I am a fan of the use of personification and anthropomorphication on objects and animals and ideas. However, I draw the line at personifying entities and ideals that fall into a collective definitive status: countries, ethnicities, races, states. These are things without a singular objective or even subjective opinion that can be expressed.
And Utah, the loathsome state I find myself eternally tormented by and trapped within, proves this point time and again by trying to be the moral watchdog state within a country that seems to have an opinion on how everyone else in the world should live their lives but forgot how the indoor plumbing worked some thirty years ago.
The laughable portion of a holier-than-thou state is of course the view from the outside looking in. Utah is a state that pays crappy wages to a largely educated populace. Utah is the state blamed for the subjugation and ritual brainwashing and institutionalized statutory rape of children. Utah is the state where it is illegal to swear on a certain street because that street is owned by a church.
Although standing on the corner and shouting things that are obscenities in other lands seems to be okay, they just want to protect themselves from George Carlin’s lovely set of phrases and of course no proseltyzing. That is for them to do to you, not the other way around.
The crimes of Utah are less laughable. More gut wrenching with a creamy center of what the hell and where do you get off?
The focus of this rant is about the newly proposed liquor laws that will be getting voted on at some point in the future. But before I go into that I should touch on the other thing Utah did recently in the world of law making that they had absolutely no business getting involved with.
Remember that proposition in California. The one that was not in Utah? The one that Utah agencies and organizations spearheaded support for? Remember that? That is Utah at work, telling everyone else how to live and what living should entail while remaining far away and out of the loop.
But liquor.
The proposed changes basically fall into two categories. The second of which is that anyone who seems to be getting intoxicated, or shows the least bit of ‘drunken behavior’ is to be immediately cut off and in some cases detained.
Now if only there was a law about detaining people based upon stupid behavior. Or lewd behavior. Or behavior that is offensive to squirrels.
I’m not sure what behavior is offensive to squirrels but when you need a criteria for monitoring and controlling the behavior of someone you might as well go straight to the most illogical and contrived source.
The first portion of the law would require that all liquor be stored and poured behind 10 foot high walls, so as to prevent children form seeing the alcohol stored or poured. He will be watching dad drink it a foot away from him, but the real temptation and essential gateway to being a boozer is seeing all of those neatly arranged colorful bottles and making the desperately difficult transition from liquid in said bottles to liquid in the glass.
My various gods, just thinking about it after 28 years on this planet I have just now realized, that is where liquid comes from, from bottles! Here I have been pouring milk and drinking soda and somewhere in the back of my primitive child-amnesia mind I thought all liquid came from boobies of one or another sorts.
Yes, there are soda boobies, there had to be, how else would we have soda?
But now it is plain and clear to me that there are no liquor boobies. It is those damn bottles, if only some kind overzealous prick in the state department had erected his 10 foot tall walls sooner I would never have used simple logic to figure out how it is that mom and dad got loaded after a hard days slog through the streets of the most backwards thinking state in the country.
But wait, there’s more.
What about smaller places? Places that have ceilings that are only the standard 8ft in height? Will these places be summarily shut and torn down? Will we accommodate them with a square footage requirement and these walls will simply be extra thick? I hope no one in the food service industry is claustrophobic.
On the other hand, a great big wall kept the Mongols out of China, and the East Berliners from bothering the civilized people of West Berlin. So maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe it is time we starting constructing walls in our world to keep the bad things out the way Utah has constructed walls within its mind to keep sense from shouting all of those flagrant obscenities about its captivity.
Filed under: Semi-Ruthless
