I don't suppose you ever watched the movie "The Ten Commandments", but that was a recurring line in it. The evil pharaoh (Yule Brynner) would say that each time he issued a new edict.
I never had a problem with writing, although I remember that a lot of kids did. One teacher used to make writing assignments as punishment for one infraction or another. She would pass out this sheet of paper that was called "full scap paper", or maybe it was "fool's cap", and the offender had to fill every bit of it with words of repentance. Every bit, that is, except the top and bottom line, upon which we were forbidden to ever write. One time the whole class had to do it because somebody had circulated a petition for redress of grievances which we had all signed. We were supposed to write an essay about what we had allegedly done wrong and how sorry we were about it. I instead went into a full rant about my constitutional rights. I got so worked up that I even wrote on both the top and bottom line in defiance of the standing edict. The teacher was not pleased. She told me to rewrite the whole thing, which I was eager to do. I told her that, if she didn't want me to write on the top and bottom line and into the margins this time, she would need to give me more than one sheet of paper because I had a lot more that I wanted to say about this subject. She must have changed her mind about the rewrite because she tore my original draft up into little pieces and told me to shut up and sit down, which I did.
My deer blind was intentionally built so that no more than one person could fit into it. Ice fishing shanties can be communal structures, but deer blinds should never be. When my father and I went deer hunting, we deliberately sat far enough apart so that we couldn't talk to each other. Unlike dogs, deer and other wildlife are not comforted by the sound of a human voice. Indeed, the are downright paranoid about it. Plenty of time for talking back at camp or in the car on the way home. When you're hunting you need to shut up and pay attention.
I never worked the main gate at Bliss Fest. I did a lot of mowing and chainsaw work and, for several years I was the porta-potty coordinator. One day I complained to our director that the porta-potties were not being pumped out in a timely fashion, so he put me in charge of them. Let that be a lesson to you! I didn't pump them out myself, I just coordinated with he contractor who supplied the units and maintained them for us. Unlike his predecessor, this guy was so cooperative that I asked him what we could do to make his job easier. This resulted in the Porta-Potty song that's on the tape I gave you awhile back. It was a big hit, probably the most popular song that I ever wrote. It's like that famous guy said: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people."
They did eventually straighten the dog policy out, after sufficient time had passed that nobody remembered I was the one who had originally brought it up. What they did was compile a list of all the kennel facilities in the tri-county area. When somebody showed up at the gate with a dog, they gave him the list and told him to come back without the dog. There was some mumbling and grumbling at first but, people came to accept the idea once they realized that it was the same rule for everybody and was being consistently enforced.
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