Enough is Enough

Our political and social world seems to be upside down right now. Two great Religions at war with each other for centuries,  seem to find agreement on two things.  Their love of weapons and their hatred of LGBT people. This unresolvable issue is all that anyone is talking/tweeting/posting about right now.  Enough is Enough so this post is not about any of that.  Stop reading here if you are in need of having a hateful fire fanned.

I have blogged about it before but I was performing at a Comedy Club in Atlanta, Georgia when a middle act named Jeff Foxworthy asked me if I thought an idea of his was funny.  He opened a spiral notebook and recited "You might be a Redneck" jokes he had written.  It was hysterical.  Two of my favorites: "If your family tree does not fork... You might be a Redneck."  And "If your mother does not take the Malboro out of her mouth when she tells the Highway Patrol officer to kiss her ass... You might be a Redneck".  He went on stage later that night and killed (comedy term for performing very well).  It caught on and Jeff Foxworthy now owns Georgia, or so I am told.

Although I do not think of myself as one, I am PROBABLY a redneck.  But you decide, here goes.  

At the Johnson Estate we do not have a formal dining room/living room. That space was converted years ago into a pool room. The pool table once belonged to Harry Anderson. Stories associated with this pool table can entertain people for hours and you never have to rack a ball or chalk a cue.  

It was not a hard sell, getting Sandi to agree to put a pool table in the dining room. In fact she was all for it since that formal area was not used very much. And with the boys growing up, it would be great place for them and their friends to hang out.  Twenty years later I can not imagine living in a house that does not have a pool table. I love to play the game but there is more to it than that.
A pool table is the perfect place to do all kinds of things. When there is not a game going on, I put a cover over it and the pool table becomes a waist level, perfectly balanced 8' x 5' table with 40 square feet of flat surface to work on. I use it to lay out and work on props, sort through files, arrange pictures and stack the mail when we have been out of town. But I mostly use it packing up my act for a trip and, oh yes, folding laundry.  No other area, so useful to fulfill these tasks, exists in the house.

The laundry day usage came about when Sandi became tired of the boys leaving their laundry in the drier for longer than necessary or mostly to get them to empty their stuff out of the drier for our clothes.  To get them motivated one day Sandi put the dried laundry on the pool table so they would have to move it (by folding and removing it hopefully) before they could play a game of 9 ball, and a new function was born.  By now this domestic use of a game table has been well established in the Johnson house. 

Okay, by now you are wondering what any of this has to do with the mass shooting in Orlando or Jeff Foxworthy. The answer to the first question is "nothing".  Here is the answer to the second question. it actually happened to me yesterday and I have to phrase it as a Foxworthy redneck joke. 

"If you are playing 9 ball on the pool table, that's in your formal dining room, and you find a fabric softener dryer sheet and a sock in the corner pocket..... You might be a Redneck.."

Love more, Laugh more, hate less,

As you were, 

Jay