Shopping in the House of the Holy

WARNING - the following is bound to offend everyone in some way.

I was in the local Quik-E-Mart yesterday, buying lottery tickets and generally abusing the Sabbath. There was a mother-daughter there, at least the elder a Christian fundamentalist, the younger dressed in one of those skort-like things, except the pants hems were to her shoes, like skousers. The girl, Grade 8 - 10 age, was cute enough, except she was dressed like a fucking clown.
The skousers had straight legs, big like bells, except the same all the way down.
Denim, and I am telling you there is nothing quite so cute as a girl swaddled in about six yards of shapeless navy cotton.
I have no guess as to why the skouser legs were so outsized. They were like those old-guy suit-pants, big enough for another guy to stand in there with you. Come in handy for a Masonic initiation, plenty of room for the stuff they have to keep secret. All the rest of the rites are dog-and-pony stuff, a smokescreen for the rampant buggery that is at the heart of the "brotherhood".
Well, shit.
Mama's faith must be pretty strong, subject a little girl to the mockery and derision attendant with dressing like a circus chimp.
The bible (allegedly) hasn't added anything new in the last 2000 years. So where in hell do these fuckwits dig this shit up? There can't be much stuff more submoronic that a 2000-year-old dress code. Except snake-handlers. Those people take the whole cake. If one were of a rational ilk, wouldn't one be moved to ask if one guy did this and got really, really lucky, or if, just perhaps, the story might be the least bit apocryphal, to point up the strength of faith?
Snake-handlers are easy to spot - the only people in town with fewer fingers than butchers and sawyers. You find them at little bandbox churches in places like Hickfuck, W. Va, Noteeth, Tenn, and Sisterwife, Mo.
So where did they find this half-shit clothing prescription? The attire is not in any way traditional ("And the soldiers cast lots for Christ's Levi's"), so, what up?
Why don't they stop pansy assing and put her in a burqua?
Oh no, that would be extreme. It's so hard to attract attention when Mom's complexion is the color of cigar ash and the little girl is dressed in hand-me-downs from her 640-pound aunt.
Okay, it's so very difficult for me to be judgemental or critical, so I'll have to stretch out a little here: since this dress code can only be found in the margin notes of some jughead hillbilly's O. T.
why strictly adhere to it and yet ignore one of the Big X? You can find these listed in any courthouse south of the Ohio River, and all of them include "Remember to Keep Holy the Sabbath".
Uhm, yesterday was Sunday, and these living testaments to the Glory of the Lord were keeping the sabbath holy at the goddam Mini-Mart.
Religion: it's all about convenience.

Today I was driving east just north of Red Bridge and saw a thoroughly massacred deer twenty-five yards into a cut bean field. A red tail stood with his back to me, selecting the choicest morsel. He may still be there, looking. That carcass was a deer in size only.
My dog Abbe hasn't been properly introduced, and since she is large and white and spayed, needs no introduction.
She looks like a white Lab, at least that seems to be the assumed consensus, even though most Labs could pass underneath her middle and not trade hairs.
She loves to chase whatever runs away, and freaks when they turn and face her, like, "Don't you know the rules?"
With most of the beans cut and most of the corn standing, there are a lot of deer moving just after sunset. Abbe is a true believer, ordained in faith that deer are on this earth for her to chase. (At this point I will say that I prefer her attitude to that shared by many others, that deer are here to kill. Thanks loads, Bible.) Last evening, in about thirty minutes, we found at least a dozen deer in the dark along a mile and a half stretch just west of Red Bridge. Abbe crashed out the cardoor into the road at full Abbe tilt seven times.
She can make a quarter mile run without panting.
After about four trips, she was really looking for new air.
Abbe is of a herd-guardian breed, so she has gifted vision, but very little scent tracking ability. A reason is she's so tall.
I am much too dim to consider this, but here's what I learned: when you bend your head to the floor and snap back erect quickly, you nearly pass out. Because the blood is rushing to and from your head unimpeded, and your brain is much too delicately balanced to accept this tidal ebb and flow.
So whither the giraffe? A giraffe can be munching leaves eighteen to twenty feet in the air, like at the top of a two-story building, reach down and catch a bug off its foot, and go back to feeding.
With no effects.
Why? The physics are the same. So why doesn't a giraffe blow its head like a melon off a truck when it's dropped immediately twenty feet?
Because a giraffe has a heart the size of a mattress, and it's built like a sponge. The giraffe's heart acts as a regulator, such that blood never moves rapidly through the neck.
Pretty cool, huh?
But Abbe doesn't have a giraffe heart, and when she drops her head to sniff, there are all these snort noises, as the essential air and fluids battle for the same necessary chambers. If she keeps her head down, like when she's on a critical mission to find something really disgusting to roll about in, everything gets where it needs to be and the snorting stops, ten to twenty seconds.
But when she is chasing a bouncing white tail, overdrive, should she attempt even a passing whiff of ground scent, the physics would kill her.
When deer make the woods, they lose her right smartly in the dark, and I think she spends more time looking for a way back out, and the chase is done quickly.
After four trips, she was panting good, and the next three times, she got off well but came back now, the spirit still strong and the body spent.
There are very few mammals in Indiana, less than a tenth of those in a North America guidebook. There are no ground squirrels, only chipmunks. There are only two or three mice.
This should be insignificant, but half of a mammal ID book is devoted to ground squirrels and mice, and we have maybe three.
With a bright moon last night, something went low across the road. Sorry, haven't done my homework, but my guess was a weasel. Even in headlights, I would expect better fur on a mink.
Mississinewa Reservoir is being dropped to winter pool. I've always wondered why fishermen don't pay a little more attention to this.
The exposed mudflats show that people drop anchor in less than two feet of water and sit there all day. Those shallows can be exciting for a bit at daybreak and for the last half hour of the evening, but summer sun heats them to a low boil. It would seem time well spent to take a look when the water's down.
I see a few American Kestrels, and an occasional red tail, but the "here we are" birds, goldfinches, cardinals, bluebirds, and most surely, indigo buntings, seem to have sought more hospitable climate. I did see a blue jay several days ago, only my second of the year. No one else has reported that problem.
It has been brought to my attention I am not on the NRA's Enemies' List.
This is not acceptable.
Here's how you can help, can make a real difference:
The next time you see Wayne LaPierre or Ted Nugent, tell them this blogger (me) claims that Wayne and the Nuge sleep with each other's mothers. When LaPierre lays some lame crap on you, like his mother's dead or some such, tell him that would only make things better for the Nuge.
Happy stalking!