One thing I can't stand are people who say one thing and do another, who smile in your face and kick you in the butt, who promise you the sky and never follow through. I am also very poor at getting double entendres, you know, the kind of thing that has two meanings and you're supposed to "get" what the person saying really means, not necessarily what he/she said. That used to get me into trouble when I was very young because I was afraid to say I did not understand. Now I just stare at the person saying "yeah, so?" who will then feel inclined to say what he/she really meant and whatever joke was supposed to be there now falls absolutely flat. Their problem, not mine. I am not here to be someone's butt of a joke or to make them feel better or superior or witty or whatever. Say what you mean and then there won't be any misunderstandings.
A particular gripe I have is with the people who trot out their religiosity but don't live by it. Case in point: another Texan. This was a woman who was a buyer for Neiman-Marcus at a time when that store was strictly a Texas store in Fort Worth. Her job required a lot of travelling out of state. When she was in her home state she was a "good Baptist" and those folks don't smoke, cuss, drink, dance, drink coffee or Colas, but go to church - a lot! like twice on Sundays and also on Wednesdays. That's fine with me as long as they don't make me follow those rules. They also talk a lot about all these rules and how folks shouldn't be doing this, that and the other. In Texas at that time you could barely buy any alcoholic beverages unless you went to a "packing house" which is a liquor store, in a "wet" county. A dry county was one in which you could not buy anything stronger than beer or wine, if that. So come evening after work you'd see whole caravans of cars heading for the border of the next "wet" county to buy their supply of booze. Then they'd go on the weekend usually to a "private club" where they would buy a "guest pass" for a dollar or two which made them a "guest" of the doorman and they could get any mixed drink they could think of. If that was too hoity-toity for the average dudes they'd put their bottle of booze into a brown paper bag, go to the nearest bar which would only serve beer or wine and put the bottle in the bag on the table and ask for a "set-up". That meant a glass of ice and a soft drink. Then the booze would be poured into the soft drink. Voila, mixed drink! So here we have: Rum and Coke, Whiskey and Seven-Up, Vodka and orange juice, the list goes on. All of this was quite legal but had all these weird little "laws" to go with it: the bottle of booze if it was less than a quart had to lie down on the table, quarts had to stand up, they had to stay inside the paper bag unless you had one of those fancy cloth bags but they had to stay in there too, the server had to pour some of the soft drink into the glass.
But back to the Neiman-Marcus buyer. I found myself going from Dallas to NYC and saw that the buyer was on the same plane just a few rows in front of me. She did not know me well so she probably never saw me or did not recognize me. As soon as the plane had left Texas airspace she was ordering one of those little bottles of booze they sell on planes. And another and another and.........By the time she got off the plane in Idlewild (NYC) she was staggering, she could hardly walk. So much for that "good Baptist". What a joke. But confessing your sin of drinking and promising not to do it again will get you straight into heaven as your sins will be forgiven no matter how many times you backslide. Of course anyone who is not a Baptist is going to go straight to hell. Well, I don't want to be with all those killjoys anyway.
There was also such a thing as "Blue Laws". Not just in Texas but all through the South at least. A Blue Law meant that on Sundays you could not buy anything but food unless it was something you absolutely could not do without, such as band-aids, or sanitary napkins, or a tire because the one you had just ruined was beyond repair and you had to get to work and there were no busses to where you were going. You can imagine the abuse those laws got. From what I hear those Blue Laws do not exist anymore and that the whole state of Texas is now "wet". Somebody probably decided to sue the state saying that those laws were unconstitutional. Maybe that had something to do with good old Dubya who was known to like just a few too many beers.
Speaking of him that reminds me: remember when Clinton was elected the Republicans acted as if somebody had killed their baby? The Democrats had "stolen" THEIR presidency. They had been under Republican presidents for so long they could not imagine any other way, this was the "normal" way that the presidency was supposed to be. Then when they had to swallow that bitter pill they expected Clinton to solve all their problems within 100 days as if anyone could do that. Dubya sure couldn't when he came in. Now they expected Obama to do the same thing and there was a lot of noise made after that did not happen. How soon they forget that one of their own couldn't do it either. Hypocrites, all of them.
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