wearing the right hat

Oh those old hymns.  Oh those long mornings inside that dingy church wearing those awful clothes that you couldn't get dirty which meant you couldn't have any fun in, even when you were finally released until you got home and changed out of them, and even then you would have to hang them up carefully.  Arrrgh.  And then the preacher droning on and on and then that phrase, "Now let us open our hymnals to Hymn 639." 

I don't remember the hymn you reference.  In my mind it is always "The Old Rugged Cross," which was just a slow ugly dirge.  Wait I just remembered another one.  "In the Garden," I think.  It had a sprightly little passage: "And he walks with me, and he talks with me.." kind of like a minuet i guess.  Not that I know anything about minuets, but I have seen people doing them in movies, or at any rate I thought that was what they were doing.

Every now and then I go to a funeral or a wedding and find myself in some protestant church, and there they still are in those little, what, hymnal holders, on the back of the pew in front of you, and I wonder why like tail fins and coal bins and other things of my youth, they have not been replaced by something new.  Maybe they have.  Probably anymore the preacher has them whip out their smartass phones and they download the hymn from the cloud and then they sing it out to the clouds where presumably God takes a minute or two out of His busy day running the universe to see if they are in tune.  I imagine He prefers those dusty dog-eared hymnals, but He is only God so what can He do?

Many of my ilk, along with most of your ilk are against a national
ID, but I'm kind of with you, what's the diff?  I'm a little uneasy about the idea of if you are not doing anything wrong, what do you care who knows?  Don't you sometimes want to pick your nose?  And you know your friends in the NRA hate the thought of any kind of gun registry.

Tea partiers are like libertarians and dare I say hippies.  You don't have to go through any rigamarole to become one.  If you have a tricorner you can be a tea party; if you have a headband you can be a hippie; libertarians I think prefer to go bare-headed, maybe a cowboy hat, who doesn't love a cowboy hat? 

When I was a young man I smoked dope and dodged the draft and grew out my hair, and even though I wasn't exactly like everybody else who did those things, I would acknowledge that I was a hippie.  You want to hide out in the swamp with old Betsy and think the gummint is always up to some nefarious plot, I don't know why you don't acknowledge that you are a tea partier.

Actually back in my youth, when I was one, I never was fond of the term hippie.  It didn't sound, you know, dignified.  But I did acknowledge that that's what most other people called me.  Can you acknowledge that some poor fainting seaman coming across our gleaming blog would probably consider you a tea partier?

I have all my packages wrapped up in two tote bags, ready to haul to my sister's and bring back my haul with, and then it will be over for another year.    Then another week and we begin a whole new year of stoking the lighthouse that is The Institute.