I was sitting on the front porch of the compound yesterday morning having my coffee and perusing the latest edition of Woodward News. I used to work myself into an agitated state whenever I came across an editorial, grammatical, or spelling error in a newspaper. Not anymore though…nope. Life’s too short to get that pissed off over something I have no control over. Besides, I’ve worked as a newspaper writer and even as an editor so I know how tough it can be under the pressure of a deadline to get every little thing perfect before you go to print.
But something I saw in the paper got me thinking about the difference between an avocation and a vocation. What? You don’t have inner-voice debates with yourself about such matters? It’s a daily occurrence for me, much like the editorial errors in the local paper (psst…page 1, article about feral hogs, think you meant Arkansas rather than Texas)…oops, there I go again. But I digress… I was still turning the whole vocation vs. avocation thing over in my head when I came across an entertaining piece on the KFOR.com web site. The story provides a great example of the difference between the two. It seems some guy down in Purcell (whose motto translated from the Latin is, “We got a new bridge!”) came home from a doctor’s appointment to find his home ransacked and some dude asleep on his sofa. He tried to wake Sleeping Beauty, but was unsuccessful so he headed out the door and called the cops. The law was able to wake our Sleeping Beauty without a kiss…wonder if they used the Taser (bet that would wake someone). Turns out Sleeping Beauty has a long and distinguished history with the police in Purcell. In fact, he was arrested in 2001 for the exact same thing…burglarizing a home and then dozing off at the scene of the crime. Dude doesn’t learn does he? So, let’s review. Here we have a career criminal, guess that would make “criminal” his vocation, but he really sucks at it so that moves it into the avocation category. Maybe we should say that his vocation is prisoner and his avocation is criminal since that seems to sustain his vocation. Damn, I’m good at this analysis thing. And then, this morning, again on the KFOR.com web site (where apparently it’s dumbass criminals week), I find a story about two idiots in El Reno (whose motto translated from the Latin is, “there’s more here than the prison”) that tried to steal windmills to sell for scrap. When I first read this, I thought about those old Bugs Bunny cartoons, in particular the one where Farmer Fudd is proudly gazing at his garden when suddenly the carrots begin disappearing below ground (spoiler alert, it’s Bugs). I kind of imagined the same thing with the windmill towers disappearing as someone is watching them. But, apparently it’s a good deal less clever than that. It seems our two windmill thieves (we’ll call them Don Quixote and trusty sidekick, Sancho) were caught in the act of tossing scrap metal from the hay loft of a barn when the property owner of said barn confronted them. Apparently, Don Q and Sancho are well known to police. Investigators visited Don Q’s home and discovered several windmill fans laying around in the yard. Hmmmmmm, interestingly there was an ongoing investigation in windmill thefts in the area. Don Q admitted to being in the barn, but denied the windmill thefts. It soon came to investigators’ attention that Don Q had been selling windmill fans to antique dealers in the OKC area. After a foot chase through a wheat field, authorities finally caught up to our two wannabe outlaws who confessed to thefts that included windmills, flatbed trailers, and other equipment from rural farm properties. Like our hapless narcoleptic burglar from Purcell, Don Q and Sancho don’t seem to be very good at the outlaw trade, obviously their avocation. Maybe they’ll be better at making license plates as a vocation. Comments are closed.
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