Vote for Borden! Suck it Edy's!

To quote my favorite ex-high school baseball coach, "Pissed!"

This is how I feel about Edy's discontinuing their Cinnamon Christmas ice cream. (I realize Borden has nothing to do with Edy's but I needed a segue, cut me some slack it's the holidays!)

For a few magical years of Christ's Annual Birthday Explosion, the highlight was spooning my way through a cardboard tub of Edy's Cinnamon ice cream. Then the fat, milky, churned and frozen concoction dried up. Freezers went bare. Children cried. Old women died. The economy went into a poop circling turd spiral.

It's awful. Each day feels vacant. The air tastes of hog slaughter and the water is tainted with rust and tetanus.

I don't eat a lot of ice cream out of the desire to fit into the current flock of pants I own. But, I loved this stupid treat.

For the past 10 years, it was the one thing that I knew wouldn't suck about the holidays. No matter if I got lady's socks (I'm a man), my name misspelled on a gift from somebody I'd known closely for over 12 years, abandoned to spend the holiday in a movie theater by myself in a state full of backwards Vikings, had to travel through frozen winter shit storms with two strangers from New Mexico I met in an airport after my flight was canceled, another JC Penny shit sweater, an overnight bag that was free with the purchase of cologne (I didn't get the cologne), a talking Jar Jar Binks, a 2XL gas station God Bless American t-shirt, (I'm barely a large and not at all a redneck trucker who whistles dixie and farts Budweiser farts), was forced to drink spoiled milk, was nearly poisoned by salsa that expired 8 YEARS AGO, a gasoline gift card, gift cards to stores that don't exist in the state I lived in at the time, cat toys, items from garage sales or broken Christmas tree ornaments, I could count on Edy's Cinnamon ice cream.

But no mas.

I've tried a few other cinnamon flavored ice creams since. No dice. Homemade Pie and Ice Cream Kitchen in Louisville has a version of cinnamon ice cream. It's not good. The ice cream is chunky not smooth and the flavor is spicy, not delicious.

I hear Blue Bunny has a version. But alas, I can't find it in my area.

So Borden, it's up to you. Can you save my Christmas? Or do you want to go ahead and have Elsie the Cow set a bag of her shit on fire on my front doorstep for Christmas morn?

I'm done being a Baptist, thanks to the Westboro Baptist Church.

I was raised Baptist.

I went to Sunday School and church nearly every Sunday from age two to 20.

But over the past 15 years, my attendance at church has occurred about as many times as the Mayan calendar has promised the world will end. (Which is what, 50 times?)

My original departure from the Baptist church occurred after a pastor lambasted women one Sunday during a sermon. He was angry at women who divorced their first husbands—my mother was one of those women. She divorced the deadbeat sperm donor that I can't even bring myself to call a father and remarried the only father I've ever known.

The pastor then informed the congregation that every day a woman was married to somebody other than her first husband, that woman was living in sin. That murder was a sin and second marriages were equal to killing another individual. (I love that murder and loving family relationships are equal sins. Gives me warm fuzzies!)

This was the beginning of my realization that the Baptist church could be a vengeful, angry and depressing organization. That family values, acceptance and being considerate of your members was in fact not their concern. That hey, if a woman is beaten by her first husband and cheated on, it was her fault and not that of the man. Add this to the Baptist church's views on homosexuality, dancing, abortion and numerous other issues and over time, it has forced me to pull away from the Baptist church almost completely.

George Carlin may have said it best when he said, "I was Catholic until I reached the age of reason." Sadly, this is how I've felt more and more over the years. While I'm not renouncing a higher power, I am renouncing my membership in the Baptist church after the latest antics from the Westboro Baptist Church.

As we mourn the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut the Westboro Baptist Church has finally made me too embarrassed to call myself a member of the Baptist church.

I awoke this morning to read that the Westboro Baptist Church has decided to picket the funerals and the vigil for the innocent children and victims of the Connecticut school shooting.

What the hell?
What is wrong with these people?

I understand the Westboro Baptist Church wants to push their backwards, insane asylum beliefs. This country was founded on crazy views and beliefs—in fact we might do crazy better than any other nation in the world. But how can the Westboro Baptist Church justify this being the right venue for a picketing? How morally bankrupt do you have to be to justify the idea of protesting an innocent child's funeral as an okay idea?

I realize that the Westboro Baptist Church is comprised of weirdo fundamentalists in the eyes of most Baptist church congregations. But the sheer fact that some governing Baptist body hasn't stepped out more against the Westboro Baptist Church, especially in light of these shenanigans, concerns me and has ultimately lead me to renouncing my membership in the Baptist church.

The Westboro Baptist Church is single handedly ruining an entire religion for millions of Americans. They are rebelling against society, an established semi-governing body of churches and acts of common human decency. I remember another group of fundamentalists who did this same thing. They rejected the Treaty of Versailles, told Germany what it could do with itself and then ended up massacring millions of innocent people.

I don't want to slight genocide and the horrors of Hilter. World War II was the worst event in the history of man. But during, and especially after the war, there was no such thing as a good, "Good Nazi". Every Nazi got lumped into the group of anti-semitic hate mongers, because that's what they were.

This same thing is now happening to Baptists. We are getting lumped into this evil, corrupt, backwards interpretation of religion that the Westboro Baptist church has created.

The Westboro Baptist Church has now caused America at-large to hate Baptists.

I can't say I belong to this religion any longer.

It's a shame that innocent people have to die and nutbags like these Ku Klux Klan wannabes get to live. Oh wait, that wasn't very Baptist of me, that was very Westboro Baptist of me. Ugh, that's it, I'm no longer Baptist.

Batteries are dramatic.

Today's photo comes from Kyle B. in Georgia. 

Whomever scribbled this down has a point, a very good point.

I never thought I'd be able to compare batteries and people in the sense of their life spans but here we go. 

The death of both means crying will ensue. 

People die, we cry because of whatever reason of attachment we have to that individual. 

Batteries die and we cry or at the very least cry out. Usually tears are shed over batteries because when they die in your car they leave you stranded, late for work or your daughter's harvest fest dance and soup drive or you end up dropping an important call or your favorite vibrator leaves you mid-escalation.

Sadness everywhere.

People go in the dirt. Batteries go in a dirty landfill.

Burying people has always been weird to me. There's a graveyard in my hometown that dates back to the 1800s. This means there are thousands of bodies that nobody knows, visits or gives two hoots about. Their families have dried up or left town. Yet we're taught these 200 year old piles of bone dust are precious. 

Meanwhile, we're tossing batteries in landfills. Why? We had good times with batteries too. We made prank calls together. We snuggled up on the couch and switched back and forth between bass fishing and women's naked indoor lacrosse and basket weaving tournaments. And there was that one time we videotaped our 70 year old neighbor yelling at her grandson's dog as her bathrobe flew open in the spring, Kentucky Derby morning breeze.

Don't we need to put batteries in little mini caskets made of old cereal boxes and treat their passing as a traumatic life event?

People piss you off. Batteries piss you off.

Everyday, some person pisses me off—dumb drivers, the morbidly obese who don't understand that their sheer girth plus their cart are blocking the grocery aisle and my path of exit away from their gravitational stink pull, bankers who won't call me back, bathroom attendants at restaurants (I don't need you to dry my hands or my balls), people who talk on their phones on the shitter, Dollar Tree cashiers, idiots who wear shorts all year round in the midwest, the people who make corn dogs, ESPN (too many tickers and it doesn't take 19 people to host SportsCenter), etc.

Batteries piss me off less frequently, but nothing is worse than having a battery operated device and having it stop working suddenly. Then it's a mad dash to the drawer in your house that holds pens, toothpicks, plastic silverware, old Christmas cards, coupons, those warranty cards you were going to send in but didn't and batteries. Only to reach that drawer and find out you either don't have the right size or by the time you get back to your battery operated device, you can't figure out which fucking way the batteries go back into it. 

There's 10 minutes of my life gone.

So in the end. I agree with the drama that surrounds batteries. Maybe I'll start a battery casket and tombstone business. Or just turn my backyard into some kind of weird battery cemetery.