speaking of

So here we are.

Let’s see where a single thought takes us today:

Ernest Borgnine is gone. Rats. He’s one of those people that I always wanted to meet. Not just because he was a great actor, but he seemed like a guy who’d be fun to be around and have fabulous stories to tell. Just last week, there was a promo for the Turner Classic Movies Cruise, and there was a shot of him during a previous cruise. My husband and I both agreed that as much as we’d love to hang out with Borgnine, a boat may not be the best place to do that, lest we spend the entire cruise quoting The Poseidon Adventure and making sure we could find our way to the one-inch thick part of the ship’s hull, just in case. (Granted, in the water I am a very skinny lady.)

Speaking of lost legends, I’m not sure what’s worse: losing legends or seeing people hop on this crazy, disingenuous Twitter RIP bandwagon for someone they couldn’t give a fig about while the legend was alive. 

Speaking of the RIP bandwagon, if there is any trace amount of good that could possibly come out of Andy Griffith’s passing, it’s that all of those people who looked at me funny when I told them to watch A Face in the Crowd are finally seeing the damn movie and understanding why I got angry when they would say, Andy Griffith? Really? Shuck yeah, really!

Speaking of shuck, I just now came up with shuck as a curse substitute. It’s not to be confused with shucks, as in aw, shucks, ma’am. Don’t get me wrong. I swear a lot. Real swears, too. But occasionally I like to shake things up and be a little more colorful. Anyone can say fuck or shit. I’m trying shuck. I’m not sure that it’s effective, but I am so tired of the fracks and fricks and frells and fudges. (That may be the only sentence where I unintentionally imply that I am tired of fudge.) 

Speaking of fudge, why doesn’t fudge melt? Maybe that’s why every beach town has a shop that sells homemade fudge in the summer and closes in the winter. I’m not complaining about there being so many fudge shops in beach towns, but I don’t like the beach, and quaint fudgeries are not as readily available to inlanders as one might think. I also just made up fudgeries. (Fudgery (singular): Noun, meaning retail outlet that specializes in fudge. Also, plural: Fudgeries, as in Martha’s Vineyard features an assortment of shops, restaurants, and fudgeries.) You want fudge now, don’t you? 

Speaking of fudge shops that close in the winter, it irks me even more when I see ice cream and frozen custard stands close in the winter. There is nothing more depressing than traveling to a new city and making a pilgrimage to the local legendary mom-and-pop ice cream place only to find it closed for the season. Soup and coffee places don’t go out of business in the summertime. Get a blanket and a space heater and man up, creameries! (This is how I justify fudgeries. If there are creameries, there can be fudgeries.)

Speaking of fudgeries and other words I have made up, I once thought that I’d actually made up the word uglify when I was in the eighth grade. I’d never heard it or read it before. (Judy Blume never used it. Neither did V.C. Andrews.) I’d seen beautify, so I figured I could “create” uglify. I should have figured out that I was wrong when my English teacher didn’t circle the word in red pencil. Took me another year to finally crack open a dictionary and see my wrongness for myself. So much for my being in the “gifted” program.

Speaking of my being wrong about things, I thought that if I just kept writing, this post might actually find a way to dovetail all of these topics that led to each other, or at least come back around to Borgnine. 

Shuck... and fudge. 

Yes indeed. Welcome to me.