Sometimes I want to say, “I have no interest in your unvetted half-baked prattle,” but I want to maintain a friend or two here and there.

Who am I to be preachy, anyway.

An old story about a time when I got annoyed with my mother. It became funny to us even before the day was over and is now a treasured memory.

Decades ago, I wanted to take my mom out for her birthday to someplace nice. I saved up, meaning that I paid down a credit card to the point that I could actually use it somewhere.

We went to a place called Equinox at Friendly Center.

“Let’s have some drinks Mom!” She orders a GD Budweiser which set my teeth on edge. I was hoping that Equinox didn’t carry Bud, but they did.

“Why not, Mom? Are you sure? Maybe they have PBR!” The server played along, “we carry that, too.” I got explosively tense.

Server brings the bottle of Bud, and my mother declines the glass. I said “maybe you’d like a straw?” as I was melting into the chair.

Server keeps pushing it by placing a straw by her bottle. Fortunately, by that time, it was crossing over into being funny.

I then said, “you can take the girl out of Georgia, but you can’t take the Georgia out of the girl.” No offense to Georgia, but I had to get a dig in. That pissed her off, so we started to get even, lol.

I don’t know what was up that day. As time went by, we joked about it more and more.

I wasn’t going to say anything on social media. I had a “procedure” done and am out of work for a couple of months on FMLA.

The recovery is going well, but the mental impact is more than I expected.

I’m trying to cling to the things that traditionally have given me pleasure, like rambling on about my shit of a life.

I used to like to blog long-form, but over the years this has shrunk to posts about the size of tweets. Doesn’t matter. I’ve been at this for years.

My online approach is to post to make myself happy, and if others like it or not, they can regulate it from their end. A good mantra is, “blog like nobody is reading it because maybe nobody is.”

Though I enjoy lampooning and mocking sometimes, I try to not ever direct it at anybody.

I keep my online politics on the mild side. Others who I know handle this better than I can.

That yaz hazzit.

When I was 8, 9, 10 years old or so, my mom got this idea that it would be good for me to be shipped off to summer camp a couple of times.

One summer it was “Y” (YMCA) camp. Another summer it was something that several of the Baptist churches jointly owned somewhere out in the boonies.

Each one involved me being taken away in a bus full of kids with me sunk down in the seat in despair, a la “inmate transfer.”

The “Y” camp was every horror that I thought it would be, and then some.

The Baptist camp was actually the good one. Church-like activities weren’t that heavy or numerous. There was hiking, a lake, a swimming pool, and good food. Music was great. I remember singing Three Dog Night “Joy to the World” with a couple of hundred kids several times.

I appreciated the Baptists bailing me out of some horror that summer.