Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

from February 9, 2007

Blog time! The happiest day in anyone’s life is when he reads a new Blog by the Master. Ahhh, blogging. Is there a greater pastime on God’s green Earth? I think not! And what greater satisfaction can there be than knowing that, just by typing, I can put a ray of sunshine into a poor reader’s otherwise wasted, wasteful, and wretched life. The power! The infinite satisfaction! The unbridled egomania I am currently experiencing! YES! THE POWER IN MY VEINS! I am a BLOGGING GOD!

But that’s all a  load of crap. (Or is it? Hmmmmmmm……OK, it’s not. I am an evil genius.) I am no more a master blogger than I am a master of square dancing.

THE DATE- June 30, 1993.

THE PLACE- Old Man Ferguson’s  Barn, Lexington Kentucky

THE EVENT- 48^th National Square Dance Competition

ME- “It’s great here in Cincinnati. Which way to Riverfront Stadium?”

MAN IN OVERALLS- “Boy, you’s in the Kentucky Squaar Dancin’ competition.”

ME- “Huh?”

I didn’t do so well that night. I came in dead last. However, after the dancing there was a blueberry pie bake-off and I took the Blue Ribbon. My secret ingredient? Love.

But I digress. As I often do. If you know me you know I digress. If you don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself- My name is bmj2k and I digress.

Square dancing is a very Southern thing. Specifically, it is a very white southern thing. Now I have nothing against any race (ha ha, I love it when I bullshit!) but let’s just say that the last time I was down South (like you’d catch me down South) I didn’t see Jay-Z square dancing. I’m just saying.

But I kid because I love. I love the South. It has given us so much. Moonshine. The Dukes of Hazzard. The Cannonball Run and the Cannonball Run 2. (Not three.) There is even some culture down there. (I’ll let you know when I find some.) The finest breakfast I ever had was in West Virginia.

I was about eleven years old and we (the family, that is. Not the Manson Family, the Jacobs Family, which has it’s own very peculiar kind of indoctrination. But I digress. [Told you I do that.]) decided to go to Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. Colonial Williamsburg is cool if you are a grandmother or really easily entertained. It is an old colonial (d’uh) town and has old colonial buildings and old colonial people walking around. Yes, the people are colonial. Some of them are nearly 250 years old. However, it has the distinction of having a real, honest-to-goodness haunted house. The Wyth House is supposedly haunted by the ghost of an old woman. I didn’t see any ghosts that day, but trust me- all of Williamsburg is haunted by the ghosts of lame past.

Busch Gardens is really a cool amusement park but was marred by two problems. First, instead of wearing a normal baseball cap on a sunny day, I wore a stupid tri-cornered Revolutionary War thing I begged Dad to buy me in Williamsburg. It was so geeky. I wore it the next day to the park and was so blinded by the sun that I begged Dad to buy me a baseball cap. He did, but the look he gave me will stay with me until the day I day. “Boy,” the look said, “this is it.” I knew at that moment that I had lost all respect from my Dad forever. Trust me- it was enough to make a more sensitive kid cry. But not me because I was (and am) a prick. The second problem involved my brother. We were walking through the park, which was only half crowded. Out of the blue a young couple came walking toward us and, I am sure this was on purpose, they spilled a whole grape drink on my brother, laughed, and kept on walking. It was the single biggest example of rotten behavior I had ever seen until I started doing rotten things to other people.

But I was going to tell you about the breakfast. (Thought I forgot? Well did you? Huh?) It was buffet-style, meaning you can get as much as you want as long as you take another plate. It was the first time I discovered that you can have eggs, fried chicken, and a well done sirloin steak for breakfast. (It was also the place where my mother, in a near-duplicate of something my grandmother did decades earlier, committed petty larceny. So evil, going back at least two generations, runs in my genes.)

(Quick aside- are there two men more fey than Spence and Danny on The King of Queens? I ask because these two allegedly straight men are sharing a bedroom, despite the fact that they live in a two-bedroom apartment. And their beds are no more than three inches apart, effectively meaning that they sleep in the same bed.)

But, ahhh, the South. Smells like a urinal.

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Tags: Cannonball Run, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, square dancing, The South