Goddamned Puritans

Okay, so in Spain and Mexico and civilized countries, when it gets really fucking hot, they shut the place down. They shut down the businesses and the stores, they shut down the schools if they have to. Everybody goes home during the heat of the day and they do the logical thing when they sun is trying to kill you dead:

Lay down in the shade under the fans and nap.

The body doesn’t want to function under all that heat– why the hell bother?

Now, businessmen in America may sneer– what do they have to show for their lives, if they just nap them away?

Well, these intrepid South Americans and Europeans actually wake up from their naps and go back to work when the day gets cooler. Makes sense, yeah? They stay up until two, wake up at dawn, and sleep when the sun us trying to kill them.

Makes sense, right?

Now, the Puritans from way back in the day, they didn’t have to worry about this in jolly old England. England was temperate (a lot more so then than now, even idiots like Trump and Murdoch have to admit) so, at most, it got to be 80 degrees outside, and they could wear their layers of wool and do hard work from dawn until dusk and their lives weren’t at stake any more than they are normally when your default function is giant stick up your ass.

So, because this was how they lived, this, they assumed, was how all civilized people lived. If you had a work ethic and followed God, you woke up at dawn and worked until dusk and the weather didn’t deter you because that was God’s work you were doing and fuck all impediments that was the devil trying to get in your way.

So the Puritans left England and stayed for a while with the Dutch, but the Dutch weren’t white enough for the Puritans (in the way that white means rigid, unbending, and believing that all faith should suck the joy out of not only your life but the lives of any unfortunate individuals who have the bad luck to cross your path) so the Puritans left the Netherlands and came to our East Coast.

Now, when they first arrived–in the middle of November– the brine was literally freezing on their faces. Half of them died of starvation, disease and frostbite in that first winter, and they HAD to either keep moving or huddle over a burning stick or, well, more of them would die.

So the flaw in their reasoning didn’t really catch up with them.

But then summer hit. And oh holy hell did summer in the north and southeast blow their fuckin’ minds. See, their religion required them to button layers of black and blue wool up to their chins and yet, God gave them infernal temperatures and miserable humidity to test their faith. But did they quail? Oh hell no, because they were servants of GOD and GOD KNOWS the devil will just worm into your little heart if you go nap in the shade during the heat of the day and maybe do some of your work in the cool of the night, and to prove they were REALLY faithful, they stayed buttoned up in their suits too.

A lot of them collapsed from heat exhaustion.

A lot of them took off their frickin’ jackets and worked in their shirt sleeves and showed no repentance.

A few of them kept on their jackets and used sanctimony as a coolant as they looked down upon their neighbors who were trying not to die. “See! I am plowing the field in my woolens all year long, I must be holier than fuckin’ thou!”

But none of them thought, “Hey– maybe we should rearrange our day a little in the summer so that we do not daeeee.”

Because they were stupid that’s why.

And they have passed their stupidity down through the ages, until today, when it was 107 degrees, I had to face the hideous choice: Send my daughter to soccer practice in the heat, or stay home in the air conditioning and laugh as Mate hauled our son out into the same heat for his game, and yet feel sadly demeaned and unholy and a little bit dirty because I didn’t choose suffering as the righteous path.

I chose to hang out in the coolth because A. Squish has had a headache for the last two days and I feel guilty for throwing her out there, B. 107 is fucking insane and why wouldn’t you call practice for a bunch of 9 year old girls, and C. FUCK THE PURITANS ANYWAY!!!

I mean, those assholes gave smallpox to the natives ON PURPOSE to depopulate the Americas. Why would we want to follow their worthless righteous hypocritical witch burning asses into the holy God Sacramento cauldron of hell anyway? What did these assholes give us besides an over inflated sense of ourselves and the completely false idea that the world revolved around their view of religion?

I’m certainly not going to drag my fat sorry ass into the inferno because some righteous high-horse-riding jackasses who’s greed-driven work ethic should have collapsed the moment the first one who wouldn’t take off his wool jacket dropped dead of the heat continue to drive our political agenda.

So anyway, that’s why Squish wasn’t at soccer practice today.

And Mate, bless his righteous heart, still has a Puritan work ethic, and that’s why he and Zoomboy went and came home exhausted.

And now you know.