YOU LIED!

There is a lie that has been told to us for the last . . . four decades maybe. We are wrecking the climate. First, global cooling, then global warming, then climate change cause by man. Absolute horsefeathers! I am sick and tired of so-called “scientists” and nit-wit teenagers telling us to stop breathing or we’ll all perish! Bullcrap!

There have been zero named hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean this year. The Arctic ice levels are at an all time high. There is more CO2 in the atmosphere, which means that the biomass of the earth (that means plants for us illiterate hicks) like wheat, corn, peas, carrots, okra, cotton, palm trees, hardwood trees, bamboo, grassy lawns, etc., will all do better because they breathe in CO2 in order to grow. They breathe out oxygen, which is kinda good for us humans. Win-win, I say.

OK, for you scientists out there, plants don’t really “breathe” they absorb and release. I know. But the fact is that we are better off with a larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than without. CO2 is not a pollutant!! It is necessary!

As for warming, of course the Earth heats up and cools down! It’s been doing that for about four billion years! Why do you think it should stop now? The Lord got this thing rolling and someone (Satan) said, Bah! No way that’ll keep going! Then the Lord (Good Texan that He is) said, “Here! Hold my beer (Lone Star, of course)!”

We’re going to be on this planet for a long time. Mankind has had to deal with droughts, hard freezes, summers that never came, warmer than normal winters, The Flood, etc. Add to that a volcano every once in a while. I believe that we’ll be exploring other planets before the Great Roll Call Up Yonder. We’ll have to deal with their climate changes too. So be it.

My earliest memory is a bit of terror and bravery. My mom and dad married young and my dad was most often away, driving a semi-truck on long haul routes. I vaguely remember him being at home, but there is one memory that stands out. It was winter, nearly Christmas, probably around 1958 or ’59; I must have been four or five years old. We were living in a small house in Natalia , It was cold in the house and my mom, dad and I were in the small living room in front of the fire place. My dad was trying to get the wood in the fireplace started and was having trouble. He went outside and came back in with a Folgers half-pound coffee tin can with some gasoline it. I remember him throwing the gas on the fire and a huge flash. I then saw my dad carefully set the coffee tin down with his hands on fire. He then turned looking at my mom and me. He saw my mom’s robe and started towards her, he then realized that her robe was probably not going to put out the flame because it was made of a synthetic. He turned and hurried out of the living room, to find something to wrap his hands and arms in to put out the flame. I don’t remember much after that, but my mom tells me that if he’d tried to put out the flames with her robe, it would have caught her on fire. 

I do remember a moment, when a few weeks later, he and I were walking out in the back of Palm Courts talking with my grandfather, Ivan. Ivan said something about dad not panicking. I don’t remember his exact words, but I believe my dad earned some respect from my grandfather.
Palm Courts was my grandparent’s beer joint, dance hall, motel, restaurant, honky-tonk. My grandparents, Lillian and Ivan Jones, had moved to Texas during World War 2. He was a flight instructor for the Army Air Corps. After the war, they bought a run-down hotel and turned it into a bar/motel and more. It was a place where oil-field roughnecks and cowboys could spend their money on beer and dancing with local girls. Of course, there was more than dancing going on in the motel rooms, but that was beyond my scope of knowledge at the time. 
Also living with us was my grandmother’s father, Charles Anderson. Short, white-haired, and wiry. He played the violin (which I still have), guitar and piano. He taught me how to play chords on the mandolin and we’d play together. Of course, he was a much better player than I was. He used to take me with him to the local pool hall where he’d play dominoes and talk with some of the local men. He also had been a blacksmith of some note in his earlier days and still had a blacksmith shop in the shed behind the Courts. I remember him and Windy Herring making butcher knives out of old files. I loved the sound of the hammer beating the metal on the anvil. Loud, but it had a ring of life to it.