MILF Alternatives

Mother I’d Like to Have Coffee With
Mother I’d Like to Catch on the Flying Trapeze
Mother I’d Like to Write a Scholarly Article About
Mother I’d Like to Give a Wheelbarrow Ride To
Mother I’d Like to Run Against for City Council
Mother I’d Like to Pick Up, Turn Upside Down, and Shake the Change out of the Pockets Of
Mother I’d Like to Give All My Money To
Mother I’d like to Write a Sonnet To
Mother I’d Like to Follow Around the Grocery Store Until Security Asks Me to Leave
Mother I’d Like to Violate the Terms of My Parole With
Mother I’d Like to Meet in a Dark Alley
Mother I’d Like to Carry on My Back Across the Desert
Mother I’d Like to Like
Mother I’d Like to Mother

Comments

  1. The Duffer says

    Can we not just leave the mother alone?

  2. Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

    Shut your mouth!

  3. Didn’t Lennon do a song called Mother?

  4. MILK – Mother I’d Like to Kill

  5. Our Man in Inglewood says

    Mother I’d Like to Foot-massage

    • Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

      AWESOME catch, Rachel!!!!

      I lllooOOOOOOOOVVVVVvvvvveeeee STOICISM!!1!!!!!

      • Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

        I actually do suspect it’s more compatible with Christianity than Alan Jacobs thinks.

        To the degree I understand stoicism, I find it admirable and sane.

        Its worst weakness, as I see it, isn’t the coldness or harshness Jacobs attributes to the Southern and Midwestern ‘stoics’ he’s known; it’s the too-willingness to surrender to ‘fate’, the too-readiness to draw the circle of things within one’s own power (and thus, for which one is responsible) very tightly around oneself. The best critique I’ve seen of such an attitude is in The Remains of the Day (the movie; I haven’t read Ishiguro’s novel, though his book Never Let Me Go — of which, I haven’t seen the movie — covers much of the same ground very beautifully).

    • I can’t speak to the Southern code, but as for the so-called Midwestern code (which almost borders on the oxymoronic – but is probably more a paradox) I don’t know what Midwesterners Mr. Jacobs has met – but at least in the upper Mississippi valley, the desire to share another’s suffering is alive and well.

      I saw a woman once counsel a failing marriage and reach out to the family of a man who died suddenly all in the same day; I’ve seen another woman visit a dying man and sit with him for hours, talking about his youth and setting him in the right direction toward the grave. I also once lived with a family that took their turns waiting for death of a loved one, waking at all hours of the night to attend and serve.

      Coming from the East Coast – Mid-Atlantic – I wonder about whether there is not some sort of self-preservation instinct at play in all regions when it comes to manners. Yet as Percy himself says, manners is what allows a person to survive the daily onslaught of other people – it’s the butter which allows one to slide through society without much of a hitch.

      In the South, perhaps that sense of manners takes the form of high liturgy, a code of interaction which on the face of it is complicated, but is actually very simple. In the Midwest, that code is flipped, sort of – rather than small talk as an invitation to deeper communion, the Midwesterner tends to begin with the deeper communion – promiscuous invitations to visit and stay and linger long beneath a man’s roof, hot dishes and bars (lemon and peanut butter) at funerals, the easy allowance for strangers showing up at one’s door and being ushered in without a second thought – all that to allow for, to make space for, to make a place at the table for the small talk which is bound to follow.

      (No one volunteers the important facts of one’s life in the Midwest, they sort of strain through conversation like whey through a cheesecloth, but once they’re realized they become a part of the landscape.)

      Of course, my native East Coast is a different animal together – in which the raw utility of life (industrial, commercial, efficient) has become itself the manner by which a closely-packed population interacts, survives, what have you. But once you scratch that surface – which is purportedly all surface, a fact I deny – you have to understand that the rule of the clan is the way that a soul obtains its bearings.

      JOB

  6. In the South, perhaps that sense of manners takes the form of high liturgy, a code of interaction which on the face of it is complicated, but is actually very simple

    Spot-on, except that the complexity reflects a reality too. As a native Southerner I was really startled at how straightforwardly simple Midwestern social interaction seemed to be, all the way down to the ground: no hidden traps, no barbs, no tripwires. The South is not like this. There you can be sliding along smoothly and suddenly find that the ground drops out from under your feet. And while the politeness and warmth of others can be an authentic handmaid of virtue, it can also conceal startling depths of ill will or indifference. By contrast, things here on the East Coast seem to be more out in the open: some folks can be quite rude, but then what you see is what you get. At other times, surface rudeness covers genuine goodness. And here, where a veneer of politeness covers danger, the veneer is usually thin enough to see through in time.

    • You said better about the East than I could. I’ve been away a long time…

      Thanks for that, Katy.

      JOB

    • Bless your heart.

    • Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

      As one who grew up in the South — but not the deepest South, and not in a family with deep roots there — I find Katy’s account of Dixie duplicity to be alien to most of my personal experiences. Either I was blessed to have fallen in with a lot of good-hearted straight-talkers, or you can call me Prince Myshkin. Or both.

      • “The Nguyens? Oh, they’re not from here. I mean, they’ve only been here what, three generations?”

  7. In accordance with the amazing Walt Disney, it is curiosity that directs us down new paths.
    I am truly curious to try this path together with you and find where
    it goes to.

Leave a Reply to Rachel Cancel reply

*