Sunrise With Schubert: February 20, 2018

Nothing happens in moderation anymore. Even the slightest holiday evokes orgiastic waves of guilt-inducing commercials. Spend, they command. Spend or you aren’t a good person. Spend on whomever we honor this week. Spend before it’s too late and you’re considered a bad person. That won't make America great again.

Soon, there may be a “Neighbor’s Day,” on which we are urged to buy a Rolex watch for the man whose dog craps in your yard and a string of pearls for his gossipy wife.

Now it’s the weather. Anyone by now who doesn’t believe the weather patterns are changing has been spending too much time on social media, twittering about hell knows what.

As I write this, we await another monsoon season. I thought I had seen the last of those years ago. But noooo. The experts tell us it’s going to rain each day for the foreseeable future and the ground here is still engorged from the last of Mother Nature’s frivolous binges.

Our farm, where we spend a lot of time caring for a loved one, rests on sixty feet or more of pure clay soil. In fact, the owners of bygone days used to have a brickyard here, operated by slaves, of course. Legend has it that the Federals burned said brickyard and took the slaves and other livestock because the owners were suspected of sheltering the infamous Confederate, guerrilla, spy, and cross-dresser,  “Doc” Rayburn.

But I digress, probably from an unconscious urge to get my mind off the coming deluge. The point I had started circling my tattered wagon-train of a mind around concerned the clay soil. Left to its on predilections, clay makes a suitable, if strong-willed surface upon which to drive vehicles. It’s not much for row-crops, a feature that accounts for the past preference for dairy farming in these parts. Clay soil is just clay soil. It harbors no desire for greater grandeur.

Now, however, when such clay soil is subjected to freezing, and, if you remember, we had a “cold-weather monsoon” back in January, its mindset changes and it wills itself into a gelatinous substance of undisguised ill-will. Add a little, or lot in some cases, of rain and it’s like driving on a field of Jell-O.

That’s what we have to look forward to, and why I’m not overflowing with the “milk of human kindness" this morning. In fact, I think I’ll find me a dog (I won’t have far to look) and just kick the hell out of it.

Goodbye, and bite me.

Oh, and have a blessed day.

Yeah. You'll be in my thoughts and prayers all right.