It’s that time of year where I find myself in danger of committing more misdemeanors than usual. This is made possible in part by the fact that lecturing strangers at length on the subtle differences between “personal freedom” and “bigotry” is, apparently, considered harassment in some legal circles. Go figure!So in order to keep my criminal record clear, I try to avoid large, well-lit grocery stores during the first week of January, since that’s when and where My Local Friendly Boy Scout Troop sets up shop in a nefarious plot to collect as many dried pine needles as possible.
Why they want these remnants of the holiday season is beyond me, although I suspect they use them to build roaring fires upon which they can burn effigies of their most hated nemeses, womenfolk and The Gays. Suffice to say that the only way the boy scouts are getting my Christmas tree (which is besides the point anyway, since I don’t have one) is if I first light it on fire.
Meanwhile, my evasion of well-lit grocery stores has landed me in several shadier (if swiftly-gentrifying red-light districts can be called “shady”) parts of town, resulted in all kinds of culinary adventures (if chopping up raw water chestnuts and drinking $3 champagne can be called adventurous), and allowed me to meet all kinds of interesting people (if overweight men in saggy sweatpants can be called “interesting” and vague threats shouted across the Hispanic foods aisle, over the heads of several improperly corralled rugrats counts as “meeting”).
In my troop we wern't aloud to us pineneadles to burn our efages. We had to find tiny sticks or shave down a larger stick. This is so that I supose we could burn efages in any envirnment that at least had small sticks.
What I don't know how to do is start a fire with out an efagy though.
See, therein lies another failing of the boy scouts. You should be able to start an effigy fire with nothing but the pure power of hatred!