May 29, 2009

Just what I need

Originally published November 10, 2003

Now I've got some goddam viagra salesman spamming my comments. How the hell do such worms get here?

I drank some more gin yesterday evening. I'm developing a taste for it. If you sip it slowly and savor that flavor, it's not half-bad, especially with a big slice of fresh lime.

I had an erotic dream last night. It involved someone I met at the blog-fest. And the object of my erection WAS NOT one of the guys, although a couple of them have nice asses and pretty mouths.

The Atlanta Falcons finally played like a football team yesterday and won a goddam game. Bejus! They suck AGAIN this year.

I went through over 1,000 emails this morning. I have 3,000 more to go. I allegedly have a really shameless one in there somewhere, but I haven't discovered it yet.

I didn't write a word on my novel this weekend. I played with the boys and visited with my family. I really need to take a tape recorder the next time I get my mama, my grandmother, Uncle Virgil and Aunt Peggy talking at the same time. The stories they tell will make you fall out of your chair laughing.

My family has always been blessed with a good sense of humor. I come from a long line of fine storytellers and even my brother, being the litigator he is today, takes advantage of that fact in the courtroom. We Smiths and Abners can wind a yarn.

We're all ex-hillbillies, but nobody lives in the mountains anymore. I don't know why, but something about that heritage stays in your blood for your entire life no matter how far you travel.

Virgil and I talked yesterday about the old saying I learned as a young boy. "If a stream runs over 100 rocks, the water is good to drink." We both counted rocks in our youth and drank that water, never thinking about the turd floating nearby or the dead dog stuck in the branches by the creek bank. Hell, we're alive today, so maybe that "100 rocks" thing has some credence.

We talked about the word "nigger." When I lived in Lewellen, "Nigger-Camp" was how everyone referred to where the black folks lived. "Nigger Faye" ran a boarding house down there and she had a son that Virgil liked to play with. That boy had no shoes, but he could run and throw and hit a baseball. Virgil walked with him often to the ballfield and they had to cross a railroad trestle to get there. In the summer, the creosote was boiling out of the crossties and the rails were too hot to walk barefoot. So, Virgil had that "nigger boy" hop on his back and he toted the shoeless one across the trestle. He did the same thing on the way home. "I called him a nigger, but I never thought of him as anything but a friend," Virgil said yesterday. "He was fun to play with. Besides EVERYBODY called black people niggers in those days. I don't see the big deal about it today. Hell, people still call US 'hillbillies.'"

My mama confessed that she pitched a hissy in the churchyard a couple of weeks ago. St. Luke's Methodist Church is right behind her house and they run a day care center over there in the afternoons. My dad put up a big privacy fence years ago to screen the back yard from them, but the church installed some wooden monkeybar-tower thing that the kids could climb. The kids started climbing to the top and throwing shit into mom's yard. She was out walking her dog around the yard one day and a brick almost hit her. She got pissed. She walked over to the church and asked, "How much trouble will I be in if I burn that thing down? I need to know, because I'm about to set it on fire!" They dismantled that tower and put it up somewhere else the next day.

That's my mama. Read this blog and you'll see that some acorns don't fall far from the tree.