Tie o’ the Day knows this is my second favorite swimming suit. Despite being a forever red-and-white Delta Rabbit, I prefer the look of the sleeved green-and-white swimming suit I posted this morning. However, it has one draw-back: Its sleeves prevent onlookers from seeing my first and fave tattoo, which lives on my right upper arm. Yes, it’s my TATTOO tattoo, which I got over 30 years ago. I wanted a tattoo, but I had no idea what I wanted my tat to be. I like words, so TATTOO was an easy idea to come up with. The tattooist thought I was nuts, but oh well. Over the years, my simple TATTOO tat has gotten more attention than all of my other tats combined. People ask me to explain it, so I tell them what I just told you, and I say the idea fell out of my odd, bipolar head.I have 5 tattoos at this point. 4 of them are words. The other is a bee on my shoulder in honor of my dad, St. Ron of the Bees. One of my tattoos is not for public display. (Don’t even ask.) Right before the pandemic shut things down, I had made an appointment at a nearby tattoo studio to get two more words etched into my flesh. I’m hoping the tattoo studio will re-open soon. When it does, I’m sure I’ll do a post for y’all about the two words and the whole inky ordeal. Me? Write a post about something going on in my life—past, present, and/or future? Surprise, surprise!BTW I’m not wearing my cowboy boots in this photo, but I am wearing my Sloggers cow boots. They’re kinda sorta almost not really the same thing.🤠
My Klimt-inspired Bow Tie o’ the Day is a perfect cherry-on-top selection for my green-and-white, old-timey swimming suit. I found a green-and-white striped Face Mask o’ the Day which almost matches. I’m good with almost matches on rare occasions.
It’s pool time folks. I’m wearing my cowboy boots here in the photo just cuz I like to wear my cowboy boots. They make an especially bold statement, but I won’t be swimming in them. I swam in my cowboy boots at the Reservoir near Delta once when I was a kid, and I got stuck in the sand at the bottom. No matter how hard I tugged and pulled, I could not budge my boots from the muck. I got stucker and stucker. I stood out in the water, calling for help for what felt to me like hours, but it was probably more like 10 minutes. There was no way in heck I was gonna just pull my feet out of my stuck boots and swim to shore. No way in heck was I going to leave my cowboy boots out there to drown without me. I waved my arms, again and again, and yelled for assistance. Even then, people knew I was eccentric, so they just thought I was waving hello and putting on a show for those on shore.
Finally, some drunk hippie I didn’t even know suddenly realized I was in a predicament. He swam out to save me, and he patiently dove beneath the water to release me and my boots. He carried my boots to shore for me.
I learned two lessons that day: 1. Don’t swim in your cowboy boots, no matter how much you love wearing them. 2. Sometimes the drunk stranger will be the first one to save you from yourself.
Along with my Face Mask o’ the Day, I just had to don a Two-fer o’ Ties o’ the Day. That’s the best way I can illustrate my admiration for law enforcement AND for those who seek to bring attention to injustices near and far by public protest. First, let me say that the two “sides” are not mutually exclusive. Most cops want the justice system to work more justly. Most protesters don’t want innocent people and their property—cops or otherwise—to be harmed just because they exist.
I have been to my share of rallies, protests, marches, and vigils. When I lived in the Washington D. C. area, I felt like I was at the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial in support of some cause or other every weekend. It was exciting and enlightening. I learned so much. Over time, I refined my political and social thinking. In fact, I refined my critical thinking skills by light years, by being in the middle of the business of the U.S. of A.
But honestly, I got tired. Long before the political divides we live in now, I got tired of them. Oh, I still have all the fight in me to make the planet a better place for more than just me, but I haven’t been to a rally/protest in a long time. And I prob won’t show myself at another one. Why? The simple answer is this: There are always a few people—on every side—who lack civility. In other words, there are always a few wing-nuts who ruin a good get-together for everybody.
Last Saturday’s protest in SLC was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. A bunch a folks get together to protest the death of a criminal suspect, George Floyd, at the hands of cops in Minneapolis. The SLC cops are at the SLC protest to protect the protestors from other civilians who might do them harm for exercising their right to assemble and to speak. The gathering is going along peaceably. And then a couple of fruit loops decide it’s too quiet. They drag a few others into their mayhem and tip a cop car. Oh, this is fun! Let’s start it on fire! And so on. Meanwhile, most of the protestors aren’t interested in this crap. They leave or at least distance themselves. But of course, the only thing that makes good viewing is the tipping and burning of cars, so the tv cameras don’t follow what most people are doing—which is behaving like civilized citizens.
We’ve all seen the group mentality create dipsticks out of otherwise reasonable people. We’ve seen it happen in profound situations as well as in situations that are near unimportant. I remember being around this kind of wing-nut fervor once was when I was in high school. It was football season, and we Delta Rabbits were set to play our arch-rival, the Millard Eagles, at the end of the week. A bunch of us packed ourselves into a car and drove the 30 miles to Millard High the night before the game. We toilet-papered and egged shrubs, sidewalks, and windows at the school. This was par for the course during rivalry week annually. Some Eagles were most likely doing the same thing over at DHS at that very moment. A little temporary mess to get the rivalry to a fever pitch is fun. And then one person in our group, without any of the rest of us having any idea what was coming, pulled out a hammer and a can of spray paint and completely destroyed one of the school’s eagle mascot statues. It crossed the line. Our friend was so proud of the destruction he’d created, but he seemed suddenly foreign to all of us. This was beyond the point of what we were up to.
We shook our heads and walked back to the car—with all the wind sucked out of our prank sails. A small, but significant-to-others, object got destroyed. Worse, even though it seemed a relatively tiny bad deed, we never again felt the same ease and trust with our kidhood friend. On top of it all, we knew our friend would not have done what he did if we hadn’t been doing what we were doing. We knew we were implicated in his behavior. This could not be repaired. I could tell you how his life turned out, but I don’t want to. It wasn’t a very happy or very long story.
Some days, all it takes to make me grin is to gussy up in a gorgeous Tie o’ the Day and a plaid Face Mask o’ the Day. I’m headed out to Dick’s Market—grocery list in hand. This particular tie is like a good omen to me. It always puts me in a why-worry? kind of mood.
Another wood Bow Tie o’ the Day clashes bigly with both my shirt and what I will call my Face Mask o’ the Day. Face Mask comes from Beau Ties Ltd. of Vermont, my bow tie company. I call it “my” bow tie company because I order my non-wood bow ties almost exclusively from them. They are a small business, with skillful seamstresses. If you want them to, they can even take your favorite necktie and turn it into a flawless bow tie.
In mid-March, with Beau Tie Ltd.’s employees making bow ties in their homes, they also began to create homemade fashionable face masks. And now the company has begun to make matching bow tie/face mask sets—none of which I plan on purchasing, cuz that would be too much matchiness for me to wear.
Anyhoo… Get ready to enjoy a bonus helping of Face Masks o’ the Day on the tblog posts for the near future. No matter which side of The Great Face Mask Debate o’ 2020 you find yourself on, I think you’ll like the stylish masks.
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I have been taking a look at the world recently, and we haven’t liked the us/them division we’ve been seeing. We don’t believe in using rose-colored glasses, so we are going to rest our world-weary eyes by looking at things through our silly-colored glasses for a few hours. These glasses come in handier than you might think.
