While our friends in another part of the world — a part-time merchant marine and a being from another planet — sort out where they’re going, let’s take a break, shall we?

A bottle-shaped volume of Founders Dry Hopped Pale Ale (35 IBU’s, 5.4% alc. by vol.) finds its way down my gullet, gulp by gulp.

Young men are completing their requirements for Eagle Scout.

A young woman is completing her winning entry in the Science Fair (Wait!  Don’t tell her that she’s won — the judges haven’t critiqued her entry yet.).

People are poised to tour low Earth orbit or take a trip around the Moon, mere years away.

And an actress gives money to help starving people in the Sudan, yet another celebrity sealing her place in history as a person who’s assisting those “over there somewhere, but not in my backyard.”  Some would call it spreading the gospel, evangelising, or doing one’s duty to serve a mission, share a vision and teach civilised survival skills.

These are mere words.  They are the humble expression of my education, my subcultural training.

In the larger culture, the main channel where innumerable ideas flow past before I can blink an eye, many subcultural practices and beliefs influence my thought patterns.

I return to old thoughts that belong to Rick, the former writer of this blog:

Am I the grasshopper or the ant?  Am I the Eagle Scout who displays behaviours consistent with the moral and ethical teaching of the subculture in which I was nourished, where women were objectified as almost virginal in their demeanor and respected as nonsexual mothers/daughters/sisters, or am I the boy who sneaked peeks at the Playboy magazines hidden in the top of my father’s closet, where women from all walks of life were objectified as sexually desirable in their posed photographic fantasies?

When the genders are equally participating in a fun game of sexually explicit skits on stage, should objectification of any sort sneak into my thoughts?

In that ol’ nature-vs-nurture discussion about the formation of personalities, what are the patterns, the personality archetypes, that lead some people to a life of church-based conformities and others to life without rules that discourage comfortably displaying the body, au naturel, and the actions bodies take to relieve sexual desires?

When two subcultures meet, such as the two described above, how do individuals of different subcultures first greet one another?  What are their ordinary social interaction behaviours in office/school/outdoor environments?

I know I have traveled this path of words before but did I make any conclusive observations?

I have no grand, sweeping statements that try to box all personality types together, forcing them to operate under a set of rules for homogeneous behaviour.

I know better than that.

What can I say?  Tonight, I enjoyed the simple pleasure of watching the performance of local actresses on stage, who sang original songs (accompanied by two male musicians), read original stories, and danced in levels of dress (or undress, if you will).  Forgetting the lyrics once or twice, hitting the occasional note offkey and not on purpose.

Burlesque in the land of cotton and spaceships.

Creativity without question.

The main singer with the stage name of Rosie Profane, sounding like Laurie Anderson at times and looking like a grownup Miley Cyrus, was assisted by Pan Asian Cuisine (Christina Sanderson) and the Lovely Aunt Sofonda Peters (apparently a popular character actress of the Posey Peep Show, exemplified by the warm applause and wolf whistles she received).

Other than the staged reading of the Vagina Monologues (which always makes me want to say the Martian Chronicles, for some reason), I rarely get to read, hear or attend a public event where one is asked to think up a new euphemism for female masturbation such as occurred earlier this evening.

The title of this blog is one such poetic cliché for relieving the former medical condition of hysteria.  Another one shouted out tonight was “freeing the slaves,” a reference with historic meaning here in the Heart of Dixie so soon after Juneteenth but also more generally in terms of feminine empowerment.

At the end of the workweek, I had the choice of listening to a tribute band perform the tracks for the album “Back in Black” by AC/DC, a band I never really cared for in my secondary school days, or seeing Rosie Profane bare her personality, her bosom and her derriere, a performance for which my father’s Playboy magazines prepared me.

Dad never cared for rock-n-roll.

Tonight, Dad, I raised a flask of Bushmills in your name while Rosie Profane-ly declared full freedom of expression by singing a song for a military member serving this great country of ours, where an Eagle Scout can watch a striptease act without an ounce of guilt and later write about it for the [uncensored] world to read.

With mass media outlets around the world reducing their staff, including our local newspaper, the Huntsville Times, blogs like these, as well as other social media formats, become the voice of the people.

As a cartoon caption recently stated, “He’ll keep doing it for free as long as we call him a content provider.”

Here’s your free, friendly mention of a local staged musical performance in a former cotton mill, just short of a full-fledged critical review, courtesy of humble ol’ me.

My choice of euphemism?  Hmm…how about ripening the peach?