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. 

I Learn About Invasive Species

Not too long ago, my Master Gardener (MG) group, the North Georgia Master Gardeners, held a two day workshop on invasive species that threaten the North Georgia ecosystem. Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly Debbie Does Dallas stuff. More like Japanese knotweed does Georgia.

I attended the workshop even though I cannot identify more than eight native plants or shrubs. I’m okay on vegetables but not so hot on the other stuff. In my defense, a lot of plants and shrubs look the same, and you need an incredible memory and an eye for fine detail to differentiate them. The fact that ninety percent of them are harmless and will make absolutely no difference in my life reduces my urgency to know what the bush next to the porch really is. I mean, when’s the last time you heard on the five o’clock news that a Drooping Leucothoe or a Dwarf Fothergilla robbed a bank, ran a stop sign and killed a mother of four or committed welfare fraud? I figure it’s enough to recognize which plants have thorns or give you a rash. Please don’t let the MG’s know about this. They would probably strip me of my trowel and drum me out of their ranks.

There’s a chance I would have attended the workshop regardless, but the truth is that I was compelled to be there. You see, I agreed to be a vice president of the group months ago, and it was only later that I learned I was in charge of organizing educational programs. That was in the fine print in the bylaws. As a result, when we got the opportunity to have this workshop I was automatically the MG in charge. That’s MGIC for you with a military bent. Anyway, I couldn’t very well not attend.

I was glad I went, I think. I learned that there are many, many invasive species—animal, plant, insect and disease—that threaten North Georgia’s native species. Now I can recognize three or four invasive plants. As for the rest (and there are a lot of them), I’m clueless. The only way I’m going to identify the other invasive species is if they’re wearing a name tag or are in the custody of an INS agent. But, hey, at least I’m aware that it’s an issue. I’ll never be able to look on a beautiful sylvan scene again without wondering how many illegal aliens, er, I mean, undocumented plant visitors there are.

Many of the invasive species come from Asia, and their common names of show it: Chinese privet, Japanese honeysuckle, Japanese climbing fern, Japanese stiltgrass, Chinese tallowtree, Chinese wisteria, etc.

I have to admit to having a certain prejudice against things oriental. Maybe I read too many war histories when I was young but I’m still angry over Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, kamikaze attacks and Iwo Jima. Diversity training be damned, I just don’t trust the little bastards. They’re still eating with sticks, for God’s sake. You’d think that by now they’d realize that food stays on a fork a lot better than it does on a stick. As far as I’m concerned, the only things good that came out of the Orient are Chinese take-out food, pad thai, the Nissan 240Z, Casio watches and ben-wa balls. So I hope that there are gardeners in China and Japan who are having workshops on invasive species with American names like the American beetle, U.S. poison ivy and Yankee nettle. Serves the sneaky bastards right.

The workshop was taught by the Invasive Species Coordinator for the University of Georgia’s Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health. (With a name like that you’d think the center was larger than the Pentagon.) She was very knowledgeable, and fighting invasive species is her cause. The short version of her message is that invasive species out-compete native species causing the native species to die which brings an end to the ecosystem and then we all die. Well, that may be a little overstated but her message was more doom and gloom than uplifting or optimistic.

My first thought was let’s do something about it. But when she told us about the number of acres affected by the problem, I realized the enormity of the task. Take kudzu, the vine that ate the South. By one estimate there were 227,000 acres of kudzu in southern forests in 2010, and it is spreading at the rate of 2,500 acres a year. And that’s only the numbers for forests. There’s an estimated 500,000 acres of kudzu in non-forest areas. But that’s peanuts compared to Japanese honeysuckle. In 2010 there was an estimated 10.3 million acres of Japanese honeysuckle in southern forests spreading at the rate of 65,000 acres a year. Holy invasive species, Batman! That’s more than the number of new people who signed for Obamacare this year. From now on I’ll never stand still in the woods for fear of being steamrolled by honeysuckle. It will take more than a few Master Gardeners with a squirt bottle of Roundup to tackle the problem. I guess she had a reason to preach doom and gloom.

In addition to teaching the workshop, she gave an evening lecture where the community was invited. The lecture compressed all the bad news into a one hour talk. I almost felt sorry for the people who attended. They expected a nice little talk on plants only to be told there’s a possibility our ecosystem will collapse because of invasive plants. You could almost hear the people thinking, “Fuck me. Who knew?”

The evening lecture was so well attended that I got to thinking that the MG’s should sponsor a lecture series about topics that would take peoples’ minds off their petty problems: “Thank you for coming tonight. I hope you can attend our next talk on the high probability of a species-ending asteroid strike in the very near future. Other lectures in the series include talks on what happens to humanity when the Yellowstone Caldera erupts, nuclear proliferation, and viruses that threaten human existence.” The lectures would be an opportunity for the MG’s to hand out membership information inviting people to join our merry group. Come and join us if you want to be permanently depressed. Oh, and here’s the number for the suicide prevention line.

So now I’ll have to add invasive species to the list of things to worry about. Whoever said that ignorance is bliss got it right. Sometimes it’s better to bury your head in the sand, particularly if it’s on a Caribbean island and there’s plenty of rum punch.

The election, sorghum flat bread and a forest fire

Fannin County participated in the election in a big way. Of 14,684 registered voters, 11,924 turned out to vote. That’s 81.2 percent. While turnout figures for this election are not yet available, Fannin’s County’s voter participation figure easily beat the nationwide averages in 2008 (62.3%) and 2012 (57.5%).

I suppose that’s predictable in a county where it’s not considered a political statement to fly the American flag, they’re not ashamed to say the Pledge of Allegiance, everyone stands respectfully when the National Anthem is played, and everyone knows the words to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Around here people honor our military and those who have served, view the United States as the land of the free and the brave and think that all lives matter. They believe in doing their civic duty, and voting is one of those duties.

It helped that that there are lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” in Fannin County—folks who believe that Washington, the liberal media and the egg-sucking intellectual establishment have overlooked or forgotten the concerns and problems of the average working Joe. And you know what? I’m okay with that. If you don’t like it, go live elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll fit in fine among the left-leaning wingnuts in California or one of the other blue states. Oh, and by the way, on your way out the door you can kiss my ass.

This is Small Town, USA, and there are a lot of other places just like it across the country. These are the places that the liberal media, big city elites and Hillary Clinton look down upon as being backward, unsophisticated and ignorable. The reason I know there are other places like this is because Small Town, USA, just rose up and taught the elite establishment a lesson.

Predictably, Trump got 9,622 votes or 81.79 percent of the vote in Fannin County. Hillary only got 16.32 percent (1,920 votes) and Gary Johnson got 1.89 percent (222 voters). Everyone around here is wondering who the hell the Gary Johnson voters are. If they are to the right of the local Tea Party Patriots they probably live in the woods, carry muzzle loading rifles and wear buckskins. If they are to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren they undoubtedly wish to remain anonymous.

Being on the conservative side of course I was pleased with the results of the election but it was for more than just policy reasons. If Hillary had been elected there would have been a run on guns and ammunition even worse than when Obama got elected the second time. Ammunition would have disappeared as quickly as wide screen televisions during a Detroit riot. I’m okay in the gun department but my ammo supplies are low. I meant to stock up before the election but never got around to it so I was kicking myself on election night. You can’t be too prepared. You never know when the revolution is going to start or the Cubans will invade or there will be a zombie apocalypse. Now I can take time to replenish the arsenal.

I guess I’m a little bit of a prepper. Some of my time up here is spent trying to learn the old way of doing things. Not only am I interested in such things from a historical standpoint but some day it may be good to know how they did it before electricity and supermarkets. For example, I’m learning how to make leather britches beans. These are air dried string beans that will last through the winter. To reconstitute them you have to boil them for a while. I’ve spoken to an older woman who knows the old ways. She remembers leather britches beans fondly from her childhood and says that when they are boiled with an old ham bone they are tasty. I talked to others who say they are taste like old shoe leather. I guess I’ll find out.

Along those lines, I grew a couple of rows of sorghum this summer. Think of a smaller version of sugar cane. Like sugar cane, the pithy core of a sorghum stalk has a high sugar content—as much as 16 or 17 percent. The old timers used to squeeze the juice out of the stalks, boil it down and make sorghum molasses. They still do. In fact, Blairsville, just to the east of us, has an annual sorghum festival.

Sorghum also produces seed heads with hundreds of seeds. Sorghum grain is one of the top five cereals in the world on the basis of production tonnage behind corn, rice, wheat, and barley. I harvested and winnowed the seeds, and now I will experiment with the grain. Just last night I made some sorghum flour by grinding the seeds in a coffee grinder and used the flour to make roti (also known as chapatti), an Indian flat bread. It wasn’t bad. I think it’s outrageously cool that I can grow an easily usable, edible grain.

Meanwhile, for the last month Fannin County has been on fire. The Cohuttas are a mountain range on the side of Fannin County, and there has been a forest fire raging in the Cohuttas for several weeks. It’s called the Rough Ridge fire, and the latest estimates are that it covers 6,000 acres. We have had an extremely dry summer, and all of North Georgia is in severe drought conditions. It hasn’t rained on my property for almost two months.

When the wind is from the west there’s a smoky haze in the air and the unmistakable smell of smoke. The satellite photo on this page shows the smoke from the Rough Ridge fire drifting south towards Atlanta from Fannin County. We live close to where the North Carolina/Tennessee line meets Georgia.

When I drive into Blue Ridge on Highway 515 there is a panoramic view of the Cohuttas. The other day there was not a cloud in the sky but over the Cohuttas there was a huge plume of gray smoke drifting off to the north. It reminded me of Mordor and Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings. I suppose that’s another reason to stock up on guns and ammo when you can. You never know when you’ll be attacked by Orcs and Goblins. The hell with swords, spears and arrows. I’m making my stand with high velocity hollow points.

So there you have it. I live in the land of deplorables, patriotism, conservatives, and forest fires, I can grow my own grain and make my own bread and I’m prepared to handle civil unrest, zombies, invading Cubans and Orcs. Who can ask for anything more?

I Am Not Dead

No, I’m not dead. I didn’t suffer a horrible injury and lose the use of my typing fingers—all two of them. I haven’t fallen into a catatonic depression that prevents me from communicating with the outside world. I just haven’t written any posts to this blog in some time.

There are reasons for this. One is a lack of inspiration. Let’s face it, North Georgia is not the most exciting area in the world. Visiting Fannin County is not on any thrill seeker’s bucket list. People come here for rest and relaxation, to commune with nature, to watch deer gambol happily in the fields, to see the seasons come and go—if they wanted excitement they’d go somewhere else. While communing with nature and watching the seasons come and go may be good for the soul, they don’t make great fodder for an entertaining blog. To make this blog remotely interesting, I need to see or experience something that has a dash of oddness, a smattering of quirkiness or a bit of the unusual.

Sad to say, not much that is odd, quirky or unusual has happened around here lately. Fact is, life in Fannin County has gotten somewhat boring. What once passed for eccentric or noteworthy has become normal and expected. What was once idiosyncratic is now commonplace and humdrum. Finding subject matter to write about is becoming harder.

Another reason I haven’t written any posts is because I’ve been busy doing other things. Among other things, I worked on a fundraiser for the local homeless shelter, organized a two-day workshop on invasive species, tilled under my summer garden, painted my pole barn and went on a five day camping trip with the men’s group from my church. I’ve also written several anti-Hillary columns for one of the local newspapers. (Now there’s a subject that provides a writer with plenty of material. You can view my columns at http://fannincountygazette.blogspot.com/ if you are interested.)

I’ve written about a camping trip with the St. Luke’s Men’s Group (SLMG) before. It’s not a young group—I’m the baby of the group if you can believe that. Our camping trips resemble a reunion of veterans of the Great War.

We do these camping trips once or twice a year. I think the object of the trips is to build comradery and fellowship or maybe it’s just to get away from the wife for a few days to fart and scratch freely in the presence of other men who are farting and scratching freely.

This year we went to Appletree Campground in the Nantahala National Forest near Topton, North Carolina. It is remote. There is no cell phone reception. To use your cellphone you have to leave the campground, drive a few miles down the road to a fire station, stand on the northeast corner of the porch, face east and stick your thumb up your ass. That’ll get you one bar of reception. Perhaps it’s not the best place for a bunch of older men to go. The EMS response time is measured in days, and the nearest big hospital is probably in Chattanooga.

The men in the SLMG are great guys. All of them have held highly responsible jobs before retirement so they bring some accomplishments to the table. But, as I said, even though they are remarkably spry and energetic, they are not spring chickens. Many of them are hard of hearing so conversations around the campfire at night when they can’t see each other’s lips are interesting. (Phil: “What do you think about predestination?” Harry: “What? I’m not going anywhere.” Tom: “What about my hair?” Bill: “Well, I think the nation’s going to hell.”)

Like most gatherings of men, there is a lot of bullshitting at these camping trips. Bullshitting is a technical term. It describes the social interaction among men in a group, and it consists of an endless stream of antidotes, reminiscences, opinions, one-uppers, jokes, first person adventures, and outright lies usually fueled by alcohal. No useful or meaningful information is ever conveyed when men are bullshitting. If you’ve ever followed a men’s foursome around a golf course you have a pretty good idea of what bullshitting is.

My theory is that bullshitting serves the same social function among a group of men that picking nits off each other serves in a band of chimpanzees—it reinforces group ties. It’s an innately human phenomenon. It probably has its roots in the days when early man sat huddled around the campfire trying to entertain themselves and not think about the loud rustling noises out in the brush.

The highlight of the camping trip was the hike that most of us took the first day. It was intended to be a three-miler. It turned into a five and a half hour, 7 and 1/2 mile Bataan Death March. We started out at mid-morning full of good cheer and bonhomie looking like the seven dwarves in retirement. By the time it ended and we straggled into camp we looked like we had crossed the beach at Peleliu.

The problem was a crappy trail map and a poorly marked side trail. The trail map looked like it had been scrawled by a drunken and dyslexic pirate. All it was missing was a cross with the words “Here be treasure.”

There came a point when we realized we must have missed the side trail that would have taken us back to camp. By then we had climbed to the top of a long ridge, and the side trail was a couple of miles back. We should have turned back, but this group is nothing but optimistic. So we decided to truck on.

A mile or so later, after we descended a long, steep and narrow trail to a poorly maintained forestry road, it began to dawn on us that we really had no frigging clue where we were or where we were going. At that moment every one turned into Lewis and Clark. Guys were consulting compasses and GPS devices trying to determine which way was north. I think one of the guys was channeling Hiawatha and trying to use the sun to figure out where north was. It was a little disturbing when they came up with different conclusions but they eventually worked it out. I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel all that confident in a direction that was worked out as a consensus judgment. Of course, knowing which way is north is of no practical benefit when you don’t know which direction your home base is. But we all felt better for it. If we were going to die on the trail, at least we do so with our heads facing east in Indian fashion.

Several of the guys spent an inordinate amount of time bending over an old trial map disagreeing on where we were. I think they finally worked out that we were still in North Carolina. Actually, they did better than that. They narrowed our location down to an area only slightly smaller than the King Ranch.

Not that it mattered much. To go back meant climbing back up a long and steep trail and walking several miles. No one was up for that. We optimistically thought forging on would get us back to camp quicker and easier. I can’t remember why we came to that conclusion. Why did we think the road would take us to where we wanted to go, much less be shorter and easier, when we didn’t know where we were? I favored following the road but for another reason. I figured there was a greater chance they would find our bodies on a road rather than in the woods.

The terrain on the downhill side of the road was thickly wooded and dauntingly steep. There was no way we were going to make it down that way (not to mention we had no idea where down led to). If we weren’t going to retrace our steps, the only real option was to follow the road and hope that it led somewhere.

So we trudged and trudged and trudged. We knew we had to descend to get anywhere but the road refused to do that. It would go down a little and then go up a little. One of the group had an altimeter, and he started calling out the elevation every few minutes. It was like being in a bad submarine movie: “Three hundred feet and holding, Captain.” Spirits and energy were lagging.

At one point during this long and tiresome march someone began taking stock of how much water and food we had. I think it came out to three breakfast bars, an apple and five bottles of water. We were cautioned to drink sparingly and save the food for an emergency. I began having visions of the Donner Pass party. Fortunately, I had my little .380 pistol with me and was prepared to use it if we descended into cannibalism.

Finally, at long last, the road began to slowly descend. Two of us moved out ahead of the group. As we rounded a bend there, by God, was our campground. Talk about dumb luck.

Needless to say, that was the end of our hiking forays for that camping trip. The rest of the time we sat around the campfire with our drinks of choice in our hands trying to have a conversation. With this group that’s a challenge all by itself.