"Just An Old Sweet Song..."

Wow! It's been awhile... hasn't it kids...?
Brace yourselves... this is gonna be a bit long...
Just got back from my 3 week visit from way down soufh...
in da "Land 'O Cotton".

Georgia.

"Doo-dah...!"

(Well, Ok... been back a week already... just been busy.)
Doctor appointments, therapists, house cleaning, foodshopping, photo expos... and on top of it all, I took like over 400 pix down there, and burnt them to a disk. But something screwed up, and I only managed to salvage like half.
Gotta hook up with Kelly, and get her to send me the missing photos.
But although it took a bit... I made a gallery and finally am able to post a lil sumthin'- sumthin' from my trip.

First off, Kelly & D.J's house is amazing.
(Sorry, parental bragging rights apply here. My kid's doin' way better than I ever did. I'm SO proud of both of them... Stephie too.)
Not so much that it's a palatial mansion... but it's a brand new, 2 bedroom, 2 bath, huuuuge apartment, with walk-in closets in every room, a tropical pool & tiki bar, full sized gym, gameroom, and has all brand new appliances like dishwasher & clothes washer/dryer, security system, in a gated community... with parking!
All for $800. bucks a month rent!
Around here, places like this are called luxury condos, and rent for over three grand a month. I'm living in da wrong state.

The only problem for a city boy like me is that...
well... it's Middle Georgia.
Centerville.
Ain't a Hell of a lot ta do down thar.
It's all clean, and sparkly and all, but not too interesting to look at.
And if your like me, and you don't drink, hunt, or fish...
unless ya like eatin' in chain restaurants like Chili's etc., shopping in malls and doing a lot of bowling... your fucked on a saturday night.
So during the week, I was Kelly's personal maid...
I kept the house clean, dishes washed, clothes done, and mainly watched every HBO movie imaginable (all 5 channels!), and also caught up on the entire 5th season of The Sopranos on DVD...
in like 3 days.

But when my lil toosieface would come home from woik,
fuckin' wit shit down at da 'ol hangar...
I was like a deranged housewife in heat...
"Ooh, Ooh!, Ooh! Kelly... your home! Take me out!
I just gotta go bye-byes...!!!"
We managed to visit every mall & chainstore you can think of...
Sears, Target, JC Penny...
Chuck's Bait, Tackle, Gun & Pawn Jewelry Shop.
Wutta joint dat wuz...!
For all your fishing, ammo, handgun, shotgun, "30-aught-six", high powered automatic, and pawned powertool needs!

And I got to go with my baby... to take pictures of her baby.
We went to get Kelly's sonigram, and we found out that "Baby Herman" is actually... "Baby Hermoine"
We saw her heartbeating, sucking her thumb...
and a great upskirt shot of her tiny lil sideways burgerbun.
So we know she's a lil goil.
A proud moment for this soon-to-be grandpappy!

We went out one night to an "O'Charley's"... "O'Chucky's"...
I dunno... some fuckin' drunken Irish bastard's name... I forget.
Your basic family restaurant/bar thing.
They had a "trivia night' on Tuesday's.
Your play as a group table, all agree on an answer, and the table captain writes the answer on a piece of paper and brings it up to the moderator.
Ya have to hand in the answer before the song he puts on a turntable finishes.
And lemme tell ya... these focker's take their trivia seriously!
All sorts of rules... like ya can't answer a cell phone while at your table. You gotta go up to the moderator in front of everyone, and answer it...
so that you can't cheat and get "phoned in answers".
We were like... "Yeah... OK Regis... it's just my wife on da horn...
I ain't usin' a lifeline there Cha-Cha...!"
But I was at a table full of 20-something airman & their wives...
and they weren't as up on trivia as I was.
I'm a regular "Cliff Claven" from "Cheers"...
just chock full 'O useless information.
I fed them all sorts of answers. And they never scored so high before.
They thought I was Yoda or something.
Our team name was "We Were Here First". Because we apparently bumped another table of "trivia regulars" that usually sat there.
And we really seemed to put Granny Gump's panties on the opposing team in a knot cuz of it. They actually had spies, checking us out, and tried a feeble attempt at ratting one of our players out for taking a cellphone call.
Unfortunately... we didn't win.
But I did manage to polish off a better part of a 50 piece bucket of hotwings & a gallon of rootbeer...
and didn't shit for like the next 3 days.

Kelly took me on her base one day, and got a special security clearance for me to bring me onto the flightline, and onboard one of the surveillance planes she works on called the J-Star.
It's a monster of a radar plane.
And if you pass the little red line after the big gates you gotta go thru to get onto the air field, without clearance...
the armed guards there will as my kid puts it... "Jack yo' shit up".
I didn't wanna test da kid wit da big M-16.
(Although he did piss me off, cuz he was using it as leaning post. Quite possibly fuckin' up a perfectly useful deadly weapon that my tax dollars are paying for!)
The plane was fun, and I got the grand tour...
and I got to sit in da cockpit!
Afterward... the guys had a pig roast, and I ate with the airman.
It made me proud, and brought a tear to my eye to know just what kinda chowhounds are defending my country.
Good times... good times...
Hoo-rah!

They seem to eat a lot of pork down in the peach & peanut state.
Which is fine by me...
my arteries are lined with "the other white meat".
We got wind of a "Pig Jig" down in Vienna, Ga.
(which I was corrected on... it's not "Vee-enna"... it's... "VI-enna".)
It's one of these things ya see on da Food Network.
A big PIG cookoff.
Pulled pork, spareribs, brisket, hamhocks, Bar-B-Que...
you name it... they make it.
And it's kinda like a fair/small western town in the middle of some giant field near a shitload of cotton.
The winners actually setup small wooden duplex buildings permanantly there, with railings and decorated porches & shit.
It was kinda cool.
Afterward we went to a few antique stores with some great old stuff.
And then I got to wander out into a cottonfield...
and actually picked me sum cotton!
I can now die and go to heaven.
Kelly kept motioning me back to the car, and seemed to think I might get brought up on charges of cotton thievery.

And then I finally got to meet my "Gee-O-gee-ah Sweetheart"...
Sara Jane.
I've know Sara now for like 8 yrs. online.
She's from Georgia, and has a website called Southern Fried Chuckles.
(see link top left on this page under links.)
She found my website years back and wrote me...
and we've become thick as thieves ever since.
She's been my friend, confidante, teacher, therapist, big sister and a fantasy.
And now living outside Ga. in another nearby state...
she actually drove for hours just to come see my sorry ass.
It was fantastic!
No words can describe how nervous we were to meet at first...
but how amazing a visit it was!
Unfortunately it was waaay too frickin' short!
But we vowed that we'd see each other again soon, and that next time maybe she'd come up here by me, and I'd take her for a spin around da Big Apple.
(A great big shoutout to Poe for making everything possible for our get together. Your a great guy buddy... thanks!)
Till we meet again Sara my love...



Next it was off to the Georgia State Fair.
It was a monster of a fair, but like everywhere else me and Kelly went, we usually left a tiny bit late, and didn't get to see everything...
so we only saw a bit of the livestock/agricultural part of the fair.
("yawn.")
But it don't get no better than this folks!
Rednecks, cotton candy & corndogs, livestock, rides...
and one of the few remaining old-timey traveling 10-in-one sideshows around!!!
If your a magician & carnie-lover like me, or a just fan of the bizarre and corney... or even just watch "Carnivale" on HBO...
this one's a must see!
The ballyhoo stand...
(that's where the barker drums up business for the show)
had one of the last genuine "Munchkins" from "The Wizard of Oz".
Lil fucker was like 75 yrs old, still doing magic 'n shit.
Inside the tent was pure cheese... in full glory!'
Hokey stunts and badly done illusions, con-jobs, "pickled punks" and fakeries... sawdust and tattered tights.
(a "pickled punk" is carny talk for a fake deformed embryo in a big pickle jar.)
I was in my element!
In usual form, they had like two couples taking turns performing all of the ten plus acts pictured outside the tent...
"Spidora", "Revolvo", The Human Blockhead", The Electric Girl"...
I immediately fell in love with the one chick who was just so amazingly trashy... she was hotter than Hell to me!
A sexy lil number that wore like old mismatched undergarments, with long-john bottoms underneath torn fishnets, and she was tatooed all over, had half her head shaved, and various pieces of hardware threaded thru her face.
But up close... she was a real looker guys...!
My kinda woman.
("wink-wink... nudge-nudge...!")
She actually was quite sexy & cute in person.
Da pix in my gallery do her no justice.
The only thing that kinda gave me the creeps at the fair were the ghastly & gruesome looking, open-mouthed, clown-head trash cans.
They could traumatize a small child for life!

We also took a trip to Macon twice.
Once to just to visit... another time... for a murder trial.
Macon is a cute town with old buildings, but no people that seem to wanna walk around.
It was like 6pm on a beautiful friday night... and the town looked like it was a sunday morning.
Nobody around, except for an old black dood in a wheelchair, and his cronies...
and a handful of yuppie wanna-bees dining in a sidewalk cafe.
One of the only open busineses around.
I dunno... but the empty town kinda creeped me out...
it reminded me of the old 1950's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movie.

What's that you say...?
"What about da murder trial Ed...?"

Well... apparently Kelly kinda went out very briefly with this guy awhile back.
Nothing much came about of it, and they parted company.
Thank you Sweet Jeezuz...!!!
Later on... this dood went out with a married woman or something.
(I'm not all that totally clear on the actual story.)
And the woman decided to go back to her paralyzed, wheelchair-bound husband.
So this kid lay in waiting one night for the couple to get home.
Waiting with a large monkey-skinning knife, with deep serated edges for removing monkey nuts...
or some other reasonable facsimile like dat dere.
Anyhoo... when they got home, he stabbed them both visciously to death...
and I believe severely injuring a friend who was also with them.
So he was convicted of murder one.
And what was weird, was that Kelly was called in as a character witness for him during the sentancing trial...
not the actual murder trial.
Kinda like to help lighten his sentance I guess.
I listened to testimony from his high school coaches, Home Depot boss, girlfriend from bible school...
He was a nice fella.
But Kelly never wound up testifying at the trial.
They let her off because she was pregnant & a bit emotional that day.
They didn't wanna stress her out while pregnant.
But he ended up getting hit with da full magilla...
the death penalty.
"C'est la Vie, mon cherie monkey sticker..."

Then one day we took a 3 hour drive out to Savannah.
An absolutely gorgeous town on the coast.
(I think it's on da coast... felt like we were driving to France...)
Old buildings and houses, cobblestone streets, and the one end of Savannah ends with like a two story drop-off, with stairs leading down to the waterfront riverwalk area.
Very impressive.
There we found curio shops, and knick-knack, bricka-brack, give a dog a bone shops.
And lots of seafood joints.
We ate in one called "One-Eyed Lizzy's".
Cajun shrimp with scallops, king crablegs and dirty rice...
good stuff!
By then it was getting dark, so we started for home.
We got a bit lost on the way back, and went thru some of the neighborhoods there.
I regret that we didn't have enough time during the day to explore some of them.
(my digital camera takes crappy pix at night.)
Beautiful plantation-type mansions, and little quaint old houses with porches, and stone streets. Even the ghetto neighborhoods were beautiful.
(which Kelly usually has quite the knack for getting us lost in... da ghetto.)
I need to get back there someday.
I just couldn't get over just how much un-tampered-with, open land there was during our 3 hour drive there between Centerville & Savannah.
On the way back... I couldn't even hardly make out any lights thru the trees.
And I just kept thinking of all the U.F.O. books I've read, and shows I've seen...
where ya always see da redneck farmer talking about being abducted, and taken aboard a spacecraft, and having anal probe thingys shoved up his butt.
It made me a tad offput... and needless to say...
I kept watchin' da skies all da way home,
butt cheeks clenched tighter than a clam.

Last but not least... we went to the Warner Robbins Air Museum.
More planes, cheesey displays of oldtime war stuff, and Georgia heros.
I got tons of cool plane pictures, but most were lost temporarily till me & Kelly hook up and she sends me the remaining lost pix.
Met a great old coot who kinda is the greeter there.
A retired airman from Delaware who made Georgia his home.

All in all... this 'ol Yankee found the south... Peachland, Peanutville... and the people down there... much different than I had expected.
I was actually quite impressed.
I would actually contemplate living there...
or not...
I dunno.
But I certainly liked it.
I liked it alot...
I had a cotton pickin' great time!

On the plane ride back... I hadda switch planes for a layover in D.C.
The first plane on this small independant airline...
(aptly called Independance Air)
had an elecrical problem.
In which the captain came off the plane and proudly announced that he would fix it by his own damn self.
("I don't need no steenking maintanance guys...!")
I looked out at the plane... and it was a tiny Buddy Holly job.
As big as a school bus.
I had never been on a plane dat small...
I nearly crapped my pants.
And I nearly missed the next plane they brought out after El Capitain finally came to his senses about his knowledge of electricity.
The ride back thru the monsoon season the north was in da midst of was rough to say da least...
And so I white knuckled it all the way back,
with my butt cheeks clenched,
just watching da skies out da plane window, for da lil U.F.O. doods wit their anal probe thingys...
I can crack a walnut with my buttocks by now.
They won't take me alive I tell ya!

I had a great time, and a much needed break from a very stressful & trying period of my life. I had a wonderful time because of my beautiful sweetheart daughter Kelly.
Thank you my baby girl!
I miss you so much already.



Here's a gallery of some my adventures in da south.
More pix will hopefully be posted later on when I get 'em.
After clicking on the first pic, either use the navigation below each picture to advance to the next one...
or simply click on the center of each picture to move forward.
Enjoy!

Peanutville Gallery

Long post...
tired... goin' ta bed.
Wuss dat...???
Izzat a lil green man outside da window...???
What's dat he's got in his hand...????

Happy Halloween!!!