Now that our national obsession with guns is linked to our national love for the great outdoors, with Congress voting to allow loaded and concealed weapons in our national parks, I began thinking what the summer might hold in terms of fun with guns.

Imagine how we could market this new recreational combo.

Looking for a summer thrill? We have parks that really kill.
Do you need a place to stay? Call your local N.R.A.
Pack a pistol in your pack, U.S. law has got your back.

Bring the sutures, bandage rolls, iodine for bullet holes.
Bug spray, sunscreen, snakebite kit won’t protect you from a hit.

Okay, campers, you get the idea? Now, let’s consider the possibilities if the all-powerful gun lobby, the Great Horned Shooters of America, given their triumph over common sense, decide to flex their muscle even more and push to make firearms legal in all the other places Americans go to rest and recreate.

Do you need one in your car? Would you take one to a bar?
Would you reload at the mall? Or in a museum hall?
Going to an outdoor theater? Don’t forget to take your heater.

Love that holster on your bike. Do they make one for a trike?
Stash a sidearm in your basket, bring home Grandpa in a casket.

I know this sounds as sing-song silly as a Dr. Seuss rhyme. But who would have thought that the grown-ups who are leading our country, with our epidemic of murder rampages, would agree to make it legal to take a loaded firearm to Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or your favorite national seashore.

We go to our parks for fun, not so we can scream and run.
Outdoor’s made for peace and quiet, not for those who cause a riot.

Mother Nature’s hit the floor since the sniper moved next door.
Smokey Bear is worried too. He’d feel safer at the zoo.

With all the concern paid to the endangered written word – who’s producing it, who’s reading it and how will newspapers and books survive - we might want to pay more attention to preserving the spoken word.

That is, the talking part, when we’re face to face. Where chatter is not reduced to 140 characters on a tiny keyboard. And we can strive for eloquence, understanding and maybe throw in a few adjectives and adverbs.

When we’re talking, we don’t need any stinking tweets or text. We can use our big girl and big boy words. While old and new media duke it out, we could be having summer salons and front porch idea fests. Return to those days of communicating in full sentences.

And yet, I worry, having observed a sloppiness among people, even those who consider themselves articulate and well-spoken, to slip into “blah, blah, blah” speech. The alarming part is that it’s catching. Someone blah-blahs you and you blah-blah back.

For example, a friend reports she is no longer going out with a man who is smart, kind and likes to dance. “So, he called to say he couldn’t come to my birthday party, and blah, blah, blah. And you know, I can’t put up with that anymore.”

But what is the blah, blah? Maybe there’s a pattern of behavior with this person that I’m supposed to know and doesn’t need explaining, but how can she assume? She could be leaving out the best part of the story. Did she mean, instead of “blah, blah, blah,” to say, “Because orphans, as you know, hate birthday parties.” Or, “because he’s back with his ex.”

“Blah, blah, blah” seems to have replaced “yada, yada, yada.” You remember “yada, yada, yada.” It was immortalized in a Seinfeld show in which George complains that his girlfriend stops short of saying what she really means and glosses it over with “yada, yada, yada.” And Jerry Seinfeld says perhaps she is just being succinct in the manner of USA Today.

Of course, that was at a time when USA Today was considered shorthand journalism but which is “War and Peace” compared to blog briefings. Online communication is terse and code-like. Twitter seems like passing a note in junior high and having the teacher read it in front of everyone.

But offline we can talk on into the night.

Social media is not the same as social discourse which is full and rich in a “My Dinner with Andre” kind of way.

Maybe people use “blah, blah” because they’re feeling time-sensitive and rushing to tell the story. Like saying “and so on” or “same old, same old” or “etcetera, etcetera,” assuming that the other person can fill in the details. But it takes no more time to use real words.

Besides when someone says, “Blah, blah” I think of what the dog hears when you look into his face and say, “I mean it, no more barking.”

Consider how many delicious and useful words are rejected every minute just to fit a tweet or a blog or a Blackberry that we could save and use in our next conversation. When the napkins are balled up and the glasses pushed back and talk drifts down the table like music, punctuated by laughter and maybe debate and then everyone is taking turns recalling childhood memories of swimming in their favorite green lake.

And it’s all brilliant, not blah-blah, these words that are attached to thoughts, not thumbs.

There used to be a term for older women – Blue Hairs - named for the steely rinse used to enhance their graying locks. Not always intended, the color could have resulted from a bad dye job or bad perm. But “blue hair” was not at all a respectful or flattering term.

Still, I’m sure those blue-haired women were making what they hoped was a subtle attempt to forestall the appearance of aging which they feared, and society validated, would make them feel invisible.

Thank goodness, subtle is out. And visibility is in. Now we have groups of women in their 50s and beyond who are stating their presence in living color. If some people think they’re too gaudy, well, fiddle-dee-dee, get over it. Like them or not, they’re not at home fading into the wallpaper.

The latest to go public are members of the Blue Thong Society. You might consider them an alternative to the Red Hat Society, that group of older women formed 11 years ago to display their vintage in ever-growing swarms of purple boas and red chapeaus.

But not everyone is the Red Hat type. Women do not deal with their experiences, even shared ones like milestone birthdays, in the same way. Yet, there’s strength in numbers, especially when you’re out to bust stereotypes having to do with age. And so a group of friends in San Diego decided to do it their way.

The Blue Thong Society was conceived four years ago when Mary Jo Wallo, an investment counselor and surfer in San Diego, celebrated her 50th birthday and two surfer friends gave her red hats. As a joke. Mary Jo knew about the Red Hats and appreciated their chutzpah but considered herself a bit hipper than the Red Hat image.

She couldn’t do the costume, she says. She and her friends remain true to their bell bottoms. And while she says, “We accept the fact that we’re all getting older,” she explains, “We’re young-minded. We’re hot and we surf.”

Mary Jo’s friends agreed she was more apt to wear a red thong than a red hat and that was the beginning of what is now a national group. In the development process the thong became blue, maybe because everyone in the charter group lived next to the Pacific.

Now Thongers have recruited women across the country who sport the Blue Thong logo, a frisky design that, depending on how you look at it, can resemble a flip flop shoe on a bare foot or a string undergarment on a round bottom. Members are not required to wear either variety of thong but happily wear T-shirts that say, “Fight Frump.”

Red Hats founder Sue Ellen Cooper, also from Southern California in Orange County, stated from the beginning that she hoped her Red Hat women would gather just to have fun, without an agenda. Mary Jo Wallo asks each Blue Thong chapter to work with a non-profit in their community. Her own, in Encinitas, sponsors a women’s shelter.

Thongers like to have fun, too, which I discovered when I spoke to a group in San Diego where the theme drink was a blue martini and they were still raving about last month’s sex workshop.

Founder Mary Jo, who combines a tight tanned surfer body with a business woman’s marketing brain, doesn’t feel competitive with the Red Hats. She told Sue Ellen, the Red Hat organizer, there are your Coke drinkers and your Pepsi drinkers. Your Adidas people and your Nike people. There’s room for us for all.

That’s right. We grow proud and old and this time if we color our hair blue we’ll make sure it glows in the dark.