Self awareness is a valuable thing, or so I’m told. According to The-Reason-I-Get-Up-In-The-Morning, I am prone to lack such awareness. She often accuses me of “not having a filter.” Actually, I get that a lot. After much pondering and debate, I’ve finally realized the confusion stems from my transmission. I am an automatic shift in a five speed manual world.

The vast majority of people in the world have manual transmission in their heads. Now, anyone who knows anything about stick shifts knows that the car won’t go into gear unless you depress the clutch. This requires some input from the driver, or in this case, speaker. Most people have a thought that hits them wrong and they want to say something, but they work those gears and once they let out the clutch, the situation drives on smoothly.

For good or ill, I’m not like that. I have a Turbo Hydromatic 400 auto tranny between my brain and mouth. That means when I push the gas or someone else pushes my buttons, the car JUST GOES. Burning rubber and burning bridges all at the same time! Now don’t get me wrong. I in no way advocate my way of communicating to anyone who wants to get in a sandbox with others. It’s a lonely existence when you can go from zero to redneck in 5.2 seconds.

Of course, I’ve been that way a long time. By now, those who like me are pretty much willing to take me as I am and those that don’t like me; well, they tend to stay away. I keep telling myself that someday I’m going to swap out this auto slushbox for a nice Muncie 4 Speed with a Hurst shifter . . . but as CCR puts it so very well, “sometimes someday never comes.”

Hope everything’s going well for all y’all. Don’t forget to wash your feet, or at least knock them off, before you get in the car! Love y’all muches.

Mason Benjamin Wham, here at age 27 hours

Ladies and gentlemen, may I be permitted to introduce the first new addition to the Frank B. Wham, Sr. branch of Whams in about 22 years! Meet Mason Benjamin Wham, the absolutely beautiful fruit of my younger brother, Nick’s loins and the result of the hard work of Kerry, my sister-in-law.

He is, of course, flawless in every way and has already scored perfect marks on all his newborn tests. Depending on who one asks, he arrived a week early (by Sissy’s account) or two weeks early (by Dr. Keller’s account). It’s actually a good thing he decided to come on and make his debut because as it was, he was 8 lbs. 7 oz and 20 inches long. A week or two more of floating around and growing and he would have been a hoss sure enough. As it is, he fits perfectly into the crook of an arm and weighs about the same as a large bag of sugar and is just as sweet.

Nick and Sissy brought him home today and I’ll need to be going over there before long to help get him settled in. In all likelihood, he’ll never see the inside of a day care since Nick’s mother, Teresa, is “conveniently” unemployed due to cutbacks at her former office. Daddy is absolutely about to explode with pride over his first (and if Sissy is to be believed, his last) grandchild. I think Teresa may have to sew new buttons on all of his shirts to replace the ones he burst upon Mason’s arrival.

One funny story about his birth. No one told my brother that babies don’t automatically start breathing as soon as they clear the birth canal; so, there he was coaching and waiting like a good new father when Mason pretty much popped into the doctor’s hands. According to Nick, “He was as blue as my blue jeans and he wasn’t breathing. I sank to my knees certain that my son was still born.” Luckily for all of us, a little suction at the nose and mouth and Mason announced his arrival into the world with a set of lungs that would have made his Granny Wham very proud. He also has no problems nursing and has shown a definite appreciation for George Jones songs.

I think he’s perfect.

We fell back last night and took back our hour of sleep that was so rudely stolen from us back in the late spring. Now, for a large majority of the people in the places where this biannual clock changing is enforced, the event passed largely unnoticed. For a select few, however, last night was a PITAS of the highest degree. Anyone working in a manufacturing plant last night had a bad time.

See at one time, we had more textile plants (factories, if you must) here in the South than a feral dog has fleas and ticks. For over a hundred years, textiles fueled this region and new cotton mills seemed to pop up like so many toadstools after a hard rain. All that wouldn’t matter as much to me except that much of my family went through a spell at one or the other local mills. In my own time, I spent a few dreary summers in one of the many textile plants owned by the richest man in South Carolina. He has always been known as a bit of a miser, so everyone in his plants worked “swing shifts”.

To the uninitiated, most factories run on three eight hour shifts: First is 8 AM to 4 PM, Second is 4 PM to 12 Midnight, and Third (or Graveyard) lasts from 12 Midnight to 8 AM. If you worked a swing shift, you would spend a week on First, then a week on Second, then a week on Third and the next week back to First. It was brutal to say the least, but in a factory running swing shifts, the owners don’t have to pay a shift premium because everyone works all the shifts. Again, for those not accustomed to the lint-head lifestyle, a shift premium is the extra pay you draw for working an “off” shift — Second or Third. Most of the time, you’d get so much more for Second and then double that for working Third. It was a way of rewarding bleary-eyed drives home in early morning and basically shooting any of one’s body’s natural circadian rhythms in the head.

Now, I gave y’all that  quasi-history lesson to tell you this — under no circumstances did you want to be working Third when the time “fell back”. See, if you don’t know, the time actually changes at 2:00 AM. Most people just set the clocks back and go to bed. Not in a cotton mill. Oh no. The one time I was unfortunate enough to get caught on fall back night, I joined a group at the time clock and watched at 2:00 as the clock wound back to 1:00 AM. A whole miserable hour of hot, lint-filled, and sweaty work was just erased like so much chaff on the wind. It was heart breaking and the worst thing was, you didn’t get paid extra even though you worked 9 hours instead of 8 because your time card would show 8 hours and not 9. The Man got an extra pound of flesh for nothing.

It’s been many a year since I walked the machine aisles picking up lint waste, but I haven’t forgotten that cruel irony. Sadly, what few manufacturing plants that still run today around here have continued that barbaric practice. Unfortunately, most of them run 12 hour shifts so the late shift works 13 hours!

Of course, “jump forward” night in the spring was different, but who wants to talk about that 🙂 !

Sleep good and enjoy waking to daylight and not dark, y’all, and as always, don’t forget to scrub your necks and wash your feet. Love y’all!

Hello to my three loyal readers!

As most of you know, I’ve been out of work since June. I won’t go in to details, other than to say my former district shut down a school and so I became the sixth librarian in a five school district. So, I was bumped from my job in favor of a person with less than a quarter of my ability but three times my seniority. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Anyway, I’ve been casting about for ways to keep my questionable sanity intact. To that end, I’ve launched some more blogs. Each blog will now have a focus instead of being a catch-all for whatever jumps into my head at the time. The new lineup will go something like this:

“Granny Beads & Grocery Store Feet” will remain my flagship blog. It will actually improve now because it will now take over as the repository of my memoir, story, and anecdote collection about my life growing up and living in the small-town South. This will now be a “politic, employment, and hopefully angst free zone.”  I’ve been asked to write a book. Well, this is where it’ll get written.

“Insomnia Inducers” is a niche blog that appeals to the neurotic, OCD, paranoid side of me. To call me a pessimist would be to defame good pessimists throughout the world. “II” will be slavishly devoted to publishing the growing list of horrible things that keep me awake at night. Truthfully, if it’s on “II”, then I’ve literally lost sleep over it.

“The Idiot Patrol” is my attempt to point out the overwhelming plethora of people in this world who should have the common decency to do us all a favor and stop breathing the air that other people so desperately need. Each update will point out a person who fits my very liberal definition of an idiot for some reason. They could be mean or a boor or a leader who is incompetent to the point of criminality. Each and every one will get my undivided attention for around 500 words. This blog will be political, employment related, and probably riddled with middle aged W.A.S.P.  angst masquerading as righteous indignation.

Finally, I’m launching “The American Reality”. This blog, located at nomoredream.wordpress.com since I couldn’t get the address I wanted, will be where I play pundit and solve every problem the world has to offer with wit and the wisdom passed down to me by my ancestors. Here, I will hold forth on education, politics, movements (bowel and otherwise), and pretty much all the rest of the hot-button issues of the day. If you want my opinion on all things public, this will be where to turn and I’ll go ahead and guess that y’all probably won’t like it.

In time, I hope to launch a one-page web site that gives a jumping off point to each of these endeavors as well as including other items of interest to me. I hope you all like the line up. It’s what I’m praying will keep me from going off the deep end of the shallow pier.

Check them out and keep your feet clean, y’all! 🙂