Freddogg Off The Chain

Maybe about 20 years ago my wife was sitting on the couch watching television or I was watching she was reading when she reached behind her back and pulled an empty half pint bottle of Jack Daniels from the sofa cushion.
“Is this yours,”’she asked?
“Is it yours,”I asked back.
“No it doesn’t belong to me,”she said.
“Then it must be mine,” I answered.
“And since when did you start drinking whiskey, ’she asked. ‘I’ve found about five of these little bottles scattered about this house over the last two weeks. “So I’ll ask again, since when did you start drinking hard liquor?”
“Since I gave up beer for lent,”I said.
The joke behind the joke was it wasn’t a joke and that’s long before there was a fighter named “No Joke” and before a white pit bull from Harlem named Casper ate a neighbor and was shot dead by police causing a second neighbor to exclaim “Casper Ain’t No Joke.”
You know it’s Catholics who do the lent thing and mostly they are Caucasians who aren’t giving up anything without reaping rewards and rebates. Catholics give up cookies and candies, perhaps beer and cigarettes, then write it of as helping god rather than helping themselves.
The church got hip- notoriously non hip- and asked the laity and gayety- to stop using lent for their own diet of denial but rather use it to reach out and positively help others like community service without a court officer checking off the hours.
You know that shit never caught on.

Pax Father Freddogg