My grandfather liked burnt toast for breakfast. Basically, a shingle of charcoal. If he went to a restaurant and the waitress brought him anything less than a serving of smoking brimstone, he would crumble it up in his fist, scream, "THIS ISN'T WHAT I ORDERED!" and throw it across the room. I mean, really, A little anger management, sir? is what you'd say these days, but then? Did people just go, Tch! Cookie's asleep at the grill again! and go back to gossiping about the town slut?

This obituary got me thinking. This quote in particular:

"By the turn of the century, you know, we didn't have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays," Jones recalled. "We didn't have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other."

Maybe people really were a lot more different way back when, or maybe they were just less self-conscious about being alcoholic/bipolar/anorexic/major flaming assholes. We're all much more aware of these things as failings these days. Yet the Catholic Church turned at least one woman who drank lepers' pus and treated bloody scabs like communion wafers into a saint. And then there's Wuthering Heights. It contains one of the meanest, least-evolved, clinging-to-their-neuroses set of bastards you'll ever read about short of the Third Reich. That whole novel is one big fuck you to mental health*.

So, this is why I'm going to quit shaving my armpits. Who's with me!?

*This sort of in-depth literary analysis earned me a C in Eng. Lit. 101.