Preoccupied

Scrambled brains here, fatigued from going back to *work* after my annual four-month hiatus (thanks to Netflix I didn’t do a Jack Torrence), dodging cholesterol medication by diet and running five miles three or four days a week — which helps to alleviate this nagging arthritis plaguing my lower and upper back (don’t laugh, young whippersnapper: you’ll be whining about all this shit soon enough), success in reducing the weight from 210 to 170, and looking forward to elevated temperatures and my beloved sunshine. Thankfully the job is situated outdoors, and on my off days you’ll find me sprawled out on the back deck soaking in the rays with headphones feeding the ears all manner of sonic splendor at Top Volume. I’d rather not get into the prickly issue of basal cell carcinoma — we all have our areas of denial, don’t we? I hate cold, I despise winter, and the only reason I’m not perched in some glorious Arizona desert is the Maryland in-laws and my Better Half’s need to be near them just miles away in this Wayback Machine called Pennsylvania — which James Carville accurately described as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” Academic types have taken issue with that, first by debunking the obvious geographic differences, then by combing through political and economic data supporting little-to-no correlation. Regardless of their pie charts and textbooks, academic types are notoriously stupid in so many ways (no streetsmarts), and as I write this, Chet, one of the local farmers, just got finished raving about last night’s dinner — dinner in these parts is served around noon — from critters he trapped on his land: burgers made from squirrel brains flavored with bits of groundhog sausage. He gloated about this while “warshing” his vee-hickle down near Drover’s Rest Farm at Lowry’s Glen. That’s where the sheep are at. Don’t be so quick to judge ol’ Chet: when the evildoers start dropping the Dubya-Em-Dees, he’ll be out in the woods rustling up breakfast while I’ll be running down the street crying that my internet connection’s kaput. Indeed, who’d you rather be holed up with in the wet-ass hour? Down at Miss Lindsay’s (that there’s our titty bar yonder over the mountain) some of the girls who work on Mondays through Thursdays (slow nights) ain’t got no teeth but plenty of stretch marks, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t started calling waitresses darlin’. As they say here and down in Alabam’, “Yee-haw!”