It's 4 O'Clock Somewhere

So, i'm a tea drinker now, going on a fortnight; drank coffee for thirty years. I never really liked the bitter taste of coffee, actually; i liked what i put in it: milk, sugar, and vanilla flavoring; liquid ice cream with a kick.

I wonder if tea drinking will make me a different person, i AM using words like "fortnight", after all; so, obviously i'm reading Jane Austen.

Coffee is John Wayne, tea is Ricky Gervais; i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess that expression came about when people started using wood floors in homes, there's nothing like a wood floor to resonate the sound of a dropped shoe or boot.

That thing about red meat being next to go is an inside joke that no one is in on. The thing is, i have a lot of customers in the cattle industry, i wonder if i should be writing stuff like that, it might upset them. But if i'm not going to write things that might upset people, i have nothing to write about. Anyway, beef, i can take it or leave it, but to me the only good steak is a piece of meat loaded with fat; it's the fat that i like, not the meat, just like my coffee. This year i've had lean beef on three occasions, when there's been nothing else to eat, i just don't see the point of lean beef and i'm not going to eat all that fat either, when i actually prefer chicken.

Don't pay any attention to me, it's the tea talking.

Life on a Rock

Who are we and what do we want? People, i mean.

For a short time there i thought we were creations of a deity and that our principal desire should be salvation--the fundamentals that my parents taught me. But it slowly dawned on me that we are just another one of the living creatures that evolved on this planet. I then realized that what i truely wanted was a reasonable amount of happiness during my time on this rock and to understand it and as many of its other inhabitants as i could; by inhabitants i mean other animals, fish, plants, trees, viruses, everything that i share Earth with.

This desire to know about all the creatures on this rock and the rock itself, i realize now stem from my connection to these things. A connection that modern life keeps hacking away at.

15,000 years ago i would have to risk life and limb to obtain material for making footwear; there was a closer connection then, between hunter and hunted. Today, unless i had to bring down the UPS truck that delivers my animal skins to produce footwear, the predetor-prey relationship is gone, the connection is less defined. My need to explore mother Earth, to become one with, is diminished.

Knowledge of life is understanding of it and to understand is to feel, which brings honor to the life being acknowledged. That is why Facebook is so popular: most people like being acknowledged.

"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance"
--Socrates

Signs of Age

I was watching the movie Charade (1963) the other night, and i kept asking myself: why don't filmaker make movies like this anymore? Is it because we no
longer have Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant? I miss that banter between two charming characters; i suppose, like everything else, if it doesn't sell, writers won't write it.

Maybe it's because you can't bring it back, like you can't bring back the cattle drive because of the fences. But in this case: characters like Hepburn and Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell in the Thin Man movies, it's the fences that  have been taken down, anthropologically speaking, that keep that kind of charm from coming back to the movies.

And maybe it should not be tried again; let those movies stand alone as a product of it's time; like the romance of the passenger train.

And who says 21st century artists cannot charm us as well in that genre? I just haven't seen much of it. I do have my opinions about who has potential: i was just watching Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski; first of all, he pours powdered non-dairy creamer in his white Russian and it's driving me nuts because that stuff is so hard to dissolve in cold liquids, but i think he has potential.

I 've quit coffee, or rather, coffee has quit me after 30 years. It no longer has much kick, unless i up the dose to dangerous levels. I've switched to black tea to stave off withdrawl headaches and i'll drink that for awhile. Eventually, i want to see what i can do without stimulants; actually, i did some research on caffeine and it could be my cause for that awful achey feeling in the mornings when i'm getting out of bed; i've learned that caffeine doesn't just mess with your brain, it can mess with your body.

So it begins. Thank you coffee, for 30 years of friendship, a truer friend i did not have, you kept me going through good and bad. Next: red meat.