Honey Boo Boo and The Amish Mafia: An American Love Story

Yes indeed sir, you are back in ‘Mereeka. That’s how we hillbillies say “America” don’t you know. We have yet to truly settle and most days I have a want to check with the airlines to see when we should check in for our flight back across the pond. Having shuttled our way through the holidays, we are residing (reluctantly) at an extended stay hotel. Life out of a suitcase is not unfamiliar to our crew, nevertheless, the pressure it creates within the family dynamic is enough to steam a turkey. Sharing limited space and seemingly limitless resources means that keeping this place tidy is a full time profession. This is something that I seemingly had much more time for while I was in France. Forcing myself to the brink of re-employment means that job applications and self-indulgent cover letters replace a load or two of laundry that is now piling up faster than rats abandoning a sinking ship. Pair that with my moonlight gig as my children’s chauffeur, and it seems I have little time for anything else. I have racked up enough miles to qualify for my CDL, so perhaps Truckmasters should receive my next resume submission.

Activities are on the rise and there is little time for boredom. Birthday parties and sleepovers have resumed as has our thrice weekly endeavor back into the martial arts. Other sports are soon to begin, so the wife and I have already committed ourselves to the divide and conquer approach to child rearing. Along with the intense confusion , frustration and toil involved in re-building a house, there is scarcely enough time to pour myself into bed for an hour or two of slumber. This is not to say that of an evening I don’t let the gentle glow of the moving picture box wash over me in cascading high definition. This return to apparent “normalcy” is somewhat bittersweet as my return to the land of my birth should surely alleviate the pressure felt when living with a sizable language barrier, RIGHT? My return finds my favorite television channels awash with “reality” based programming that has taken a turn toward the bizarre. I am now forced to watch television with a frenzy of subtitles as I am only able to make out every other word on any given program. I wish this was said with tongue in cheek, but it is the God’s honest truth. Spoken English in this country has become so poor that subtitles are now needed so that those of us who still have a full set of working teeth can follow along. The days of the Hollywood starlet are seemingly at an end. Their curvaceous figures have been replaced by the Gurning masses of rotundity we have apparently become known for. With crossed eyes and banjo in hand, we are making James Dickey proud . . . one television program at a time. 23 programs about logging in every known region and climate, 74 programs about panning for gold from the Kondike to the Bering Sea, 32 shows depicting the graceful art of “noodling”, 15 or so crazy bastards “rastlin” gators, and one or two delights that still have me scratching my head. We have “Auction Kings” and “Pawn Stars” by the drove. Buying, selling and trading the absurdity that has become our American culture.

Truth be told, the display is so disgusting that it is enough to make a grown man cry and a weak man vomit. Complete degradation . . . and I CAN’T LOOK AWAY! That’s right, I am contributing to the decay of the American cultural landscape and I simply can’t help myself. Whether it be Moonshinin or Amish warfare, I am tuned in. My mind is numb and a steady stream of drool is forming at the corner of my lips. Shameful really, but why deny it? Abrupt depictions of illegal activity with no consequence, all for the sake of bringing it to our living rooms . . . live and in dazzling color. Titles and catch phrases of pure American poetry. Everything is labeled with either “War”, “Hardcore” or “Extreme”. There are “Bad Girls”, “Real Housewives”, “Swamp People”, “Gator Boys” and something called a “Honey Boo Boo”. We have “Propery Wars”, “Auction Wars” and even a little “Hardcore Pawn”. One is truly forced into a life of DVR madness in order to keep up with it all. I mean, heaven forbid I miss the next episode of “Hillbilliy Handfishin” while I try to consume the bounty that is “Doomsday Preppers”. That’s right, programs about outdoor survival come in the thousands. From one man’s pseudo “real” fight against the elements to a barefooted hippy and his sidekick blundering their way through one of our national parks. And yes,the eventual slide down this digital scree slope amounts to a bunch of half-wits preparing for the end of the world.

If all of this “reality” is too much for you to take, you can always turn to one of the countless channels providing the insatiable public a liberal dose of brain eating Zombie dramas. Being morbidly fat is fashionable and the mullet is back in style. Having come this far in the short two years I have been absent, where will we possibly be two years from now? A show about Swinging or BDSM on the Oprah Winfrey Channel? Too Late. So, what is a guy to do? READ? How about “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”? Or maybe I could join the 65 million or so degenerates who found “50 Shades of Grey” to be a literary masterpiece. Can there honestly be that many people out there that like spanking the shit out of each other? Weird. I know what you are thinking. This is all making me seem quite prudish and uptight. Those that know me, know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, if you derive sexual pleasure from sticking a lamp shade up your ass . . . by all means, carry on my good man. Just because it’s not for me, doesn’t mean I judge. In fact, I am all about exposing the dark underbelly. Sometimes the best stuff resides in the “ahem” cracks. What I don’t like, however, is hypocrisy and drawing lines in the sand. Who chooses what is now glorified and what is to remain frowned upon and hidden. Let your freak flag fly I say, or maybe we should just keep it to ourselves for the sake of social decorum.

It all stinks of our society’s complete lack of creativity. Sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism. It wouldn’t bother me one bit if they sold bondage supplies at Wal-Mart so long as I could turn on the television and see something actually thought out or pick up a book that was actually well written. What I am trying to say is this . . . I miss France. Not for the magnificent baguette or the delightfully complex Bordeaux red, but for their sense of dignity. They don’t pretend to be prudish or offended by the realities and grotesqueries of the world. In fact, they seem to accept them without a single misstep. If Whiskey, Weed (for prescribed medicinal purposes in a jurisdiction where such things are legal of course), and Women are your thing . . . go for it. I quite prefer life WITHOUT taboos. Taboos, not illegalities. Some things are illegal for a reason and should stay that way. These two concepts are quite different indeed. Other than that, everything goes. The issue is, there is a time and place for everything and the French, nay, Europe as a whole has that figured out. No need to glorify it. Just let it be. So let’s strike a balance here America. Life isn’t all or nothing you know. There is in fact a middle ground. How about a nice trip to the movie theater with your significant other (male or female, genitals pierced or un-pierced) to watch Lincoln as something other than a Vampire slayer followed up by an equally nice evening of consensually degenerate sex acts in the privacy of your own bedroom with whips and chains you purchased at Bed Bath and Beyond . . . WAY BEYOND (they really do have EVERYTHING). Nobody has to know . . . REALLY! Again, just keep it legal. Not since Mister Ed has a horse been able to tell you if he was up for a night on the town. Besides, I heard Mister Ed couldn’t actually talk and only moved his lips to try and get at the peanut butter they smeared on his nose, but I digress. See, now that is life in balance. So, let’s get it all out in the open and out of our system so we can all move on with life . . . whose with me? No? Oh well . . . I tried. Until next time, I gotta run . . . Honey Boo Boo is about to start . . . hope I didn’t forget to set the timer to record the Amish Mafia! If you can’t beat em . . . join em. R

Flight of the Mouseling and a Cure for Literary Constipation

As pressure mounts from the outside to continue with this project I find myself terribly blocked and despite a diet heavy on literary bran muffins, I still can’t squeeze out a single word worth publishing. Indeed it has been some time and we are long overdue, but words don’t really do it justice. The depth and breadth of the change we have undergone over the past month or so has, in fact, left me speechless. Oh, I gave it the old college try a time or two, but to be honest it was a bunch of crap. Tedious paragraphs about packing and unpacking, shuffling about in a mindless fog of logistics. It was all just about as dry and lifeless as a popcorn fart. The longer I sat staring at a blank screen the more perplexed I became as to what, if any, direction this project should take. With an absolute gold mine of experience in the palm of my hand, why waste a single breath on the mundane reality of yet another international move. To be completely honest, it was fairly uneventful. Certainly, there will be memories that last the test of time, but are unlikely to translate in my broken prose. Still, I felt uncertain where to start and then it hit me . . . MOUSELINGS!

Anyone have the slightest clue what you call a baby mouse? Perhaps this is nothing more than my final break from reality under the burdensome strain of a life in flux, or maybe it is simply my way of getting back to where we started . . . back to the usual unstable meanderings of my mind. As I spent yet another mindless hour on the road, portaging my children to and fro, it struck me as odd that in all my years on this planet I had failed to learn what a baby mouse was called. A cat . . . kitten of course. Dog . . . a pup. I even am acutely aware that a baby Alpaca is called a Cria. Hatchlings for Aligators and calf for most of the larger hooved varieties of mammals wandering the hills and valleys. A deer has a fawn, a horse has a foal and some fish have fingerlings . . . but what in the hell does a mouse have? As it turns out they have pups, kittens and something called a pinkie. WTF? Stumbling across the answer to my query on the interwebs, I became hopelessly quagmired in some intensive research that eventually led me to an even more interesting topic. As if the English language isn’t fascinating enough in its oft times counterintuitive nomenclature for our offspring, the conventions for naming groups of things is more interesting still.

A group of mice, for example, are known as a “mischief”. And though I have never seen more than one owl at a time other than in a zoo, a group of these nocturnal predators is known as a “parliament”. Everyone knows a “troop” of monkeys and a “pride” of lions, but have you ever seen a “business” of ferrets or a “coalition” of cheetahs? Bears come by the “sleuth”, badgers by the “cete” and peafowl by the “ostentation”. That last one actually makes a great deal of sense in my humble opinion. Between the “rookery” of penquins and the “crash” of rhinoceri, I found my head swimming like a “squad” of squid. Human beings are worse yet. We come by the boatload or the busload; in a crowd or a gang. We come as a mob or even a tribe. We are known by the mass or a huddle and some have even come as a horde. There are multitudes and legions, families and flocks. Hell, we even come in something called a “dispora” . . . whatever that means. We congregate as troops and create a rabble or scrum. It seems there is no limit for how we combine, by the throng or the wave, we come just the same. The noise of it all would silence a “murder” of crows.

So, for better or worse, these are my thoughts for the day. Maybe tomorrow I will have something meaningful to say. The best I can hope for now is that this contrivance will have the desired laxative effect and I won’t again be absent for so long. See you next time. R