Mulled Vine

These are my days.

I’ve lived well. I’ve lived badly.

Now I just live, and write.

[Work in progress...]

It came to pass long ago, when the earth was young and the internet a fishing term, that a baby boy was born to the farmer and his wife. The farmer was immensely pleased, as he had worked hard to build up his farm and needed a son to help him at his labours. The boy grew up quickly into a fine, handsome young lad of golden disposition, however it soon became apparent to the farmer and his wife that their son was bone idle. At first his mother attributed it to an artistic strain in their family, but since he did nothing but spend his days dreaming under the apple tree on the hill, they eventually realised that there would be no practical manifestation of his gift. Perhaps this is all a little unfair on the young lad, because whilst he had idle notions, he did sometimes show promise: like the time he thought to weave a 3ft daisy chain for his mother. He was however so immensely proud of this achievement that he kept the floral necklace for himself.

The years went by, and it was not long before his parents had passed away and the lad, now a young man, sat idly under the apple tree, contemplating what to do with his inheritance. The farm he had of course sold immediately as he knew not, and indeed cared not, what to do with it. The bag of gold sat heavily in his lap and he regretted having asked for quite so much.

An apple fell to the ground and rolled down the hill towards the road, and the young man in that instant decided to follow it and see the world that had not bothered him much before. He set off with a jaunty stride, gold in hand, dreams in his head, whistling a little tune his mother had taught him.

Not long after that, perhaps not even an hour, he began to feel hunger pangs and he wondered what he would do for food. It was quite a problem as he was in the middle of nowhere. In the distance however he spied a man sitting next to a cow, seemingly eating his lunch. He smiled, pleased with his good fortune, and ran towards the stranger. On arrival he greeted the man and asked if he could have some of his bread and cheese. The man looked at him with some surprise, no doubt wondering whether an exchange was to be offered, but since none was forthcoming and being a charitable fellow, he shared his lunch with the young man. They fell to talking, or at least the young man talked at length about himself, until he noticed that the cow was a milk cow.

“Sir, I don’t suppose you would give me your cow, so I can have milk the rest of my days and need not go hungry?”
The man replied, “Son, I have just acquired this cow through a trade and am not inclined to give it away.” The young man looked so downcast that the man continued, “However I did exchange some magic beans for it, and if you hurry you might be able to catch up with the youngster I gave them to. Perhaps he would give you one or two.”

The young man cheered up immediately and was about to run off when he thought, “this bag of gold will slow me down, I shall give it to the man.” So he did, and set off at pace. Nightfall fell, as it usually does, and he came to small cottage in which a cosy light shone. He knocked on the door and enquired if he might have lodgings for the night. The owner of the cottage, an elderly woman and her young lad were only too glad to have visitors, for it had not been a good day. Their only cow, Tulip, had been foolishly exchanged by her son that morning for a handful of supposedly magic beans. The young man made himself at home an regaled them during supper with dreamy tales. When they enquired as to his destination he said he was looking for some magic beans he had heard about.

“Magic beans?” cried the woman, “Not you too? How strange Fortune is. We have some beans lying outside our window which you may freely have, but I doubt they are magic. However it is late and I suggest we turn in and attend to this tomorrow.” They bade each other good night and settled down to sleep, the young man sharing a bed with the woman’s son.

Dawn broke, but instead of the radiant morning sunshine, a green hue shone through the cottage windows. At first the occupants thought that the world was about to end and fell to praying, but when nothing happened, decided to go outside instead and investigate. It will no doubt not come as a surprise to you that a gigantic bean stalk had grown overnight from the magic beans and extended many miles up into the sky.

“Let’s climb it!” exclaimed the lad.
“No, it is not safe.” replied the mother.
The young man turned to her, “Do not fret, you have been so kind to me. I will hold it steady while he climbs.” The reality was that he had developed over the years a keen nose for strenuous activity and how to avoid it and this bean stalk had strenuosity written all over it!

The lad clambered quickly, watched anxiously by his mother, and soon disappeared from their sight. They stood a while, but since chores wait for no one, the mother soon went inside to attend to them. The young man settled down for a nap under the leafy shade of the bean stalk. He must have slept for a good few hours because when he awoke the sun was past noon. He wondered what had awoken him, but soon heard frantic rustling as the young lad climbed down with a hen under his arm.

“Quick, quick!” the young lad cried. “Fetch the axe.”
Fortunately his mother heard, because the idle young man knew not what fetch meant, and detecting the urgency in her son’s voice ran out with the axe.
The boy reached the ground, gasping for breath. “Giant… hen… golden eggs… coming … cut it down!”

Seeing that the young man was not hearing him, and indeed had wandered off into the orchard to look for apples, he grabbed the axe from his mother and began to frantically chop at the bast of the bean stalk. A giant roar from on high only served to increase his pace and soon the bean stalk gave a violent creak and tottered mightily. A second roar was heard, this time more like a screech, as the bean stalk began to tumble to the ground, casting its gigantic clamberer to the earth, to his death, into the apple orchard, where a young man of idle notions wondered when his fortune would hit him.

If you are a familiar reader of such fairy stories, you will no doubt be wondering what the moral is. Well fear not, here it is: “Don’t you have anything better to do than read tales of idleness?”

My wife sat down on the couch next to me as I was flipping channels.

She asked, ‘What’s on TV?’
I said, ‘Dust.’

And then the fight started…

******************************************

My wife and I are watching “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” while we were in bed.

I turned to her and said, “Do you want to have sex?”
“No,” she answered.
I then said, “Is that your final answer?”
She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying, “Yes.”
So I said, “Then I’d like to phone a friend.”

And then the fight started….

******************************************

Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked up the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad all day.

I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. I cuddled up to my wife’s back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, “The weather out there is terrible.”

My loving wife of 10 years replied, “Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?”

And that’s how the fight started…

******************************************

I rear-ended a car this morning. So, there we were alongside the road and slowly the other driver got out of his car. You know how sometimes you just get soooo stressed and little things just seem funny? Yeah, well I couldn’t believe it…. He was a DWARF!!!
He stormed over to my car, looked up at me, and shouted, “I AM NOT HAPPY !!!”
So, I looked down at him and said, “Well, then which one are you?”

And then the fight started…..

*****************************************

My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.
She said, ‘I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.’
I bought her some bathroom scales.

And then the fight started…

******************************************

When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive… so, I took her to a gas station.

And then the fight started…

******************************************

After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver’s license to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.

The woman said, ‘Unbutton your shirt’. So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair. She said, ‘That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me’ and she processed my Social Security application. When I got home, I excitedly told my wife about my experience at the Social Security office.

She said, ‘You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability, too.’

And then the fight started….

******************************************

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my high school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table.

My wife asked, ‘Do you know her?’

‘Yes,’ I sighed, ‘She’s my old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn’t been sober since.’

‘My God!’ says my wife, ‘who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?’

And then the fight started…

******************************************

I took my wife to a restaurant. The waiter, for some reason, took my order first.

“I’ll have the strip steak, medium rare, please.”
He said, “Aren’t you worried about the mad cow?””
Nah, she can order for herself.”

And then the fight started…

******************************************

A woman is standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror. She is not happy with what she sees and says to her husband, ‘I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly.

I really need you to pay me a compliment.’

The husband replies, ‘Your eyesight’s damn near perfect.’

And then the fight started…..

Jeshua was frankly a little down; he had known from birth that his was a special calling, that his birth was supernatural, and that he had a divine imperative to be good, perfect in fact, but today it was all a bit too much.

A familiar voice spoke in his head, “What is the matter, Jeshua?”

“Abba, you know what the matter is, you know all things.”

“I know I do, but I like you to talk to me, so tell me what the matter is.”

“Well,” began Jeshua, “there is this boy at schul, Aaron is his name, and he picks on me all the time, I suppose because I am little and not very good at games; I so badly want to smite him dead, but I know I mustn’t.”

His Father smiled sadly from his omnipresent viewpoint, and said, “Listen, I know it’s tough, but your calling is so very important, so you must resist. I will send Gabriel to minister to you.”

Jeshua sighed.

“Uhm, Abba?”

“Yes, my Son?”

“What does minister mean?”

(I have always wondered what it would have been like for Jesus as a boy, and whether he had any powers, or whether these came with the Spirit at his baptism.)

We sat opposite each other, matching laptops and luggage, but apart from that were different, strangers brought together by a common journey to the airport. I wondered if we might be going to the same place but there was no way of knowing since she was not wearing her destination tag, which was surprising since that was against the law. Mine said Boston, and I thought how she must feel quite naked without it, yet there she was, smiling contentedly as she stared out of the train window at the passing fields and trees. Finally, my curiosity and ire could be contained no more, and I demanded to know where her badge was, and didn’t she know that she was upsetting the natural order of things. She looked at me with obvious but very irritating bemusement, and replied that she had no badge because she had no destination. I said that was impossible and hit her over the head, before calling the authorities to clean up the disorder.

I’ve been pondering how morality would work if there was no absolute reference point like a god-ordained set of laws.

Morality essentially is about how we behave, either personally or towards others. Those who don’t believe in god-ordained laws would say (I presume) that the personal aspect of morality is irrelevant as long as it does not harm the community.

So there is actually an absolute moral law here: the law of community preservation, and in an evolutionary sense this law is an extention of the self-preservation law. In other words, our prime drive is to survive, but we need community to do that long term, so we have to balance personal survival with community survival.

I have a slight philosophical issue with this survival of the fittest law. If there is no god, no eternal purpose outside this universe, then what we are just IS, and if we all implode into nothing tomorrow, then that also just IS. Neither surviving nor not surviving is to be preferred. The answer to this of course is that the law just IS, so we can’t question it. I find that a little convenient.

But I digress.

So in the absence of god-laws we have a morality based on maximising the survival of the individual, and the society that supports that individual.

Unfortunately we have different societies, with different views on what is “right”, i.e. what benefits the society and the individual. This means that one group has no right to judge another group’s views. So Hitler’s acts just ARE, neither good nor bad. Ok, our society might differ in opinion, but that’s all it is: a different view. The fact that the Allies went to war reflected on (i) how strongly they believed their view, and (ii) their ability to go to war, i.e. their might as a “fitter” group. If the Allies had lost then the “right” view would have been Hitler’s.

Its also wrong to think that the LATEST society is the also the most successful. Think of evolution like a maze: there are many possible branches and cul-de-sacs and even if you are happily walking along a long passage with no end in site, you don’t know until you’ve reached the end whether your route is a dead-end or not. And even if you did last the longest, is that because you were successful or just lucky?

All of this is just my opinion, right?

So we decided to see how many people we could fit into a telephone booth – it was Jay’s idea, no surprises there; bloody lunatic is going to kill himself one day trying to see if death is bad as they say. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to break any records, more an excuse to get drunk afterwards and get up close to the girls without being slapped.

We decided that the largest people should go in first, something Anna was not too pleased about – she describes herself as buxom, which while true, is only part of a much bigger truth. Getting the first ten in was amusing enough, and apart from a few protests from the girls at being groped, it all went pretty well; the rest however were more trouble and by the time I clambered to the top and squeezed into the last available space, tempers were pretty high.
“Where’s the feckin’ photographer?” swore Jim, “I’m dying here.”
“I’ll call and see where he is,” said Juliette, “Anyone got 20p?”

So we decided to see how many people we could fit into a telephone booth – it was Jay’s idea, no surprises there; bloody lunatic is going to kill himself one day trying to see if death is bad as they say. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to break any records, more an excuse to get drunk afterwards and get up close to the girls without being slapped.

We decided that the largest people should go in first, something Anna was not too pleased about – she describes herself as buxom, which while true, is only part of a much bigger truth. Getting the first ten in was amusing enough, and apart from a few protests from the girls at being groped, it all went pretty well; the rest however were more trouble and by the time I clambered to the top and squeezed into the last available space, tempers were pretty high.
“Where’s the feckin’ photographer?” swore Jim, “I’m dying here.”
“I’ll call and see where he is,” said Juliette, “Anyone got 20p?”

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me for the path is narrow. In fact, just piss off and leave me alone.

2. Sex is like air. It’s not important unless you aren’t getting any.

3. No one is listening until you fart.

4. Always remember you’re unique. Just like everyone else.

5. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

6. If you think nobody cares whether you’re alive or dead, try missing a couple of mortgage payments.

7. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.

8. If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

9. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

10. If you lend someone £20 and never see that person again, it was probably well worth it.

11. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

12. Some days you are the bug; some days you are the windscreen.

13. Don’t worry; it only seems kinky the first time.

14. Good judgment comes from bad experience, and most of that comes from bad judgment.

15. A closed mouth gathers no foot..

16. There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.

17. Generally speaking, you aren’t learning much when your lips are moving.

18. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

19. We are born naked, wet and hungry, and get slapped on our bum … then things just get worse.

20. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

Susie’s husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months. Things looked grim, but she was by his bedside every single day. One day as he slipped back into consciousness, he motioned for her to come close to him. She pulled the chair close to the bed and leaned her ear close to be able to hear him.

“You know” he whispered, his eyes filling with tears, “you have been with me through all the bad times. When I got fired, you stuck right beside me. When my business went under, there you were. When we lost the house, you were there. When I got shot, you stuck with me. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. “And you know what?”

“What, dear?” she asked gently, smiling to herself.

“I think you’re bad luck.”