I hit the hay early last night.  It was cold and heat pumps don’t work for shit below freezing.   The weatherman was calling for 16 degrees.  In a bold attempt to fuck with the heads of the plutocrats that own our electric company the little woman and I have been keeping the thermostat set at 60 degrees downstairs this winter.  Upstairs catches what it can.  The bedrooms are cold. I’m talking plaster & lath with no insulation.  So, I was snugly supine and pressed  like a flower, reading, beneath a mountain of blankets when I came around the corner of a paragraph and slid to a stop on this…  “The big lesson of Anthropology 101 is that you can never know your own culture because you are it,”…

I drifted off and floated into dreamland thinking about that and awoke to find it still there, at the foot of the bed with the cat.

If that is true we are all something like those hands seen outlined on dark Paleolithic cave walls, by sprays of pigment, blown out of the mouths of our brutish ancestors.  The universe of possible realities sprayed at our form and we became what we blocked from sticking.  An outline.  A silhouette surrounded by what we rejected.  We did know it.  We just rejected it.  I just can’t say with any kind of objectivity what I am, but, I know I ain’t that.

Sanity, it seems to me, involves a turning away from the conflicting input.  But when the born junky gets off the junk, when the TV and the radio and the books stop and the lap-top gets closed… it’s just terribly dark, deep in the cave where that hand print rests,  half obscuring an extinct bison.

Precious little makes any sense to me any more.  In another sense, nothing has ever been any clearer.

Southern Livin magazine features home improvement, decoratin, entertainin, cookin, and travel — and of course, signature Southern recipes.

Yes, Spring is in the air in Dixie and attention to landscape detail is evident where ever one cares to look.  In the New South clean lines and strict formal plantings take a back seat to the abundant bounty only Mother Nature can produce.  Pride of place and heritage are paramount in this and all Southern Estate homes.  If one stops for a moment and closes their eyes on this quiet country road one can almost smell the magnolia blossoms, hear banjo music in the distance and hear the Master of the Estate enquire… What the fuck you lookin at?”

When it comes to first impressions nothing is considered more important than curb appeal.  Today the Southern home owner is treated to a cornucopia of options when it comes to fencing.  Brick, split-rail, boxwood hedge or traditional (pictured above) all can, and do, lend an air of Southern charm to private residences and public buildings alike.  Above we see the Zen like simplicity and attention to detail so magnificently executed as to almost appear totally organic in origin.

No place symbolizes the pride of history and heritage so valued in the  New South better than its birthplace, Appomattox Court House.  Oh, if these walls could speak, the tails they would tell of forgiveness and brotherhood reborn from the ashes of a war that today is all but forgotten.  When the multitudes of tourists are gone and the bus loads of school children have all gone back to their classrooms to reflect on the history they have learned… and all is quiet, as only the hallowed ground of a National Landmark can become, around dusk, on a Spring evening, one can almost hear the instructions passed on from the patriarchs of one generation to the youth of the next….  “Let the inbreeding begin!”

So, whether you are looking to pamper yourself at one of The South’s finer Bed & Breakfast establishments……

Planning a wedding…..

Looking for a special place to pop that “special” question…..

Or, just looking for that old fashioned “Family Fun” type of environment so missing from todays fast paced life…..  Come on down South, pull up a chair on the porch and grab yourself a cold one and wash them troubles away…… Ya-hear?

This months recipe was sent in by Billy Bob Campbell from Lynchburg Virginia.

Redneck Squirrel Fry 

~ squirrel legs, amount depends on how many you have or how hungry you are.
~ 2 eggs
~ 1 tbsp ketchup
~ salt and pepper
~ 1 can beer
~ Drakes batter
~ butter

Beat the eggs in a medium bowl. Add the ketchup. Salt and pepper to taste

Add 1/2 can of beer and drink the rest. (you don’t want to waste it!) Mix well.

Put some of the Drakes batter in a shallow dish.

Melt several tablespoons of butter in a skillet over medium-low heat.

Dip the squirrel into the egg mixture and then roll in the Drakes. Repeat for thicker coating.

Add to the skillet and cook until golden brown. Turn as needed.

Serve with mashed potatoes and cream corn.

Enjoy.

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ON THE ROAD IN DIXIE

It’s “shop till ya drop” down at the Dollar Tree that holds the distinction of being constructed right, smack dab, on top of one of the Seven Wonders of the Redneck World.  [The Great Wall of Madison Heights]  Engineered and constructed by a prominent local Fundamentalist Christian Engineering group it is recognized as an outstanding example of End Times Architecture.  Winner of the Jerry Falwell Award for Architectural Excellence and never intended to last very long anyway, because “The Rapture” was do any day, it hovers at an improbable angle over the Wal-Mart parking lot.

After you are finished with shopping for those last minute Christmas or anniversary gifts At the Dollar Tree be sure to wander round back and catch the view from Lover’s Leap.   We are pretty dang sure you will be glad you did.

The evolution of similar traits in unrelated lineages is rife in nature.  The Marsupial lion had retractable claws, the same way the placental felines do today.  The Marsupial mulgara has many resemblances to the placental mouse.  We are informed that, over time, similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ecological niche, even if those species are only distantly related.

Another way of saying that is “Earth knows how to cat”.  It also knows how to mouse, ant eater, flying squirrel and that’s just the beginning.  Earth has independently evolved sharp spines and prickly protrusions of the skin many times – echidnas (monotremes), the insectivorous hedgehogs, some tenrecs (a diverse group of shrew-like Madagascan mammals), Old World porcupines (rodents) and New World porcupines (another biological family of rodents)…. ALL make the point.   A sharp pointed hypodermic tube has shown up independently 10+ times: jellyfish, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, various insects, cone shell, snakes, stingrays, stonefish, the male duckbill platypus, and the stinging nettles plant.  What the Earth knows how to do goes on and on.  Silk production, echo location, bioluminescence, long sticky tongues and more kinds of “eyes” than you can shake a stick at.  Earth wants to see!  Earth wants to smell!  Earth wants to hear!

It is a terrible pity that our only experience with life is terrestrial.   We have knowledge of a pin-point on a surface of a universe that is so vast we can’t comprehend it.  We can only imagine.  We can only use the information we have and the patterns we detect and try to guess what must be going on outside our view.  Knowing some of what the Earth knows how to do we can ask if it ends there, or, if Earth is just a small example of what the Universe knows how to do.  If the Universe wants to see, smell, hear and who knows what else?

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.   http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html

Rupert wonders if there is no such thing as “Natural Law”.  He suggests that the Universe learns by doing and that what appear to be laws to us are just habits that an intelligent universe has picked up by doing.  Hard, or, by chance the first time.  Easier every time after.  What remains to be seen is if placental cats and marsupial cats are just the tip of the iceberg.  Are there kinds of cats out there in the Universe beyond number?  Are there as many different “kinds” of eyes as there are galaxies to view them with?  Is the whole point of it all, the whole point of life no more than an elaborate game of Hide and Seek as the Hindus believe?  The Universe, being all and one, could not help but be terribly lonely, so, it dreams that it is the myriad of separate things.   Are we that dream?

I think we are nowhere near ready to be exploring the universe.  I think Plate Tectonics and the relatively short distances between continents has left us far too unimaginative to be out there interacting with other sentient life forms that, no doubt, will not look exactly as we do.  All we have are humans of differing shades of pink and brown.  All we have are minor differences in color and THAT is enough to bring out our worst.

Just imagine how it all would have turned out if Asians hatched from eggs and black people were marsupial.  How long do you think it would have taken them to figure out how awfully vulnerable decent white folks were when we were molting?  Would we even have had a chance?

It has been three days of cold rain here on the east side of the Blue Ridge and it is taking its toll.  Add to that the seemingly endless Republican Debates that aren’t debates at all and the hideously depressing cast of characters they spew forth and encourage to vote and I have about reached my limit.  This morning I read about a woman with two vaginas.  A pornographer has offered her a million dollars to make a movie.   Won’t that be something?

Every morning, as I rise from my bed, I sit and look out the window and contemplate the world without me in it.  Today it was way too easy.  Today the disappointment of it all was right there up front like a bad tooth that can’t be ignored.  I’m not quite suicidal because I have always had that fear that if I didn’t hang in there, stay late at the party, I would miss something important.  I still need to see how things end, but, today not nearly so much.  Today naps of indeterminate length are a comfort.  A half hour, six months, a billion years…. There is no difference to a man who loves nothing so much as a good nap.

I spoke to an 84 year old gentleman over the weekend.  Last year he fell off a church roof, where he was doing some repairs, and his shoulder still isn’t right.  He is hard as nails and loves to tell the story of how he asked Jesus to save him from cigarettes.  Fifty years ago he smoked three packs a day and cried out to Jesus for help and hasn’t touched one since.  He just spent $6,400 on two hearing aids.  It was all of his savings.  He has nothing left.  He could have purchased about a dozen 50 inch, flat screen TVs for that amount of money.   If he was enormously fat Medicare would have bought him a scooter to drive around on.  If he was younger they would have paid $50,000+ to cut him open like a trout and staple his stomach shut.   But, he just couldn’t hear, so, the hearing aid guy cleaned him out.  Capitalism at its finest.

“Crap. 
It’s all crap. 
Living is crap. 
Life has no meaning. 
None. Nowhere to be found. 
Crap. 
Why doesn’t anybody realize this?”   (Hasegawa)

In the end isn’t it about mustering the fascination?  Picking up the ball and running into the future where it all will make sense and the pain will stop cold and be replaced with some kind of understanding that makes it all very worthwhile?  As if…

 “Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.”   (Andre Breton)

How frightening it is to be ourselves.  How difficult it is to observe the strangeness head on without blinking.   Muster that fascination and keep the top spinning, keep the ball rolling in the right direction.  Let one thing lead you to another and like the Buddha advised, be mindful.  When washing dishes be careful to just wash dishes and you will probably be all right, for a while.    But don’t sit out alone on warm starry nights.  Don’t let yourself dwell on how temporary and ridiculous it all is.   Don’t think about how they make sausages, why, or, out of what.   Never visit a slaughter house.

     “People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”  (Lemony Snicket)

So, you just have to really maintain a taste for salad.

This is the background on Newt Gingrich’s wife.  She was younger and her hair was different, but, it’s her.

Long before the woman with two vaginas there were those who made a living exploiting the anatomically overendowed.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”   (Kurt Vonnegut)

I’m sitting in my orchid room facing south-east.  It is almost 12:00 noon on a rainy winter day and the temperature here on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains is 37.5 degrees.  We all here have been lead to believe that the temperature outside will peak today somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 degrees.  The rain is not expected to let up until late tonight.  Puddles reflecting a grey on grey sky are scattered all around the flower beads like broken mirrors on a blank slate.  The Solstice has come and gone leaving that blank slate pregnant as hell with new flowers for another new year.

I have 26 different orchids and most of them it seems are preparing to have sex right here in this room.  It’s a whore house.  Shameless displays of colorful anatomical features grown specifically to attract and confuse and amaze will soon be everywhere pumping perfume and calling to insects that will never hear, or smell, or see them.  No one has a date for this prom.  There is no one here but us voyeurs who make a fetish of this kind of thing.  You could say we like to watch.

In the last week I had the opportunity to read two interesting books.  “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson and “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne.  The first was about Steve Jobs.  In 571 pages I learned that I don’t think I would have liked him at all.  I appreciate his art, but, I’m afraid that is as far as it goes.  The second book was about the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history.  The Comanches were artists at torturing people who were their enemies while Steve Jobs was somewhat of an artist at torturing friend and foe alike.  Steve Jobs figured out a way to tame and make computers friendly and useful to people almost to the point that they couldn’t live without them.  The Comanches figured out a way to tame the wild mustangs left behind by the Spanish Conquistadors and with them rule the South West.

Both books were very interesting and worth the time spent.  Steve Jobs was afraid to die, the Comanches not so much.  When a reporter asked Steve Jobs what kind of market research he did for his products Steve replied,  “Do you think Alexander Graham Bell did market research before he invented the telephone?”  Steve Jobs cried a lot.  I mean A LOT!  The Comanches expected to be tortured to death should they fail in battle so they always fought to the death.  Not a crybaby in a carload.

So, here I sit in my room full of oversexed dandelions, as usual, trying to make some kind of sense out of it all.  Failing of course because there is no sense to be made of this dog’s breakfast mix of so called facts and falderal we call existence.  The only game in town is “Connect-A-Dot”.  We are each, in our time and place, the only player.

Long after I have forgotten the things I learned about Steve Jobs I will remember how the Comanche broke wild horses.

They would lasso a horse around the neck and tighten and tighten the noose until the horse could be forced to the ground.  They would sit upon the terrified animal and restrict it’s ability to breathe until it, after much thrashing, would lose consciousness.  They would then undo the noose and the man who was to own the horse would begin to stroke its neck and blow air up its nose until it regained consciousness.  In a matter of minutes the animal could be mounted and rode away.

Could John the Baptist have been a Comanche?

According to Mitt Romney and his Mormon Church Jesus came to America after he was executed.  Who is to say Johnny didn’t come too?

I read this morning that… “Dr. James L. Poppen, a neurosurgeon at the Lahey Clinic in Boston and an international expert on the use of lobotomy for intractable pain, had been summoned to operate on Eva Perón in the summer of 1952.”  Evita died a few months later at the age of 33.

     The nature of Perón’s illness was initially shrouded in silence. Her doctors diagnosed advanced cervical cancer in August 1951, but as was common at the time, the patient was told only that she had a uterine problem.  

…”a uterine problem”

As the orchestra begins to gently play “Don’t cry for me I’m a metaphor” the audience is treated to multiple screens displaying images of every-day life.  Stove-Top Stuffing and Jimmy Dean sausages and half the population living at or below the poverty line, what ever that is.  Moe, Larry, Mitt and Newt and so many things I have to remember to ask my doctor about, and if I should be on, and if I would “benefit from”.  So little time with Christmas almost here and the Solstice upon us and all the problems in the world.

…”a uterine problem”

“Postmortem X-rays of Perón’s skull showed indentations in the areas where lobotomies were usually performed.”

     In keeping with the holiday spirit it is my hope that, when our time arrives, the same can be said for us all….. Metaphorically.

Breathe deep the gathering gloom,
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bedsitter people look back and lament,
Another day’s useless energy spent.
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son,
Senior citizens wish they were young.
Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colors from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?

(Late Lament)

The guy who invented the frontal lobotomy got a Nobel Prize for figuring out a quick and inexpensive way of making people with profound mental illness much easier to handle.  In retrospect it doesn’t appear to have been such a good idea.  Today we drug people who are hard to handle into oblivion.  It’s kind of a variation on the same theme but nowhere near as messy.  Back in 2005 two researchers from Australia got the Nobel Prize for figuring out that the bacteria H. pylori caused stomach ulcers and that antibiotics would cure the whole problem.  Unfortunately, as with the frontal lobotomy, it appears that the Nobel committee may just have hit the Jackpot once again.

Research has recently shown that the stomach behaves differently after a course of antibiotics eradicates resident H. pylori.  For one, after a meal, levels of ghrelin, a hunger hormone secreted in the stomach, are supposed to fall. But in subjects without H. pylori, the amount of ghrelin in the bloodstream held steady, in essence telling the brain to keep eating.  Experimental animals given antibiotics in the same dosage as american children with “ear infections” had marked increases in body fat even though their diets remained the same. (Indeed, farmers have long given antibiotics to livestock to promote weight gain without increasing caloric intake.)  Researchers at New York University have found an inverse correlation between H. pylori infection and childhood-onset asthma, hay fever and skin allergies.  Researchers in Switzerland and Germany have reported that mice given H. pylori actually are protected against asthma.

“If some twisted genius vaporized all 10 trillion cells in your body — along with the hair, the fingernails, and other tissue they create — it would not leave empty space behind. A body-shaped cloud made of bacteria, viruses, and other former stowaways would hover briefly in the air. The cloud would outline your skin, delineate your lungs, trace your digestive tract. You might be gone for good, but your shadow biosphere would remain.” 

The 100 Trillion micro-organisms “Left Behind” are anything but our enemies.  Without them we could not live and, we are learning, tampering with their balance in the cavalier fashion most people are accustom to may prove to be the root cause of some of the most deadly and expensive health problems faced by our modern society.  Asthma kills more than a quarter million people every year.  Obesity, especially in children, and the myriad of other health problems obesity directly causes contribute in a big way to the unsustainable cost of our so called “modern” health care system.  Mental problems, digestive problems, cardiovascular problems, cancer….. “We’re just beginning to learn the effects our micro-biome has on us, but it’s clear that they can be profound. Certain species help digest food and synthesize vitamins; others guide the immune system.”

    George Washington died of a throat abscess.  His physicians, the finest medical minds of the day, treated him with advanced bloodletting techniques in the hope that the evil humors causing the disease could be purged from his body.   The ironic thing is this…. If  instead of using their scalpels to open blood vessels in his  arm, to let out the bad humors, they had instead asked George to “open wide” and, with the same implement, punctured the abscess in the back of his throat the Father of our Country might just have recovered and gone on to complete the construction of his garden at Mount Vernon.  George was a hell of a gardener in case you didn’t know.

The story of every living thing that ever was or will be ends with a phrase something like the title of this rambling bit of heartbreak and hiccup.  Here today… gone tomorrow.  It is my understanding that, by the end of this month, the earth’s population will hit 7 Billion.  I don’t think anybody can really grasp what seven billion of anything is.  Seven billion pickles, seven billion tuna fish is just not knowable in any real sense.  It makes me wonder how many people there have been since day one.  His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama says prayers every day for everybody in the hope that all the sentient beings that ever were will find enlightenment.

How many individual centers of the universe have made the dust to dust round trip, wide eyed and hard wired self-certain of their own importance?   It doesn’t appear to stager the Lama’s imagination, but, it sure does a job on mine.

Understanding that we don’t see things how they are…  We see things how we are… is something that I need reminding of constantly.  It’s a shocking bit of understanding, and keeping it foremost in view is like never getting off a roller-coaster of input that you ride alone.  It gets old.  One tires of the isolation.  That is where gravity comes from.  The gravitational force has no choice, in a universe such as ours,  but to become manifest.

For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life, letting his work live or die on its own account, and has never wholly surrendered himself to life.  

In place of his own self the artist puts his objectified ego into his work, but though he does not save his subjective mortal ego from death, he yet withdraws himself from real life.

And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness.   [Otto Rank]

Lately I have become fascinated with the idea that we humans seem to be the only mammals who do not have an innately preferred way to house ourselves.  Perhaps all this business about the housing bubble got me going, or, the proliferation of what have come to be known as “McMansions”…  I can’t really say.  I can only state that for some reason I find it odd that something as basic as shelter has gotten us into such an economic pickle.  I’m fascinated by the idea that humans have come to view their nests, if you will, as the primary way of displaying their status in the general pecking order to their fellow humans.  Cathedral ceilings in “Gated Communities” where Palladium windows are a must and countertops of marble or granite, well, that goes without saying today doesn’t it?  Like the magnificent plumage of a peacock’s tail our homes became the way we show our fitness, our taste and our place within the society we inhabit.  Now, it all has gone bust and many find themselves asking the question, “How the hell could I have been that stupid?”

It’s an odd kettle of fish when you think about it and I have been thinking about it.  Only humans do this.  Squirrels don’t work their whole lives to build a nest.  Rabbits don’t invest everything they have in their warrens.  No other mammal invests more than the absolute minimum they can get away with in shelter and some don’t invest a damn thing at all.  Hold on, beavers, I almost forgot about beavers who do in fact invest an enormous amount of time and effort in their housing arrangements.  With the readers permission I am going to place beavers in a special category due to the fact that beavers are so specialized with regard to housing, as a result of their dietary habits, as to deserve to be considered an exception that perhaps, as they say, proves the rule.  But even beavers don’t go trying to out do other beavers.  They live, as all other mammals do, in the way that is the easiest and most comfortable for their “kind”.

The question I am interested in is this.  Is there a home, a nest type, warren or den if you will, that your average human would innately feel the most comfortable in simply because of the way it is designed or built?  If so, what would it be like and how could we go about making our lives better by promoting housing that makes us feel good rather than look good in the eyes of our fellow humans.  Affordable substance rather than unaffordable fluff and nonsense that enriches bankers and mortgage brokers far more than it does the poor humans who reside within.

Now you may be asking yourself why I would think about things like this.  Why I just wouldn’t accept the idea that humans are different from the rest of the mammals in many ways and one of them is in how much we like to display how great we are by living in homes as big (or bigger) than we can, or logically should, afford.  Actually, it all goes back to a “feeling” I once had 37 years ago.

It was winter and I was in graduate school, living in the Mid-West.  We were poor and perpetually on the lookout for free ways to have a good time on weekends.  There was a big snow storm scheduled to hit and I was tangled up with characters who liked to winter camp, as I did myself.  A suggestion was made that we take the liberty of bending the law and sneaking in to a nearby state park that was closed for the season.  The previous summer we had visited the park in question and noticed that it contained a particularly beautiful cave, carved by an ancient river, in what was now the base of a small cliff.  The idea was to spend the night of the big snow in the cave fortified with all the beer, red meat, onions, green peppers and I can’t swear to it, it being 37 years ago and all, but, there may have been a few joints involved.

To make a long story short we made it into the park and it did indeed snow more that two feet that night.  We had a great fire and drank and ate ourselves into a very happy and contented place.  Good friends, good food and a particularly beautiful winter night deep in the quiet woods.  I remember at one point, late in the evening, leaving the cave and walking in the pitch dark down the hill in search of a place to relieve myself.  When I had finished I turned around and noticed I could no longer see any sign of our home for the night.  I followed my deep imprints in the snow up the hill.  As I crested it I could see, through the falling snow, the fire-lit mouth of the cave and my companions within in the distance.  That is when it hit me.  A feeling I had never experienced before and never felt again since.  It shook me to my core and I stood transfixed to the spot for how long I can’t say.

I wondered how many times over the untold thousands of years our ancestors have walked this earth, before McMansions, Cape Cods and condos were invented, someone crested a hill, rounded a corner or parted the foliage and saw what I saw and felt what I felt at that moment.  It was home.  It rang some kind of a genetic bell in me that I have never forgotten and never will.  I search for a taste of it again to this very day.

Something from Above

As the summer slowly draws to an end here in Dixie I find I can no longer even pretend that I have any idea what is going on.    Not in my yard, not in my town, not in my state, not in my country… not on my planet… and so on and so forth.  I honestly don’t have a fucking clue and there is no use pretending that I do.  I can only make “guesses” that this is the kind of feeling experienced by the Romans when the Barbarians were peeking over the hedges, admiring the layout.  It’s a creepy feeling that things will never ever be the same again.  That feeling is bad enough, but, it all gets much worse when you hear one of your neighbors discussing Jesus and how scientists don’t know everything.

I walked in my garden at sun up this morning and it looked “seedy”.  The stems were too long.  There was rot and old dried up centers to plants that were, just a few weeks ago, factories of growth.  It  all seems to be going the other way now. It’s finishing up and doing its last stretching out before death takes it on some yet undisclosed fall night when the black frost comes quietly.  That is still many weeks away, but, my garden is already prepared.  It’s seedy.

Seedy is the metaphor.  I have lived in seedy neighborhoods where the porches were crooked and the shutters were unpainted and improperly secured.  Seedy people lived there sometimes and hung out in seedy places with other seedy people.  Seedy is the metaphor sun up in my garden put in my head today and I can’t seem to get it out.  It seems too good of a fit for so much of what I see around me.  My culture, my country… my planet, all seem a bit seedy if I take the time to look.  Seedy.

Shakespeare wrote, “Juliet is the sun.”  He didn’t mean that Juliet was a giant ball of luminescent gas.  He meant that she was his light and his warmth and the center of his universe.  He meant that Juliet was “like” the sun in certain ways.  He meant it metaphorically not literally.  If Shakespeare was a Redneck he could very well have written, “Tiffany is asparagus”.  I doubt if he ever would have become famous as a Redneck, or, that writing things like “Tiffany is asparagus” would have made any sense to anyone like “Juliet is the sun” does.  There are metaphors and there are metaphors.  Some are very easy to understand and say things and convey truths by using examples of things that are “like” other things so beautifully that they make the truth of something even more true, even more clear.

In my opinion America has gotten seedy.  I just don’t know a more accurate way to put my feelings.  I hope my metaphor makes sense to someone besides me.

I’m not going to leave you hanging (another metaphor) with this “Tiffany is asparagus” business.  Have you thought about it?  Perhaps you know Tiffany, or knew Tiffany at one time, or someone like Tiffany.  These days she is living in a single-wide on her brothers property up on Puppy Creek.   You know how asparagus changes your urine and makes urinating somewhat of an unpleasant experience.