The statement or adage or quote or wherever it came from, is true in my experience. I was warned about it by my father when he got to be about my age. "Bored people are boring." My old school pal was bored, so she called me last night and yapped away until I thought my ear would drop off. If I tried to say something to be a part of the conversation she would literally tell me to shut up and let her talk. I took about as much as I wanted to and hung up.
Granted, journalistic writing is not much different than what that woman was doing last night, but reading this blog is voluntary, and if the reader has had enough of my redundant, repetitive crap, they can just click their way outta here. they don't have to read my crap. I don't know who reads what here, and I don't know how much they read before they hang it up. No more than they want to I hope.
There is one thing that people have to do for themselves and thats entertainment. They have to discover for themselves what amuses them and provide themselves with the opportunity to indulge whatever that is. That's what this bored woman wanted from me. She wanted to use me to amuse herself, and she didn't give a damn whether I was mutually amused or not. There ain't no accounting for taste.
This morning I deliberately opted for walking pretty much the same route I took yesterday. On my way out of the house I stopped and picked the bottom leaf off the ornamental kale plant I keep here at my house for eating it raw, then I went over to the field with the rye grass on it and picked some of it to chew as I walked.
Today I knew I was chewing a cud of grass and it was deliberately done. It made me feel ancient. I knew I was doing the same thing millions of homo sapiens have done before me when I picked and chewed on the grass blades. I doubt if my ancestors had fields of cover crops to select from. Cover crops are a fairly recent agricultural development.
The State of North Carolina hired him and hundreds of other agriculture majors from all over the country to move here and teach the scientific principles of farming. There may have been some sort of country-wide movement that instigated the State to do this thing, but it wasn't long after our family moved here that it also started paving many of the farm-to-market country roads in the eastern part of the state where all the old plantations were.
Now it's hard to find a dirt road to remember the "good ol' days" by. Not that anybody cares about not having to navigate the pitfalls of dirt roads. There was only one paved road in the entire eastern part of the State when we first moved here. It was a federal government road between two large military installations or even it wouldn't have been paved.
My maternal grandfather was a section boss for the State of Mississippi that was in charge of road maintenance for the dirt roads. My uncles all worked for him growing up, and when the state finally got around to using mechanized equipment they learned how to run bulldozers and motor-driven scrapers, and they did it all over the country for the rest of their lives.
My paternal grandfather was a blacksmith and owned a cotton gin. Neither of my grandparents could read or write. My father and mother were the only members of both families who graduated from high school and got a college degree out of twenty aunts and uncles. I could read and write better than they could by the time I was 8-9 years old, but so could their own children. Mandatory schooling changed everything.
I have practically no experience being illiterate. I was precocious and reading a little by the time I was five years old. I probably didn't have much choice with both my parents teaching school. My older sisters made sure of that. I was the baby boy for four and a half years before my younger brothers showed up, and they used me to imitate our parents, who they wanted to be like when they grew up.
They did grow up and become teachers, and they did it for the rest of their lives. Both of them are now retired high school teachers. My younger brothers and I resented them and we deliberately didn't finish college to keep from doing it.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
