democrat disappears in a puff of smoke.”

”Next,” says the angel.

© 2017 by Tom King

* No actual Democrats were harmed in the making of this story. Perhaps a few got their knickers in a twist but given some of the nasty things they’ve said about me and president Trumplately, I consider this little story a very mild response - especially to the Hitler references. That was really tacky. You should all be ashamed.

** To my friends who think this story is in poor taste, I'd like to remind you of how tasteless the treatment of President Bush was in the wake of the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans - a situation that was not his fault and was aggravated by a Mayor (D) who kept out aid while he threw a tantrum and tried to bury the evidence of his years of embezzlement before he was tried and convicted and sent to the posh prison where they keep Louisiana's (D) governors and judges and miscellaneous politicians who get caught with their hands in the till. 

*** I'm so proud of the way Texans handled this. What happened in Katrina is NOT happening in Texas. Everybody is working together to rescue everyone else. Even Houston's mayor who I earlier criticized for not evacuating made his case and I now agree with his decision. Along the Texas coast we are not Democrats and Republicans, we are not liberals and conservatives. We are not Hispanic, black, white or Asian. We are TEXANS and I couldn't be prouder of my state and how they responded to this crisis.

What if?

 

 

 

 

Given that Elphaba Thropp (aka The Wicked Witch of the West) has a rather difficult relationship with H₂O, one wonders if she ever gets thirsty and how she would deal with that issue.

© 2017 by Tom King

"Bare"ing Burdens - New Fad or Deterioration In Public Spelling Awareness

Okay, really? A thong? You just  can't unsee some things?

For some reason lately I've seen a plethora of posts on Facebook lately, which talk about "bearing" something in the sense of carrying a burden. The trouble is these multiple witnesses have used the term "BARING" or "Bareing" to indicate that they mean they were "carrying" or "tolerating" something.

Either some authority has changed the spelling and/or meaning of the term and didn't tell me, or it's one of those crazy new fads that everyone is going along with. Perhaps there has been a sudden mass outbreak of either misspelling or nudity while carrying burdens. I shall watch this trend carefully. You see Friday is my shopping day and on that day, I usually can be found "bearing" burdens in some public place or other. 

If I am to "bare" my burdens in order to comply with the new cultural imperative, then I am confused.  Has "No-pants Friday" come to enjoy a surprising popularity in both the Pacific Northwest and East Texas. Most of the posts about "bareing" burdens seem to have come largely from these two areas - regions known to contain many heavily-armed individualists for some inexplicable reason that has been lost to the mists of time.

Don't get me wrong. While I have no personal problem with pursuits like nude vacuuming, naked dish-washing or skinny-scuba diving, I fear I shall have to draw the line at strolling the aisles of Walmart while "bareing" anything not normally bared in a public setting. I forebear to do this out of concern for the mental health of innocent young people whose mother's have dragged them along on the weekly shopping trip. I also do not wish to be responsible for throwing a craving on some unsuspecting elderly grandmother in the sewing notions aisle.

If it was just smart-alec twenty and thirty-somethings who might be upset at the sight of a 62 year-old large hairy guy bending over the banana bin, I wouldn't give a hoot. It is my ambition to shock and horrify as many young people as possible before, I some day pitch face-first into my spinach lasagna.  I do, however, intend to limit such shocks to acts of elderly protest such as wearing black socks with shorts, ugly hats and brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, or by mispronouncing words like "quinoa" and "Niçoise" in front of them. I'd rather upset the little darlings by wearing tee-shirts that say things like "Armed and Cranky" "Ted Cruz - 2016" or "Get a Job Hippie"; not by "bareing" any of my more personal burdens however well-sculpted and muscular they might be.

Just sayin'.

© 2016 by Tom King

The Trojan Horse Lesson

Does anyone else see the irony in a condom maker calling its product "Trojans" given what happened when the actual Trojans allowed that big wooden Greek horse to come in through the gate?

I just think of things like that when I'm unsupervised. It's not good.

I do think the story of the Trojans should serve as a warning to young people though. Kind of a cautionary tale. I have way too many millennial friends for someone who reads history and actually retains some of it.
 
 One of my millennial buds described Trojans as "protection" in a conversation recently. My brain immediately thought, "Trojans weren't a lot of 'protection' when they let that big wooden Greek thing in through the gates, now were they?"

My problem is I read too much history.
Dang it. Now that story reminded me of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy and I was trying so hard to get off that hobby horse. 

© 2016 by Tom King

Coffee - To Drink or Not to Drink - That is the Issue

Ours is a mixed marriage - not racially mixed or even divided over religion. The great divide in our marriage was over coffee. You see, I grew up in a small Seventh-day Adventist college town in Texas. We rolled up the streets at sundown on Friday and rolled 'em back out at Sundown on Saturday. Adventists, especially in college hive towns, are pretty strict about things like Sabbath observance (we don't work, play army, or watch TV on Sabbath), alcohol (we don't drink period), meat-eating (we didn't sell it in any stores in town - you had to drive 7 miles to Cleburne to get a hamburger), AND coffee.  Oh, there were those who smuggled it in and drank it on the sly, but those folk were committing sin and they knew it and didn't care.

I never got the big deal about coffee. My step-dad liked coffee, but to me it always tasted like the liquid my Mom would pour off a pot of burned pinto beans. Don't ask how I know - it's one of those inexplicable things one does in childhood to find out about stuff. I could never get past the taste.

Also, caffeine has virtually no discernible effect on me other than as a sleep aid. I have ADHD. I once chewed up and swallowed two No-Doze (at that time roughly the equivalent of 20 cups of coffee) in an effort not to fall asleep while driving on I-20 in Louisiana. It did not work. My wife had to keep picking fights with me to keep me awake the rest of the way there. We got to her parents house a half hour later at 1am. I immediately went straight to bed, chock full of caffeine. I must have rolled and tossed for 3 or 4 minutes before I fell asleep. I slept like a baby. So without the "hit" you get from the caffeine, coffee for me was all about the taste and for those of you so caffeine-addled that you missed it, coffee doesn't taste very good. If I put a lot of milk in the cup with a half pound or so of sugar, I can just about drink it, but only to be polite to my relatives for whom coffee is a religious rite.

My Sweet Baboo, unlike me, was weaned on coffee - literally. Her mother used to drink 3 or 4 pots of the stuff a day, so my wife was already on massive doses of caffeine in utero. Miz Bea's breast milk was probably the equivalent of a Red Bull for caffeine content. Sheila went straight from breast milk to coffee at around 18 months. I think her mom used to lace her baby bottles with it.

Sheila's constitution is quite different from mine with respect to caffeine. If she drinks a Coke after 6pm, she'll spend half the night sitting up in bed quivering with her eyes peeled open like a hoot owl. You should see her clean a house after a couple of cups of morning coffee. It's like those old Mr. Clean commercials. She's like a white tornado. Me and the dog go hide when she gets cranked up. 

And there's the taste! My wife growing up always envisioned sitting around the breakfast table with her handsome husband, talking about feelings and drinking a morning cup o' coffee. It had to be coffee in order to complete the picture. Chocolate milk would NOT do. Orange juice in a coffee cup would not do.  And MILK absolutely ruined the tableau for her.

Unfortunately, I just really hate coffee. It has been a forty year long source of grief to my poor wife, for whom sitting on the porch talking doesn't really work without a cup of coffee in everybody's hand. That's how it was done back home and pouring a diet Dr. Pepper into a cup fools no one. It keeps making bubbles and a fizzy sound and coffee aficionados are not fooled. They also think you're a sissy if you don't drink coffee and that's not something you want to be among people from Louisiana (or East Texas for that matter).

Trouble was, I didn't really like the SDA official coffee substitute either. The folk at Post used to make a grain-based beverage called Postum. Charlie Post, was the guy who stole the idea for corn flakes from John Harvey Kellogg who ran the Adventist Sanitarium in Battle Creek (yeah, that Kellogg). Post developed enough of an SDA following that he dug back into Civil War alternatives for coffee and created a coffee substitute aimed at the Adventists and Mormons who don't do caffeine and the unfortunate folk who can't tolerate it. I don't know if they make it anymore. I haven't seen it around on store shelves lately.

Fortunately for me Loma Linda foods, and SDA vegetarian food manufacturer does produce a product called Kaffree Roma, which is actually pretty good. It looks like coffee, but with a little milk, sweet n' low and vanilla flavoring, it comes pretty close to hot cocoa for taste without the caffeine.

Sadly, it may be a little late for this mixed marriage to get the same boost from sharing a hot coffee-like beverage on the porch or over the breakfast table. Once you get old, it's hard to reset your habits. Besides, my Sweet Baboo has decided to quit her caffeine habit and she's drinking decaf these days. I'm not sure decaf will work as a substitute for the old morning cup o' joe.  Rituals tied to beverages are hard to recreate with substitutes. It's one of the reasons smokers and alcoholics have such a hard time quitting.

Still, I think I'll make me a cup of coffee substitute when I fix up Miss Sheila's morning cup of decaf. Who knows. We may get her fondly remembered ritual going again.  Just without the kick it once had.  I did save some of the evil caffeine kind of coffee in the freezer, just in case Mama needs a jolt to get her housework done or I need help falling asleep.

© 2016 by Tom King

When Reality Really Stinks!

This girl was drugged - only way I would ever get in a
pen with one of these beautiful but deadly creatures.

 I was doing PR for Tiger Creek a Texas tiger refuge when this short-lived reality show rolled into town. The premise was a WWF Girl, Lauren Jones, becomes a local TV reporter much to the resentment of the "real" news reporters at Tyler, Texas' CBS-19. The show died after just two episodes, but before they left town, I invited the ersatz reporterette out to see our new baby tigers. So here comes Lauren Jones across the pasture toward the tiger cages wearing a spray-on mini-skirt and stilletto heels, tailed by a sturdy, harrassed-looking woman shouldering a video camera and tripod.

They set up in front of one tiger's cage (I don't remember his name right now - we'll call him Gombe) to talk about his recent surgery or his birthday or whatever thin excuse I gave the reality TV people for coming out to give us some free publicity. I think the boss lady was kind of put out with the fake reporter even though we were getting good PR out of this whole thing. Probably something to do with the stillettos and the Versace handbag. Anyway, the boss lady neglected, in her pre-entering-the-cage-area safety briefing, to mention to Lauren, a key bit of information about this particular tiger. We had some females in nearby cages who were, shall we say, "in the mood" and this particular tiger was a notorious horn dog. So, he was likely to be a little randy.

Now male tigers have this interesting capability they don't tell children about on PBS. They like to mark their territory and they have a special gland-like structure beneath their tails which allows them to eject a pungent tagging fluid 20 or 30 feet like a water cannon (and quite a lot of it too). Well they didn't tell Lauren Jones in her tight dress and serious perfumication about this. Also they make a little chuffing sound when they like you. She did explain this to Lauren for some reason.

Lauren and the CBS-19 News Team

So, I'm watching her shoot her piece for the news. She's standing directly in front of Gombe's cage. I hear a little chuffing sound and see Gombe rubbing his face against the wire. Lauren turns and smiles sweetly at him then turns back to the camera. A few seconds later, out of the corner of my eye, I see a slow stripey kind of movement behind Lauren. The Gombers has quietly reversed his position against the chain link fence, so that he is no longer facing the camera. It's his hindquarters that are facing the camera and his tail has come up! Instinctively, I dived right to save myself, but didn't have time to shout a warning. Suddenly there's a spray like from a garden hose shooting past me and playing over the TV crew.  Lauren squeals and lights out across the grass faster than anyone I've ever seen run in stilletos. She runs a half a block shrieking before she comes to a stop and starts checking out her outfit for unsightly stains.

Meanwhile, I turn to look beside me and there's this poor bedraggled looking camera gal standing there, just dripping. Gombe had hit her square on. She really looked pitiful. I tried not to laugh, but God has not perfected my character quite that far yet.

I looked her up and down, sniffed the air and wrinkled my nose.

"I think like he likes you....." I said.

Oddly enough, she didn't think that was terribly funny. Gombe, however, was rolling on the floor of his cage, a big stupid grin on his face.

Sadly, that bit of video never made it to air. They canceled the show before that episode. Too bad too. That would have got about a million hits on Youtube.

Here's another camera guy who did record his similar experience for us, however. Watch this, then click on the Lauren Jones link and imagine her standing slightly to the left of the camera position and you'll get the idea.

© 2014 by Tom King

He Chose................Poorly

 
Rethinking Freshman Orientation

I became an English major as the result of a shrewd career choice I made during college orientation. After I became a teacher, Mrs. King became a full-time Mom. At the time the church discouraged members from sending their children to day care centers simply for their own convenience (like being able to pay for food and electricity), so Mama stayed home and we lived on $600 a month and what she could make babysitting the children of people who did believe it was okay for moms to leave their kids with babysitters while they went to work so they could pay for food and electricity. Sheila was wildly popular with her moms and the extra income did help out, but babysitting wasn't the lucrative sport then that it is now.

We hated the laundromat and didn't have the time or quarters to wash nearly as often as my Sweet Baboo preferred. So, in order to promote her continued mental health, we procured some second hand appliances. I usually bought them just about the time when planned obsolescence was kicking in, so I usually spent Sundays keeping our rattletrap collection of appliances running. I learned my appliance and auto repair skills as I went.

I had become an English major as a result of lenghty deliberations as to my choice of careers during freshman orientation. My high school vocational advisor had helpfully told me I was smart enough to do anything I want - advice that wasn't terribly helpful. I thought I'd figured out what I wanted to do by the time I registered for college. Apparently I hadn't.

When I told my college freshman "advisor" that I was thinking about a career in engineering, he warned me that there was a glut of engineers in America and that there were especially no jobs for newly graduated engineers. There was, however, he explained, a desperate shortage of English teachers. He gleefully described all the many and rewarding careers one could have as an English major. I should have smelled a rat, given that my advisor was head of the English department. Turns out the shortage of English majors was in his English classes.

So, like all English majors, once I was out of college I became an apprentice "making this crap up as I go" appliance and auto repairman. I can't tell you how many deligtful hours I spent under and inside of broken machines, deciphering their innards and replacing bits and pieces until I got them working again. The Internet has made this much easier, but back then it was all seat-of-the-pants mechanickin'. 

I'm still doing it, even at my advanced decripitudinousness. I spent last Sunday taking apart my Maytag dryer to find out what was wrong with it and what parts I was going to have to replace. I reassembled it and next Sunday I'll take it apart again to replace the belts and drive pulleys I have ordered. I also ordered a heating element for our Maytag oven which currently doesn't bake anything.  All this, because as an English major, I still can't afford to pay the $50 an hour it would take to hire a genuine certified appliance repairman. There's a reason why Maytag repairmen are so lonely in those commercials. Too many English majors and none of them can afford to call one.

At any rate, one thing I did learn is that the appliance repair gods require some small sacrifice of blood for every repair project I have ever done. The more complex the job, the more blood it costs me. I once had to take apart the engine of a 2001 Isuzu Rodeo.in order to replace the thermostat on the cooling system - a ten minute job on my 1977 Oldsmobile Jetstar 88. Not so with the Rodeo.. There were nuts on that thing that required three extensions and two universal joints just to get the socket to somewhere in the vicinity of the nut holding the bracket you had to remove in order to expose the thermostat. Isuzu, in its wisdom, made it so you had to remove the carburetor, and several layers of covers, hoses and things with touchy springs just to get to the practically unreachable thermostat. I finally figured out that there had to be some special tools like carburetor throttle spring mount wrenches and 2001 Isuzu Rodeo head cover rear mounting screw removal tools that you had to buy in order to do the job. As an English major, I couldn't afford to buy $200 wrenches I'd only use once. After several days, I had the thing apart and put back together with only a few pieces left over and with the loss of somewhere around two pints of blood. Thankfully none of my effusions of blood would need stitches (although the engine head covers and carburetor were liberally streaked with blood by the time I was done and looked like something out of Mad Max: Road Warrior). It's fortunate I didn't get cut up too badly in the process. I was, after all, living on an English major's diminutive salary and not very good with a needle and thread. As it was, I discovered that one fuel hose required that you remove the engine completely in order to reinstall it in it's original configuration. I wound up adding a foot to the hose's length and duct taping the excess to the firewall once I got it hooked it up. 

Good times!

And here's something interesting that freshman college advisors who are heads of English departments don't tell you when you choose an English-communications degree track. Do you know why they pay salaries and give important-sounding titles to English teachers? It's so they don't have to pay overtime and can work them enough hours per week to reduce their average take-home pay to something considerably below minimum wage hoping they won't notice! Sadly it works. Being an "executive director" is apparently worth more than gold to a well-trained wordsmith.

One thing English majors learn to do, however, is to multi-purpose all of life's little experiences. I have since become the author of over 1000 ad-supported how-to blogs on the Internet. It's how we keep the Internet on at our house - barely. My computer is early turn of the century and I built it myself out of leftover parts from my previous Windows 3.1 computer and a shrewd eBay purchase I made of an as-is motherboard screwed to a case that turned out to be proprietary and was the only case the motherboard would fit in. For some computer tasks, I have to take apart the case and swap PCI cards in order to do the job.

I suspect there will be a special reward in the judgment for English Department chairpersons who double as freshmen career advisors. At least I hope so. The day I graduated in 1976, I picked up the paper and scanned the classified.ads. I couldn't find a single job for an English major. Apparently the job market was experiencing a glut of English majors at the time, probably because a lot of kids were advised that there was a shortage of people who spoke the language back in 1972.

I did, however, find two full pages of classified ads for obscenely well-paying jobs for engineers.  To add insult to injury in a spasm of guilt, my Dad, who left Mom and us kids when I was 5 to go off and become an engineer for Brown and Root*, had offered to put me through Rice's engineering school on a Haliburton scholarship. He had become a self-taught engineer and project manager for the company so his kids got a free ride at Texas' premier engineering school if they wanted it. But genius that I was, I turned him down in favor of a degree path that led to my exciting career as an underpaid teacher and later as an underpaid worker in the nonprofit sector, where so many of my fellow English majors wound up after reading far too much Dickens in English lit classes.That, and we were already in line at the food bank anyway when we someone told us how we could work long hours for low pay making the world a better place. Oddly enough, that kind of sales pitch appeals to English majors.

They say our reward is in heaven. It would have to be if you were talked into becoming an English major** in this life.

Tom King © 2014

* This was after Dad did a brief educational stint in Texas's very special state vocational rehabilitation facility (the Huntsville Unit) where he also learned to ride in their rodeo program. 

** This observation could also apply equally to art history, women's studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology and marine biology (at least the kind of marine biology that leads to a well-paying job swimming with dolphins every day).

Dad doing his post-graduate work in engineering

New Book Release: Wampus Cat's Cure for Alcoholism and Other East Texas Stories

Just a quick self-indulgence this time.  My new book Wampus Cat's Cure for Alcoholism and other East Texas Stories is out this week on Amazon Kindle. Here's the book description:

Tom King's family stories and legends from East Texas introduce a fascinating collection of oddballs, characters, hound dogs and unusual ancestors. Tom King dips into the stories his grandfather and other gifted East Texas storytellers have shared over the years and offers up a couple of tall tales of his own. This colorful collection of characters include Wampus Cat, a reformed alcoholic and his mother-in-law; Cousin Alonso, an early twentieth century pioneer in special effects and pyrotechnics; Old Bob the water-walking wonder dog (she appears in two stories); Beulah the town's star testifier; and the legendary Aunt Agnes, who wages her own brand of guerrilla warfare during the Civil War in East Texas. Her weapons? A large quantity of lard, an old pipe and an aerial biscuit bombardment which crusty old Aunt Agnes and an assortment of pint-sized anarchist nephews use to cause a surprising amount of discomfort to the rebel forces in the neighborhood.

Elder Leiske and the Testimony of Roma Barnes

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I vividly remember the warm Sabbath Afternoon in Keene, Texas, when Roma gave her testimony. 

At the time Southwestern Union College (the college later changed it's name because the girls wouldn't buy T-shirts with the school initials on them) was captained by Elder Leroy Leiske, a lovely man. He didn't have a Ph.D. and was scorned by some of the more stuffed of shirt among the church's leading lights at the time. Despite his lack of academic credentials, the man nearly doubled attendance at the school, boosted the numbers of marriages among students, beautified the campus and put the school on solid financial ground. He remembered the names of every one of his students and there were better than 600 of them. We all felt special. He's the only college president I ever saw get a standing ovation from students for walking out on stage in a chapel service. The kids loved the man.

One of the things Leiske attended to particularly well was the spiritual health of the students. He believed in the power of unstructured religion and held semi-regular testimony meetings at the church and in the college auditorium. He always seemed to know when we needed a recharge and would hold one just in time?

It had been a beautiful service and as we were nearing the end of it. Then Roma B. tottered up to the front of the queue of those lined up to give testimony. She had been in line since the beginning waiting her turn to testify. Roma was basically our little town's resident odd duck and one never quite knew what she was going to say. She was a familiar character, who wandered aimlessly around town in something of a permanent fog, sometimes muttering to herself animatedly. Elder Leiske, who had considerable experience during his tenure at fielding Roma's heartfelt contributions to the church service, tried to roll things up before she could get up front.

Unfortunately for the spiritual atmosphere that day, Roma refused to be denied. It became obvious that she had a burning desire to speak and looked so pathetic that anyone who didn't know Roma would have thought Elder Leiske was being mean not to let her speak. Finally, he sighed resignedly and motioned her forward. As Roma took the mike, native Keenites who knew her took a deep breath.

I remember Leiske whispering to her about time and keeping it short. Finally, he shrugged helplessly and stepped aside. Roma wasn't entirely of this world at the time and she took the microphone with this very solemn look on her face. She wore a beige dress from the 20s (the 1920s) that hung like a sack on her down to her knees. She must have been in her late 40s or 50s by this time and she didn't believe in beauticians nor beauty products. This is not to criticize her appearance but to set the stage for her testimony. Simply put, Roma was a strange old bird. Her stern gaze swept over the congregation.

"I have had a terrible problem for many many years," she began. "I've struggled with it and prayed about it and finally the Lord has revealed to me what was causing my terrible problem." She paused dramatically. You could have heard a pin drop.

"Spices!" she announced shaking her head sadly. "They made me too sexy!" 

 

 Leiske went pale. A vast collective snort went up from the congregation and several crass individuals actually laughed out loud. I remember Ted Ramirez, our student body president and his buddy, Tee Chincheretta, sitting over to one side, doubled over in pain, their whole bodies shaking. If I remember right one of them rolled off his pew onto the floor. Roma turned and left the podium, her warning to the saints well and truly delivered. The congregation didn't want to be impolite and laugh out loud, but most of us were internally hemorrhaging, trying not to LOL as letting out a brisk snort later came to be known. Poor Elder Leiske stood up and stepped uncertainly to the podium. Without any indication that anything was amiss, he asked us to all bow our heads.

Elder Leiske's closing prayer was heroic! His voice never wavered.

© 2014 by Tom King

Keeping the Lady's Weapon in Her Holster

Jeanne Robertson tells a story about her husband "Left Brain" going to the grocery store and making a serious mistake. She tells it funny and like every woman alive she remembers every detail of the incident. Like most women she has a photographic memory for every mistake that poor man's ever made in his life complete with date, time, temperature and map coordinates - every detail vividly recorded in such a way that he looks completely stupid. 

Somehow women manage to keep a vast collection of such embarrassing incidents slung somewhere inside their brains in some kind of mental holster where they can whip them out in a split second, whenever they need them to win an argument with their virtually unarmed husbands who have either forgotten any such incidents in which their wives figure prominently or simply dare not retrieve them for fear she might exercise the nuclear option. Married men, you understand. Unmarried men, you don't want to know.

I believe that this asymmetrical distribution of forces between men and women is one of the primary reasons why men like my grandpa, who in their youth were talkative enough fellows, eventually lapse into a laconic quietude as they ages. 

One does what one can to keep Mama's weapons in the holster.

© 2014 by Tom King