Mother Fletcher

What's the difference between pass the salt and pass the fucking salt?  In both cases the intention is clear.  The latter sounds more like the salt requester is maybe in a hurry, or maybe he is kind of pissed off, likely at the requestee.  If the requester is like an old salt, or a hippie, or just some guy, or gal, that has a fondness for that language, that interpretation is less applicable, like Old Dog asserts, it loses its impact.

You know watercolor painting is an arduous task.  You dip your brush into the wet paint, but you can never be sure exactly what the ratio of paint to water on the brush is.  Sometimes you might want a subtle highlight and what you get is a big dark blob, or you might want a big dark blob and what you get is a wet gruel.  And sometimes the paint doesn't dry as quickly as you think it should and you brush your blue right next to the yellow which turns out to be still wet and the blue leaks right into the yellow, and once yellow goes green you can never get it back.  Mother fucker!

I remember exclaiming that once when the teacher was away and I was surrounded by tender young beginners who were strangers to me.  I realized right away that my outburst was out of bounds, but when I looked up nobody was looking my way.  I thought to apologize, but it seemed like that would just bring more attention to it, so we all kept on painting away and none of us was worse for the experience as far as I could tell.

It's no big deal, when painting with grizzled water vets to hear damn or shit or in extreme cases, like blue seeping into yellow, fuck.  I've taken of late to suddenly changing the cuss word to darn, or shucks, or fudge.  And you know just because it's apparent that I have made that change I think the expletive has even more force.  I guess it gives me a bit more satisfaction because I think what a clever guy am I.  But then I think that all the time anyway.


I remember fifteen years ago reading an article about a guy who came across a plastic duck on an Oregon  beach and tracked it to some boatload that sank in the South China Sea, and did further investigation and it turned out the sea is full of plastic.  It seemed like an odd thing then, but since it has begun to seem like one of those menaces that may well do us in.  If microbes, likely engineered by us, do develop a taste for plastic beads, how much more tasty will be all our plastic toys and then where will we be?


Booze has been a historic force in our government though I think it was in the form of bourbon rather than beer.  Anymore I suspect that fewer of our pols, like those hard-drinking ink-stained wretches of yore, imbibe like they used to.  I imagine they spend more time in the gym than the bar.  You take one look at Paul Ryan and you know he is a teetotaler.  How much more pleasant was the drinking, smoking, tanning, John Boehner.


I was expecting to hear some joke with the ducka you head thing.  Egg shells and watermelon rinds would be much better than that awful plastic, and what a good eye on young Beagles to note the contents of a sack thrown from the second floor while on a moving vehicle in a faraway land.  If Americans pollute less these days I'm sure our manufacturers will swiftly make up for that under the helmsmanship of the likes of Pruitt.


At a time when the lakes weren't connected it was all dry land under the current Mackinac bridge, well except for the river that ran between the two lakes whose bed is still at the bottom of the strait and that's what those NatGeo people were showing with their nifty high tech devices.  I suspect those green squares are some kind of thing to like grow algae for profit or as some kind of experiment.  But maybe I have said too much already.