Memorial Day is early this year, more or less. It’s always on the last Monday of May and that would be May 25. Here in Maine, Memorial Day is a beginning of many things, like tourism and gardening. The governor’s economic development team probably has an algorithm that appropriates state funds based on the inbound and outbound volume of traffic on the Maine Turnpike.
I have my geraniums and tomato plants ready to go. But the holiday weekend is off to a rocky start. I made a grave mistake last night when I stopped by “Handyland” for dessert. Handy was watching an episode of Hoarders on his giant Tee Vee and I sat down to watch it with some apple pie à la mode.
For those who might be new to this blog, I don’t have a Tee Vee. It’s a choice I made about 15 years ago and I try not to be “holier than thou” when I tell people about my lack. (But no thank you, I don’t want your old Tee Vee.) I’m out of touch with a lot of the lingo people use in every day conversation because television is such a large part of the American consciousness. Once upon a time, biblical and historical metaphors like “he’s older than Methuselah” or “Rome wasn’t built in a day” were part of the common parlance, but today, one might more likely hear references to characters and situations from Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, or The Walking Dead.
It’s hard to keep up with it, but I do the best I can.
Handy explained the “hoarding” phenomenon to me some time ago when we passed an “auction” sign at a storage facility. Again, it was hard to understand.
Thinking about the Tee Vee show before I fell asleep resulted in a night of fitful sleep and even folding my hands on my chest and trying to meditate on a French prayer didn’t help. The characters on the Tee Vee show, if they are real, were suffocating in their stuff all night. Hoarders remind me of cigarette smokers. I want to kindly tell them to “please stop.”
It’s probably not that easy.
I took this picture at a VFW “yard sale” in the area. The man selling this shoe had backed a small trailer of stuff into the parking lot, probably fresh from a storage auction. He asked me why I was taking a picture of it and I said “oh, I’m a free-lance writer, working on a story about yard sales.”
He nodded his head in understanding and asked no more questions. Thank goodness, because if he’d probed further, I might have been honest and said “this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
At one time, recycling an old shoe into a planter with fabric scraps, decoupage glue, and lace might have seemed like something to give a young Martha Stewart a run for her money. But the craft hadn’t stood the test of time.
On a brighter note, it’s fifty days (more or less) until the Moxie Festival. I know, I can hardly believe it either. I’ve been working on some fun changes to the Recipe Contest, including a new judging format and a new location. Check in here on Tuesday (blog dark on Monday, due to Memorial Day observance) and I’ll tell you all about it.
No hoarding this weekend!
Julie-Ann Baumer 
Of all people, it is you who should know better than to watch the telly. I could quote Bunker, or Mander, or my own preference, Kramer, who once wrote an excellent article called “TV is for Women,” outlining how the box is carefully designed to take away every feminine virtue and make women into little imitations of men. Sadly, it is not available on the web anymore, but this is:
“Resonance is key here. The technique of ‘entrainment’ posits that similarly resonating systems tend to synchronize. For example, it is known that the human brain resonates at different frequencies in different states. By introducing frequencies at different rates, this will cause the brainwaves to entrain and begin to resonate at that frequency. The result is a change in mind state, induced by the predominant incoming frequencies. For example, watching television can cause the viewer to slip from the accustomed Beta state (12-26Hz), through a passive Alpha mind state (8-12 Hz) and into the highly programmable Theta state (4-8 Hz). In Theta, assimilation of incoming data on the screen is deeply seeded into the psyche. What you watch is permanently burned in. This is frequency control. Or, if you prefer, mind control.”
Stay away from the telly, and keep us up to date on Moxie Fest. This reader has been waiting for all the Moxie details..