Now, where was I? Oh yeah...

"Its late", she cried, as the clock ticked away
the dawning of another dark day
where her sunshine was something she'd hidden away
until somebody came to claim it.

~~ Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate. - Chuang-tzu ~~

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Now, where was I? Oh yeah...

A girl walks into a supermarket and buys the following:
1 bar of soap
1 toothbrush
1 tube of toothpaste
1 loaf of bread
1 pint of milk
1 apple
1 banana
1 orange
1 peach
1 plum
1 tomato
1 lettuce
1 cabbage
1 potato
1 muesli bar
1 pie
1 box of cereal
1 frozen dinner
1 single frozen pizza

The checkout guy looks at her, smiles, and says "single huh?"

The girl smiles sheepishly and replies, "How did you guess?"

He says, "'cause you're ugly"

Amen.

~~ I may be ugly, but I have big breasts ~~

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Now, where was I? Oh yeah...

I was going to write about Sex, and then Shari sent me a joke and I was going to write about God... then I thought "bugger it, I'll combine the two" and then I thought I might just rehash something out of the old blog and recycle it with a few minor modifications.

Cos I can.

My Version of the Seven Deadly Sins.

ENVY:
What it is: Envy is the desire for others' abilities, status, wealth or attributes.
Colour: Green
Why I do it: Because other people are so much richer, smarter, luckier, better looking and more clever than me.
My punishment in Hell is likely to be: A freezing cold swim. A long one. I hate water.

My Version: Shari bought a nice MP3 player for her Primera. I want it for my Primera. Oh, I want World Peace, an end to hunger and to lose 40 kilograms of fat as well. But I really want that MP3 player.

SLOTH (This would have to be my favourite Sin well, after that really big sin that I've forgotten what it is now).
What it is: Sloth is avoiding work. Any sort of work.
Colour: Light Blue
Why I do it: I am a really shiftless, lazy cow.
My punishment in Hell is likely to be: I will be forced to listen to Barry Manilow's Christmas Album for all Eternity. In the dark. Whilst folding washing.

My version: The phone is ringing. I can't be bothered rolling over to answer it. Sorry.

GLUTTONY
What it is: Gluttony is an intense desire to use or eat more than is required.
Colour: Orange
Why I do it: Because I was bottle fed as an infant.
My punishment in Hell will likely be: Eternity spent rebaiting the trap for Merlin's snak-paks. He's a bloody glutton, too.

My version: I will hide all this box of chocolates a lovely lady sent me and share almost nothing with the kids.

WRATH
What it is: Anger is manifested in people who are irrational in the face of opposition. They display this as Wrath.
Colour: Red
Why I do it: It's a talent. It just comes naturally.
My punishment in Hell will likely be: Living in a room with 20 men who cannot put the toilet seat down.

My version: Parking Nazi. 'Nuff said.

PRIDE
What it is: Also known as Vanity. Pride is overweening the belief in one's own fabulousness that interferes with the individual's ability to recognise the Truth.
Colour: Violet
Why I do it: Well-meaning people told me to "believe in yourself." Like if I don't, nobody else is going to.
My punishment in Hell will likely be: Listening to some evil size 10 bimbo moan for all Eternity about how fat she is.

My version: I don't give a shit what you think, I know I am right.

LUST
What it is: Lust is an extreme craving for the pleasures of the body.
Colour: Blue
Why I do it: Cos I have a Pulse.
My punishment in Hell will likely be: Living in a room with 20 GAY men who cannot put the toilet seat down.
My version: I'm dead from the neck up and the waist down. I think they meant "dust" not "lust"

GREED
What it is: A rapacity or desire for material wealth or gain. Also known as Greed.
Colour: Yellow
Why I do it: Cos I am a spoiled brat living in the "Me, now generation"
My punishment in Hell will likely be: Every technological toy imaginable... and no batteries, power or phones.

My version: Debbie has a nice Home Theatre system. I want one too, but with a big plasma wide screen TV.

So, what's wrong with all that? I never said I was altruistic to the bone, it's really only skin deep :-)

Really, I'm a yellow-bellied, green-eyed Hari Krishna wearing Orange robes who just happened to fall into the wrong incarnation. I drive a blue car with light blue trim and have violet hair. I go from perfectly calm to "I see red" in 1.37 nanoseconds.

My personal favourite sin would have to be Lust, but Sloth, Wrath (hey that rhymes!), Greed, Pride, Envy and Gluttony are a really close second.

Oh, Shari's joke was;

Why Men Pee Standing Up

Seems God was just about done with creating the universe but he had two extra things left over in his bag so he decided to split them between Adam and Eve.

He told them that one of the things he had left was a thing that would allow the owner to pee while standing up. "It's a very handy thing," God told them, "and I was wondering if either one of you would like that."

Well, Adam jumped up and down and begged "Oh, give that to me! I'd love to be able to do that. It seems just the sort of thing a man should be able to do. Please. Please!
Pleeease! Give it to me." On and on he went like an excited little boy.

So Eve just smiled and told God that if Adam really wanted it so badly, he should have it. So God gave Adam the thing that allowed him to pee while standing up and he was so excited. He whizzed on the bark of a tree and then went off to write his name in the sand, laughing with delight all the while.

God and Eve watched him for a moment and then God said to Eve, "Well, here's the other thing and I guess you can have it." "What's it called? Eve asked.

"Brains" God said.

You can go back to sleep, now. I'm done, I think.

~~ Remember: First you pillage, then you burn. ~~

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Now, where was I? Oh yeah...

"It's astounding;
Time is fleeting;
Madness takes its toll.
But listen closely...
(--Not for very much longer--)
I've got to keep control."


Richard O'Brien wrote The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the early 70's. He was an out of work actor at the time. The original RHPS started out as a stage play in London, which opened in June of 1973 to fantastic reviews and packed houses of 60 or so people a night. In early 1974 the play crossed the Atlantic and opened in Los Angeles in March that year. Two of the attendees of that first US screening run were Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon who would join the cast of RHPS in England when filming of the movie began late 1974. Richard wrote, directed, produced and starred in it.

Bored yet?

Richard gained both lunatic and genius status with this musical about a bunch of "unconventional conventionalists" who were into cannibalism, leather, booze and all sorts of different sexual proclivities set in a spooky old castle beamed from Transsexual, Transylvania which he wrote as a young man in London, a far cry from his home in New Zealand. Thirty years later, he still occasionally visits his family in Tauranga and has been known to play the odd number or 10 with his brother and the Jazz band that performs every Wednesday night. My father reckons he is a real beaut and he didn't even know RHPS even existed. Bloody Phillistine. He was rather stunned when I sat him down and showed him what it was all about. Rocky Horror Picture Show became the cult movie to end all cult movies where audience participation was not only welcome, it was almost mandatory. You could even say that RHPS has done the Time Warp and come out the other side just as entertaining as it was risque when it first appeared.

Time is a subjective thing. It's pretty warped, as well.

I have several clocks in my house.

I have one on the microwave which seldom gets reset after a power cut. I have one on the wall in the lounge that I almost never see, cos I never go in the lounge. I have one on my computer that I look at all day and I have one next to the bed that I look at in between the times I am looking at the one on the computer. The trouble is, they all tell a different time and I don't actually think any of them are correct.

Just goes to show how often I need to know the real time, doesn't it.

It's astounding, Time is fleeting, I am about to turn 40 and I don't know where it went. But wherever it went, it took my youth and all my good bits and it left behind the dregs of good health, usefulness, happiness and acceptability. I think it also took my Queen albums, my wit, my Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of Haunted Houses and my emerald engagement ring. In other words, anthing worth having it took with it. Mind you, it left me my long hair. Shame that's going so gray.

I wouldn't have a problem if I looked like some bubble-headed bimbo, she would look good sitting in a wheelchair, still be a visual asset and every shcock-driven male knows sexy is what really counts in a man's world.

Sometimes Life is very, very stupid. Every day is one more wasted, every day is Groundhog day, and Madness takes its toll.

~~ Barbie doesn't come with Ken, she comes with G.I. Joe. She only fakes it with Ken. ~~

---

Now, where was I? Oh yeah...

Convenience - an ordinary word with different meaning for different people.

When my Great great great grandmother Olivia Kensington came to the Coromandel in about 1879, she didn't have a washing machine. Oh, I'm sure she had a copper and a river or stream and a washboard and a rope strung between trees for a clothesline, but she didn't have a washing machine or a dryer. She still didn't have these things when she left her husband buried in the ground at Port Charles and moved to Oropi on the outskirts of a young Tauranga township with some of her adult children, about 1882.

She didn't have an electric iron or one of those fancy clothes press thingies. She probably had a couple or three flatirons that she heated in the fire, maybe even used a piece of wet cloth to steam a crease in the menfolks Sunday best, but she didn't have an electric iron. Colonial women made underwear out of flour sacks, wore petticoats and long dresses and made nearly everything they wore by hand. Storebought clothes were a luxury.

Olivia didn't have a TV or a radio or the World Wide Wait to deliver global occurences on a instantaneous basis. Oh, there were newspapers back then, of course, but they weren't just a short jaunt to the dairy away, cos there wasn't a dairy and there weren't any cars to jaunt in. News took months to arrive from "home" via ship. Olivia's son Bridge Kensington had a bullock team that he brought logs out of the bush with and transported a boat on all the way from Rotorua on, but the Tauranga/Rotorua road, via the Gluepot and the Mangorewa Gorge was uncomfortable at best and treacherous at worst and could take days to accomplish with a wagon and team. We drove most of that route today - that's what made me think of Olivia and write about her tonight. Tauranga to Rotorua in 45 minutes. Just the trip from Oropi down to Tauranga and back took a bit of stamina in the 1880's. And the trip over the Kaimai Ranges that back then took 3 days to complete, if all went well now takes us 20 minutes by car.

Back then, when people and their kids were sick, the community doctored them as best they could until a doctor could be summoned to provide healing or pronounce impending death - whichever was appropriate in the case. Oh, they had medicines and painkillers and surgical instruments, but they didn't have them within easy reach and you couldn't ring the hospital or call for an ambulance. There wasn't a phone and there wasn't an ambulance.

Kids were raised with staunch and demanding rules and values about respect for elders, property, self-discipline and control, politeness and damned hard work not only being the measure of a man or woman, but a necessity for the survival of the family unit in frontier New Zealand. Listening to and following directions helped keep them alive. Kids were beaten when out of line, worked hard from dawn to dusk from an early age and were prone to dying from common ailments and minor accidents.

You had to be hardy to survive childhood, back then.

Today, we shop for a huge variety of pre-packaged and prepared food at the supermarket, we drive 10 minutes to the doctor and moan about waiting 30 minutes to see him. We have every gadget and appliance you could think of available in our homes to make life easier. We cook with gas or electricity in clean, well organised kitchens, we wash and dry our clothes in a flash, we don't have to iron a lot of them and can take things to the drycleaners if they are bulky. We no longer read about long past events as if they were just happening - now we are participants on a global stage and are a part of history being made, not necessarily just remote spectators after the fact. And, 107 years after the passing of Olivia, we have something that she and the hard working women like her never really had - we have frequent and regular leisure.

In our modern society, we aren't allowed to use physical force to teach out children any more; they don't seem to understand respect, compassion, consideration or reciprocation because their parents didn't necessarily bother to teach it to them. Political correctness has taken over common sense and our kids are ultimately going to be the losers. We no longer have much contact with our neighbours - our survival doesn't depend on it any more. We wear comparatively scant amounts of fast drying, easy care clothing made in some third world sweatshop of some manmade fibre that doesn't warm the body, doesn't protect us properly from the elements, and we have all the gadgets in the world to keep them looking pristine in the shortest amount of time possible with the least amount of effort.

And we think we got it tough?

Pussies.

It's all arse about face now. No longer are children a convenience who pay for their tuition in Life with useful toil to increase the wealth and survival prospects of the family unit. Now we, as parents have become a convenience to our children. They have trouble with the concepts of speaking when spoken to, don't butt in or talk over an adult, do as you are asked the first time instead of the 5th, they seem not to understand self-discipline or self-control, personal responsibility is an alien concept of vastly humorous proportions and they don't give a shit about consequence. Lots don't seem to know the words "please" and "thank you", either. Television cartoons and X-box are God and parents are merely the avenue by which these are obtained.

Kids now have all the rights and parents have none of the power to parent. But some of the modern parents don't deserve to have children reliant upon them, anyway. Some of them are too busy enjoying their precious leisure time to bother making sure their kids are adequately clothed, fed and have enough rest, can't lead by example. "Quality time" is a misnomer - it's only quality for the lazy parent, makes them feel that they are enriching their child's life. "Quality time" is "Bullshit time". And maybe Bullshit time is all there is if kids spend their waking hours unnecessarily handed over to a childcare worker to raise cos Mum can't friggin be bothered caring for them herself. Anyone can pop a baby out, parenting needs constant work.

People only really need three things in life; shelter - warm, dry clothing and dwelling; food - nourishing, healthy and wholesome; and love - love of a parent, love of a spouse, love of a friend. Why, with more resources than ever to sustain us, is that so bloody hard to follow?

I do wish Olivia was here today, I have so many questions that I would ask her. But high on the list would be "What was it like to stand at the top of Oropi on June 10, 1886 when Nature had a wee hissy fit and Tarawera erupted, turning night into day and day into night?"

We have become a shallow, grasping, throw-away society; Life is handed to us on a disposable plastic plate and all we have to do is nuke it for 5 minutes on medium and it's ready to enjoy.

Bon appetit.

~~ One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to
come to terms with everything ~~

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