Made in America - impenetrable plastic packaging

Mom-proof caps

I was talking to my mom the other day when she told me about a frustrating problem she'd had. She went to the store and bought a bottle of aspirin because she wasn't feeling well. When she got the bottle home and tried to open it, she found that it had one of those annoying child-proof caps. Being old, she found the cap to be old-person proof, too.

My mom isn't exactly known for her patience, being Irish and all. She tried the lid a few times, with no luck. Then she got a hammer.

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! She wailed on that plastic bottle cap for all she was worth. But it didn't budge. It also didn't show any signs of cracking, so she wailed on the bottle itself a few times. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Nothing. No cracks. No pills.

In frustration, she got an ice pick and began stabbing the bottle. She told me that she managed to make a hole in the cap, only to discover that underneath the bottle cap was another cap of some sort, inside the first cap. She had to dig her way through two layers of plastic old-person-proof cap using that ice pick. This made her good and mad.




Then she got some metal snips and began nipping at the hole she'd made with the ice pick. Slowly, but surely, she managed to cut open the top cap and get down to the lower cap, the child-proof part. She cut through that one, too, a little at a time, until finally she had enough of a hole to get to the aspirin!

She dumped all the aspirin out of the infuriating patient-proof bottle and into a Ziploc bag. Then she threw the "Made in America" indestructible plastic container into the trash, where it belongs.

Everything we buy these days seems to be made in China or Mexico, and most of it is shit. But when it comes to indestructible pill bottles, or that damned vacuum formed plastic around anything from flashlights to pocket knives to new batteries, that impenetrable and razor-sharp clear plastic vault which prevents you from accessing the item you've just bought without first using power tools to tear open the packaging, cutting yourself to ribbons in the process, that shit is made in America.

Yay us.





Give me my new iPod, damn you!

Who Are You Voting For?

My Mom called me the other night, worried that I might be dead after the tornadoes had ravaged Memphis. She got me right in the middle of eating supper and seemed to want to talk. I sat and watched my food getting colder and colder as she shot the breeze about this and that, never seeming to want to end the conversation. I thought it was sort of odd, as she didn't really have anything in particular to say. To be perfectly honest, she and I don't talk that much. Go figure.

Anyway, she finally got to what I think may have been her real reason for calling, aside from wanting to know if I was dead or alive.


"Who are all these people running for President?" she asked me. "I don't even know anything about most of them."

I patiently went through each candidate from the Democrat and Republican Party, all the while suspicious, because after all, this is My Mom we're talking about.

I have always suspected that My Mom would go and vote for whomever My Dad disliked the most, not knowing anything about anything, but knowing that she enjoyed frustrating the men in the world as much as possible. I never asked her flat out if she was doing this, though, because asking My Mom a direct question is a lot like trying to wrestle with Jello. You just have to watch for her 'tells' in order to pick up the truth from the midst of all her bullshit.

As I went through all the Republican candidates, I could tell that My Mom was trying hard to pretend she was interested, but she really wasn't.

"Ooooh, mmm hmmm," she yawned.

And when I talked about Obama and even threw in John Edwards, it was obvious that she had no idea who they were.

When I talked about Hillary Clinton it was clear that her interest had perked up a bit. Oh, she tried to talk like she knew a thing or two, but it was easy to tell that she had never heard or read anything that Hillary stands for or promises in her campaign speeches. She knew nothing. Except that Hillary is a woman.

All my life I have been beaten over the head and, of course, the crotch by female supremacists with the claim that it is sexist and thus wrong for a male to ever favor another male simply because of sex. In fact, it is claimed to be wrong for anyone to favor males for any reason. And all my life I have watched as those same hypocritical female supremacists blatantly disregarded this rule where females were concerned, openly encouraging and practicing discrimination in favor of females.

My Mom is, of course, no exception.

My Mom knows vitually nothing about the world around her. She has no idea who Barack Obama or John McCain is. She really doesn't know who Hillary Clinton is, despite living in a house once filled with books on politics, many of which included fascinating and relevant details about Hillary Clinton. She doesn't know what tax rate she pays and she doesn't know what her health care is costing her. She doesn't know what a 'carbon footprint' is. She has no clue what is going on in Kenya, Nigeria, Venezuela, or Russia or why it even matters. She's never even hard of the CAFE standard, even though My Dad talked about all of these things around her for years. But she's voting, by God, and she's voting based on her usual priorities, which is, obviously, hating males.

Yes people, My Mom is voting for Hillary.

Oh, she won't admit it. If I asked her she would just lie, which I think is ironically appropriate considering her choice. I haven't told her who I'm voting for. After all, I haven't decided. But if she knew, she'd just say that this was her choice, too. Then she'd go right on with the conversation as if lying to me was of no consequence whatever and all was well. And on election day, despite what she'd said to me, she'll be pushing that button for the only candidate rumored to possess a vagina. And that's really her only criteria. She's not voting based on logic or reason, and she's certainly not voting based on the issues. She's voting for a vagina.

But the sad fact is, for the past many years in this country, that's what most voters have been doing in election after election whenever there is a lone female candidate.



A few days after My Mom's phone call, I got an email from My Oldest Sister. She's been struggling with trying to help Mom out since Dad's death, and she's found it to be rather frustrating and exhausting. Among the many things Oldest Sister had to say, there was this startling revelation:

"I have had to talk to Mom a great deal these past 2 years. I call her a lot because she gets so depressed and lost without Dad. From talking to her, I am starting to think its better not to talk about anything important because she just believes whatever is popular or whatever is "nice" and doesn't cause waves. Reasoning with her is useless. I guess a lot of people are like that though."

Yeah, I guess a lot of people are like that, too.


"Reasoning with her is useless"

So, who are you voting for in this election? Have you decided? Are you willing to say?