I drove to town today and decided that I should probably write about it before the booze and the golden memories wear off.
I'm not really drunk. I simply had a couple beers for courage before I hit the dangerous, winding, narrow, treacherous mountain roads. Okay, I had three beers. Then I took some generous swigs of a daytime liquid cold medicine. Then I took an aspirin. And a few more swigs of beer.
That curious concoction is Minor League compared to the dangerous stuff I used to mix together when I was a kid in California. I'm older now and more conservative.
Anyway, I got up at 8:00 am but wasn't ready to leave until around 11:00. I didn't know what to wear. All my jeans are embarrassingly dirty. Well, all except for my black jeans (which look clean when they're dirty) but I don't wear black on hot days - not even to funerals. So I reluctantly wore my old army pants. And an old army shirt. And my old boots. And an ancient cowboy hat.
If there was a death penalty for beginning sentences with conjunctions, I'd be pushing up daisies right now.
Since I had on old army clothes I decided to wear my dog tags. They were a perfect accessory for my Redneck meets Hicksville attire.
The fantastic thing about living in rural Tennessee is that no matter how outrageously bad you look everyone else looks even worse. This feeds my ego.
If you think driving the dangerous, winding, narrow, treacherous mountain road is bad - try doing it when your back is screamingly painful and it's 95 degrees. And the air conditioner in your car doesn't work.
Then compound that agony with having four gigantic plastic bags of putrid garbage in the back seat. The stench induced hallucinations that would have impressed Timothy Leary. My first stop is always the City Dump. I think it's properly called Garbage Central or some such thing.
Garbage collectors don't make visitations to rural mountain areas so I have to tote my own trash to town. It's a necessary humiliation.
They're no longer called garbage collectors, Jon. They're now Sanitation Coordination Engineers.
I don't know whether today was a holiday, or if Tennesseans simply take the day off when the temperature is over 90, but I never saw it so crowded in town. There are usually about 150 freakin' people in town. Today there must have been 200,000. It looked like Atlantic City on the 4th of July. I can't figure what the hell was going on.
Moonshine convention, maybe?
There were even lines of vehicles at the service station when I got gas (that's petrol, for those of you in Yorkshire).
After I went to the bank, I had to drive to two places to pay my utility and water bills.
Why don't you simply pay your bills online, Jon?
Because I savor the adrenaline rush and profound anxiety that I get when driving to town. I used to pay my bills online when I lived in Texas. It was too easy.
Is this post getting annoyingly long? It's never my intention to ply you with too much of a good thing. Or to annoy you in the process of doing it.
I haven't even got to the grocery shopping part yet. Or the beer part. There's only one place in town that sells beer and their prices are outrageous. Taking advantage of desperate, pathetic alcoholics is beyond sinful.
Well, I got the three essentials that I always need: cat litter, toilet paper, and beer. And enough groceries to last nearly a month. I really wanted to get ice cream but it would have dissolved on the drive home. Instead I got yogurt. The great thing about yogurt is that if it goes bad you can't tell.
You could always bring an ice chest and put your ice cream in there, Jon.
Hey, I'm not the fancy type. Who the hell do you think I am - Martha Stewart?
It was so hot and dry today that it felt like Death Valley (I've been there and thought I'd mention it to impress you). It hasn't rained here in two days which is considered a drought. On the way home, my contact lenses dried out and got incredibly blurry. I could hardly see as I screeched around dangerous curves at 80 MPH.
Jon, you're reckless, childish, incorrigible, and a menace to society.
And that's on a good day. You wouldn't want to see me when I'm bad. You forgot to mention that I'm cute.
BTW, what does "incorrigible" mean?
My other blog is simply an extension of myself, intended to perplex you. Here's the link:
http://cabinetofcurioustreasures.blogspot.com
