The Super Moon

The recent super moon got a lot of attention around here. It was in the papers, and people were talking about it. I guess that shows that folks living in a rural area pay more attention to nature because they’re closer to it. Or it could illustrate that there are a lot of retired people here with time on their hands.

When I first heard about the super moon all I could think of was Kim Kardashian’s ass pressed against a plate glass window. I suppose that says a lot about my natural inclinations. If there’s a choice between taking the high road and taking the low road, I inevitable head for the low road.

By coincidence, about the same time as the super moon was the topic de jour I saw a commercial featuring Niki Minaj who, like Kim Kardashian, also has an incredibly large ass. A true gluteus maximus, as it were. Apparently, there are a lot of people who have a thing for big butts. I don’t get it myself but to each his own. Which brings me to my point. If you like women with huge heinies you should visit North Georgia. There are asses around here that you could sell ad space on. They should have to display a wide load sign in public. Some are so big they deserve their own area code. 

It’s not that asses here are fatter than elsewhere. I assume there is a human limit on butt size—a kind of badonkadonk terminal velocity—though Kim Kardashian and Niki Minaj make me wonder. I also do not believe that North Georgia has cornered the market on humongous booties. There are plenty of Bertha Butts everywhere. Just go to an urban mall, and you’ll see what I mean.

No, I think what truly distinguishes this place from, say, Florida is that there are a lot less tiny butts here. In Florida you can count on encountering a nice ass on a fairly regular basis; here, not so much. I attribute this to (a) the fact that we have an older population and (b) any woman who has an attractive ass usually gets it out of here as soon as she can. So the problem really is that the fat ass to tiny ass ratio is higher in North Georgia than in many other places. How’s that for an analysis of ass metrics? If this was an economics textbook I’d insert a chart here to graphically illustrate my point.

It is probable that some will find this discussion demeaning and sexist. To be fair, this is not the place for young stud muffins either. You see a lot of overweight and out-of-shape men with big bellies and bad haircuts around here. Not by coincidence, they are often in the company of a fat-assed woman. It’s our version of a twofer.

I guess the point of this rumination is that North Georgia is not the land of young, attractive people. Fannin County will never be confused with South Beach. The people here are very nice, they do not dress weird, they love God and country and they are normal by conventional standards but if you want to be around people who will stir your libido, this is not the place to be.

On another and probably safer note, I had to wear a suit for three days in a row last week. This is notable because it is only the second, third and fourth time I’ve worn one since I retired. By my calculation that’s about once every 288 days. I’d like to get my suit wearing down to, say, the periodicity of Halley’s Comet but this was an instance when duty called.

The occasion for my suit wearing was a thing they do here called Teen Maze. They take ninth and tenth graders from the local high school and run them through stations where they learn about the consequences of bad choices. There’s a pregnancy station, a sexually transmitted disease station, a car crash station, a drug and alcohol station, etc.

One of the stations is a courtroom where the students learn the penalties for the types of crimes that hormonally laden teenagers might commit: DUI, vehicular homicide, rape, stalking and sexting (which, believe it or not, is quite a problem in these parts). The hope is that learning the consequences of a bad decision will deter them from making one.

I was asked to participate in the courtroom scenario as the public defender. The prosecutor was played by a newly retired district attorney from these parts, and the judge was played by a real-life juvenile court judge. I know next to nothing about Georgia criminal law, the Georgia juvenile justice system or being a public defender so I was pretty clueless. If the common perception of a public defender as being ignorant and incompetent is true, then I was perfect for the part. Given the depth of my ignorance I’m not clear on why they felt it so important that the public defender be portrayed by an attorney. You can teach a monkey to begin every other sentence with the words, “Your honor.” But at least I looked sharp in my suits. Folks expressed amazement that I cleaned up so well since I usually look like Paco the pool man or Mr. Greenjeans. My response was, “I told you I used to be somebody once.”

I think we did what we were supposed to do. The kids came to our station smiling and joking. After I did a crappy job pleading for mercy and the judge sentenced them to hard jail time, suspended licenses, curfews, fines, penalties and extended probation they left our station with grim faces. Fundamentally our job was to scare the shit out of them, and I think we accomplished that. Certainly I did. If I were in their shoes I would be scared of committing a juvenile crime if I believed the public defender was as ineffective as I was.

The two juvenile crimes that caused the students to pucker the most were vehicular homicide and the rape scenarios. In Georgia, if you’re 17 or older and charged with those crimes you are tried as an adult, and if you’re convicted you serve time in the big boy prison where the watchword is protect your ass at all times. Can you say, “Squeal like a pig, son?” Furthermore, it’s not uncommon for 16 year olds to be tried as adults in Georgia. As for statutory rape, in Georgia 15 year olds are presumed to be incapable of consenting to sex, and it doesn’t matter whether they look 30 years old and have multiple ID’s corroborating the fact. If you’re 17 and the girl is 15 you’re fucked, so to speak.

As I watched the guys when the judge was talking to them I wondered how much of the rape message was sinking in. I’m pretty sure the threat was enough to convince some of them to keep it in their pants. It was certainly enough to get me to swear off sleeping with 15 year olds from now on. But I’m also pretty sure that for some of them it was a hopeless cause. At that age a lot of young males are little more than heat seeking missiles. Their synapses are no match for raging hormones. Sadly, when Mr. Willy is on the hunt judgment ceases, and primal urges control the show. I know that describes me at that age.

But if the threat of criminal penalties didn’t deter them, the STD station may have. It consisted of graphic photographs of the effects of the various STDs on the body. Not good. Definitely not good. It’s entirely possible the images alone were enough to cause some of the kids to swear off sex for life and become priests and nuns. I anticipate a drastically lowered birth rate in Fannin County.

As if the photographs weren’t enough, the kids had to spin a wheel which randomly assigned them a sexual disease. Then they received a slip of paper that described the effects of the disease. Stuff like: “You have contracted syphilis. In two years your dick will fall off and you will go mad. In five years you will dissolve in a cloud of dust like a vampire exposed to sunlight. There is no cure. Have a nice day.” It was like getting the go to jail card in Monopoly but much worse.

So there you have it. I live in the land of fat asses and sexually repressed high school kids. When you think about it, those are two complimentary characteristics.