Don't ask

In all the wide world,

Nothing will draw the stares,

Like a Pennslobovian girl,

Feeding a plumpkin pears.

Chuckin' Nuts

It is a fricken coop tradition to write a Thanksgiving post. In fact, one could say the fricken coop began on a thanksgiving lost in the slurpy slime of antiquity. When Pappy sat his rheumatic rump down at a keyboard for the first time and flogged the easternet with the whip of his wit. With reckless abandon he flung his thoughts and thanks willy-nilly into the deep and found a few of them washed back up in his inbox the following day. That's not the first time he realized he wasn't the only castaway from society sittin' on an island of isolation, tending nothing but their own coconuts, but it is the first time he realized he had a way of launching his nuts at those other archipelagos. Sometimes he even gets a nut or two heaved back. For a while there was a brisk nut trade going on. Lately, not so much. Mostly he just sloughs around the trebuchet, loads in a few of his heavier nuts, the kind he couldn't finish by himself, and trips the trigger. He watches them disappear into the distance and says a little prayer that each one finds a home and a heart aching for coconut milk.

It is also a fricken coop tradition to let analogies spin off into a bizarre life of their own until they finally mutate into staggeringly irrelevant stories. For those of you suddenly finding yourselves in a freak barrage of coconuts, that is known as a "Voorlooper." We grow those here at the coop.

So, on an equally freakishly mild and beautiful Thanksgiving morn here in the Pennslobovian Archipelago, let's help Pappy chuck some nuts:

• i's thankeefull for this freakishly mild and beautiful morning.
• and that i am not standing in a near freezing river in New Yawk with the Duke of Fluke, with aching hands trying to catch a fish that won't bite while the sky makes up its mind whether to rain, freeze the rain or snow on me and finally decides on all three.  Happy hunting, Duke.
• i's thankful that despite nearly being a hostile, irritable fourteenager, i can still have a conversation with my son Happ.
• i's tankful for the talents i see's in ma boys.
• i's tankful for the talents finally being recog-i-nized in my wife.  Always knew she'd succeed.  Now if she'd just make enough so's i could retire...
• i's mighty thankyfull for sweet potato pie.  yum.
• i's tankfool for Morgan.  Cute lil' plumpkin.
• i's thankful that i finally have a callin'.  Now if i could jest hear better.

Hang on, there's one more and it's a doozie.

• I, Pappy Fricken, am most thankfully thankful that a couple o' thursday's ago, we finally finished the bedrooms in the addition i been building for nigh on eight years and can finally, after a lifetime of makin' do, can move into spaces created just for us.  Foretaste o' heaven is what it is and it tastes like sweet potato pie.  Mmmm.  That's good stuff.
• Lil bit of spin-off a that last 'un, i might get a Lego lab out of the old cave we vacated.  Maybe i'll call it the ArchipeLego.

Y'all have a good 'un too.

the Ballyhoo Belfry

It was one of those days, one of those rare, precious, chipmunk chirping days that one wakes up, goes outside, takes a deep breath with both the lungs and the eyes and says, "Golly gee, (No really, that's what you say!) What a great day to be in Pennslobovia!" It was the kind of day that makes a guy blow off football in order to be outside. Or just drag the tv out onto the porch, let's not get crazy here. Fortunately, i had pressing carpentry business to keep me from planting my posterior in the flower bed of lethargy.

The Ballyhoo Belfry needed a ladder.

The Belfry has no actual bells in it. It'll soon be home to a couple of ding-a-lings, but no bells. It is the sleeping loft for my boys' room. There being no ladder and gravity being a constant, the Ballyhoo have been sleeping on the floor of the main room, a spacious blank canvass now cramped up with a computer desk, a twin bed, a full size bed, a fusbol table and a full drum kit or as much of the full drum kit that Happ could shoehorn into the corner. Obviously, they are languishing under insufferable conditions and Amnesty International will be holding a concert for rich kids in France any day now to draw awareness to the problem. To avoid this and being villified by the eminent philanthropist Sean Penn, i spent my sabbath day of rest building a means of conveyance from one floor to the next.

The really weird thing is that i enjoyed it. Normally, working on the station in any form is the thirteenth hell. i have often been quoted as saying the station is cursed. That it is a sentient entity actually fighting against being built. That it is murdering me one Saturday at a time, punching a needle in and drawing a little more soul out with each passing week. That it is Sysyphus' labor, pushing forward through blood vessel popping effort only to see the rock roll right over me and back down the hill at the end and force me to start over with nothing but bone cracking fatigue and the whole job to do again tomorrow to show for my pain.

But all that changed a couple of Thursdays ago.

a bit o' stuff

So the coop was getting a bit run down. That might actually be a bit of an understatement. Sort of like saying Hiroshima got a bit blown up. To say it better, the coop is a bit like Shaq's movie career, sad and pitiful. To be honestly honest, the coop was already in this state when we stumbled up the drive for the first time. We were more interested in the poison ivy infested clay surrounding the coop than the actual structure. No one entertained notions of actually living in the coop for any extended period of time. The thing about notions, turns out they're pretty good at entertaining themselves. You don't have to invite them in, they just pick the lock, bribe the dog and set up a boutique for hard truths.

So for a bit of time now i've been building a bit of an addition to the coop. Yeah, it's taken a little while, the Taj Mahal wouldn't have taken longer if it have been built by a blind carpenter and his deaf laborer. You would think this was a union job. Or that i was getting time and materials instead of paying time and materials. And maybe that's been the problem, outside of a cool place to barbecue and practice the art of drunken monkey philosophy when we finished the veranda, the rewards have all been of the vague, spiritual kind. A bit on a par with building character. Only not as rewarding. In fact, at times, it's been a bit of a drag. In the sense that the black plague was a bit of a cold going around.

But all that changed a couple o' Thursdays ago.

Drei Fragen: part 'ew'

There are times when i stray so far from the point that i actually circle back around to it...

this is not one of those times. i actually had to go back to the beginning of this thread and remind myself where i was going with all this scruffilosophy. To quickly review, no, to sum up, we discussed why God made us, we briefly touched on why he made us two genders, we went back to why God made us and now here we are, outside the castle guarded by thirty men and all we have is a Fezzik's strength, my sword and your brains. Oh yeah, and a wheel barrow and a holocaust cloak.

So, two genders, man and woman, why? i can almost hear Larry King interviewing God. From the number of divorces he's had he may really want to know. But think about it. What's the practical purpose behind splitting us up? It's like a built in fault line. Maybeit it is inseperable from the third question: why did God create sex? When i put the question to Happ, he supposed that procreation was the idea. We're two different genders with sex so that we can keep making more of ourselves on our own. But why? There are other ways. He just grew one of us from dirt, why didn't he make more like that or teach us to. Nice field Adam, real bumper crop of youngin's sprouting there. He pulled Eve from his rib. We could have sprouted little pods and divided like amoebas. Don't 'ew' me, if that's all you knew, you'd think it was cute. The idea of a person growing inside and squishing out in a gush of blood and amniotic fluid isn't gross? C'mon!

No. God, who for the sake of argument or lack of argument, we are presuming is flawless, created two genders and gave those two genders sex. Go play.

Two people, separate, different, yet the more they learn of each other, the less separate they want to be. Time passes and their desire to be together increases until they are willing to commit to it. To commit to loving and being with no one else. They become naked together, exposing themselves, making themselves vulnerable, helpless, completely at the other's mercy and they come together and in their desire to meet the other's needs, to fulfill the other, they find their own needs met, and somewhere along the line, they become one, comfortable, secure with each other.

Naked. Known. Accepted.

Loved.

You can't reach this state by yourself. You can't be loved by a stranger because they don't know you. You can't love someone who exposes themselves as part of a financial conract or a power struggle. You can't find love and security by flitting from one bed to the next. You can't maintain an intimate relationship by guarding yourself or ignoring the other or dividing your affections. You can't serve others if serving yourself is your highest priority. You will have good times. You may enjoy these things and you may even work out a system that works for you but you will never know the intimate love of another and you will never understand how God loves you. And without that relationship with Him, it might be very easy to reject him and find god in cold strangers or contracts or power struggles or magazines or serving yourself for in the end don't we all serve the god of our own will?

We don't just reject God. We divorce Him.