Holiday Recap
01/05/09 09:37 PM Filed in: Schadenfreude
First post of 2009!
I resolve to post more consistently this year. However, I’ve made that resolution two years in a row now. After a few days I talk myself into believing you would rather have quality over quantity, right? I mean, if you’re bored just go back through the archives and read all the previously hilarious posts (I’m sure there’s a couple in there somewhere).
Anyway, onto my recap of the holidays.
Since the reader/subscriber base is almost exclusively friends of mine, you already know about my trips to Tennessee and Nebraska over Christmas. And if you don’t, now you are aware. Either way, I have pictures that help make it painfully real for you.
The prologue is this: December 17th I left warm, sunny Austin to go to gray and constantly rainy Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Gatlinburg is a little town nestled in the foothills of the mountains that separate East Tennessee and North Carolina. While you may not be familiar with Gatlinburg by name, you’re probably more familiar with its adjacent city, Pigeon Forge, which is famous for housing - among other attractions - Dollywood.
Then on December 21st I left Tennessee for icy Omaha, Nebraska. My hometown. While Omaha was a wintry wonderland full of it’s own holiday misadventures, I’m going to focus the bulk of the post on Tennessee. Because for compelling trashiness, nothing can compare with The Volunteer State.
Case in point:
This is the door to the convenience store we stopped at to gas up the rental. My folks claimed they go in there every once in a while, as it’s on the way to their grocery store. According to my dad, they had originally made the sign regarding pants coverage in a nice printed out page with a crisp sans-serif font. But apparently, it looked too “out of place” among the other signs scribbled on scrap paper, so they wrote one up to make it match. He wasn’t joking about this. Oh how I wish he was.
So on my first full day with my folks we decided to get all the unpleasantness out of the way. The entire day was dedicated to the stuff none of us really wanted to do, chief among them was drive to Newport, Tennessee to put Christmas flower arrangements on the graves of my relatives. I’ve never understood this aspect of American culture. Remembering your loved ones fondly? Sure. Flipping through old pictures or watching old home movies and misting up? Naturally. But going to visit their “earthly remains,” which are thankfully 6 feet out of view once you get there, and then jamming some plastic poinsettias in the ground has always bewildered me. What’s even weirder is that mom confessed that they hadn’t visited the cemetery since the last time we went together. So it had been about two years. Why is this something she’s compelled to do only when I’m there?
Anyway, let me tell you a little about Newport. As little as possible, actually. Newport was actually a sweet little settlement town where the Pigeon River flows into the French Broad river. Sometime between then and now Newport became a crime-ridden shithole. It’s a hotbed of cockfighting, cheap meth, and the remnants of what was a booming organized crime racket in the 80s. A genuine nowhere of a town.
However, many relatives on my mother’s side of the family are buried at Union Cemetery, which actually overlooks beautiful mountain vistas. You have to drive through a lot of Deliverance-chic to get there, but it is actually a nice cemetery. In one of the burned-out malls that line the highway to Newport you may happen upon this:
It’s God’s Storehouse. While I didn’t go inside, I imagine this to be a Sam’s Wholesale Club mixed with a Parables family Christian bookstore. This is where presumably you can guy God in bulk. Need a case of bibles? (Who doesn’t?) Get ‘em here. 50 gallon drum of holy water? We have ‘em by the pallet. Like Megadeth said, Peace Sells, but Nobody’s Buying. The parking lot confirms this.
That’s not to say Newport is a total loss, there is some swanky 40’s Deco-to-pre-Googie architecture in the heart of the town. Kind of a mountain meets contempo style. Back before everyone in this part of Tennessee started talking with a hillbilly patois and building a go-kart and miniature golf emporium. Example of actual legitimate architecture:
That’s a font right out of a James Lileks fantasy. The only thing is that it’s marred by the utilitarian modernization of the ATM. But it’s still a truly lovely space. Particularly when held against the rest of this town. Driving around I created a little tense awkwardness in the car when I admitted that had we lived there (which to my knowledge was never even a remote possibility), I would’ve have started running away from this town as soon as I could walk. I believe the quote that created the biggest icy silence was. “Where’s the nearest gallery? What kind of art scene do you have that DOESN’T include barns painted on saw blades?” And the ultimate zinger, “I would’ve killed myself if we had lived here. It’s like a whole town of nothing. It couldn’t be more creatively bereft if it were barren undeveloped land.” This was, of course, a shitty thing to say. Very snotty, and kind of sad for a 34 year old man to drama queen it up like a teenage girl. Suffice to say I didn’t grow up there -- thankfully -- and it’s amazing I have any interests beyond putting a bitchin’ stereo in my Camaro, considering I was raised in a not-much-more creative environment-burb of LaVista, Nebraska. So grain of salt. But Newport is an easy town to hate.
We eventually did put flowers on the graves, including that of my Great-Grandfather, who I have mentioned before was the inventor of the greatest culinary treat in the history of the American South. And here he is:
Between him and the inventor of RC cola, there is a great deal of responsibility for the loss of many teeth in the American South.
There’s really no good way to segue this story, so I’ll just dive in.
Seymour, Tennessee is a dump. It’s a necessary evil that you pass through if you take Chapman Highway from Knoxville to Gatlinburg. It is, by far, the quickest way from the Airport to my folks’ house. The other route can heap upwards of an additional hour onto your drive. So I know that I will have to go through Seymour at least twice - once in and once out - on my trip. But lucky me, there was an additional trip through Seymour. On the way to the cemetery where the above photo was taken we stopped for coffee in Symour at the McDonald’s. It was reasonably early in the morning and my parents were still bleary-eyed since they’d usually had three pots each of truck stop-intensity java at this point. Since we were on a mission to take care of business they were way behind in their caffeine consumption we stopped at the first marginally clean place with caffeine, but there is no way to clearly convey what happened next. I’ll do my best.
In the parking lot at McDonald’s my mom turned pale when she opened her door and started gasping and pointing at the ground. “What? What is it?” I asked, concerned that there was a dead animal on the ground. My mother, responding in the only way she knows how, scream/whispered, “RUBBERS!” and pointed at the ground horrified. She was convinced that two discarded prophylactics were discarded on the ground outside the car.
My rapid-fire responses were all of the following, in turn:
1) Well they’re not mine, and presumably not yours. So why get upset about it?
2) Since when does anyone in Seymour give a shit about birth control. It just seems unlikely. You know how many 15 year olds I’ve seen pushing strollers in this town?!?
3) If those are used discarded rubbers then good. Because if there are people resigned to fucking in the parking lot at the McDonald’s in Seymour, Tennessee, then that is about all the happiness they’re ever going to squeeze out of life. So they should try to enjoy it as much as possible. And thank heavens they’re not procreating, so ideally they will prevent a future generation from enduring the same sad fate.
Before I could get to thought #4 I went to examine these “rubbers.”
Here’s the pic:
If you are not legally blind and/or insane you will recognize those “rubbers” for what they are: discarded pickle slices. My mother initially refused my assessment, claiming that she knows what she sees. Aside from the fact that most properly used condoms would not have cucumber seeds in them [feel free to insert joke here], another dead giveaway is the fact that they are green on the edge. Finally, a used condom usually has more of the appearance of a small windsock on a windless day. These? Well, they look more like... pickle slices, because that’s WHAT THEY ARE!!!
I guess I should be glad that my mom can’t tell the difference at a glance. But still, it’s cause for concern. Also it sort of grosses me out on the concept of pickles, albeit not to the extent of this young lady:
Of course, no trip to Pigeon Forge would be complete without a trip to the Golden Eagle “As Seen On TV” Store. I’ve done a couple phone photoessays there in the past and can assure you, it’s a place full of amazing garbage. It’s a weird melange of EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT you’ve ever seen in an infomercial (except for whatever reason no Shamwows, rather a pale imitation, the “Super Wham Shammy.” Spelled just like that), dollar store items, discontinued/overstock foodstuffs, imported crap and miscellaneous redneck-centric t-shirts. It’s truly a grand shopping experience. While the pickings were a little slim this time, there were a couple great items, including:
I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of the Infared Ray Function Robot Series was the Space Wiser Berserker Fourthly IV. Why did this not catch on with the kids? Who wants a crummy old Voltron when you can wrap your verbose little mind around the wordy adventures of Space Wiser Berserker, upgraded considerably from Thirdly III. Honestly, this whole aisle was like the Island of Misfit Toys re-imagined as a rundown former Kroger. You can actually taste the misery in the air.
And timely? You bet! Still for sale:
Is your Windows machine ready for Y2K? This is the kind of item where it’s so charming that someone still thinks it’s a viable thing to sell you allow yourself to override the function in your brain that makes you want to take it off the shelf, wave it in the manager’s face and yell something along the lines of, “What the fuck are you thinking?!? Are you INSANE?!?” At $9 it seemed a little steep. BTW, it was on the shelf next to a Lotus Notes-ready digital organizer. We are living in the future that wasn’t supposed to happen. Ugh.
The centerpiece of the trip was a visit to one of Pigeon Forge’s dinner shows. A Christmas themed singing/dancing/crappy-food-eating extravaganza. Here’s a YouTube “ad” (???) created just for the show I saw:
Since I quite literally could write a 6-7 page essay about the experience of witnessing this show, I’ll leave it at this: If it sounds dangerous to mix hillbilly country bullshit with high levels of off-broadway camp, it is. This was the kind of show I would recommend you take a group of your snarkiest friends to and you will have a great time being the best sort of miserable. Don’t go with your parents, because at some point in the show you’ll look over and realize that they’re enjoying it unironically. This will make your brain explode. I’m speaking from experience here.
I tried to take some iPhone snaps in the dark, with limited success. But as you can see, it is real:
Real as walking nightmare and gay as a goose. Salt n’ Pepper shakers not to scale.
What the photos and the clip fail to show is the juggling, ping pong ball tricks, weird racism towards Italians, the totally gross almost carb-exclusive meal and the “it’s a small crowd tonight so who gives a shit” attitude of at least two of the performers. Amazing on literally every level.
A moment of sincerity: It was great seeing my folks again and I promised it wouldn’t be a year, so I’ll probably have to go back in the summer and see them. The seeing them part I like, the dealing with the rest of Tennessee I could do without. Aside from the natural beauty of the mountains, which are already pretty heartily bespoiled by fat-fuck tourists who hurl their KFC bucket off the lookout at Newfound Gap, there’s not much there. My parents and I have a kind of weird relationship at times, but I do love seeing them. i would just much prefer to see them back in Omaha, where at least there are normal people. Seriously. Tennessee rednecks make Omaha/Council Bluffs rednecks seem like dandy fops in top hats and monocles dropping wry Oscar Wilde-ian witticisms.
So after four days I was back on a plane:
That would be either barf or poop splatter on the bulkhead. YAY for modern travel!
See where it says Omaha 2:30 On Time? Yeah, well I took this at 3:30. Yay for O’Hare!
To be fair, it was a disaster of a travel day. The Sunday before Christmas and an arctic blast was playing hell with the air traffic in Chicago.
Whatever. No sense in grousing about it. I made it back. And now it’s 2009 and I can get back to blogging things that really matter, like gross cookbook photos and weird pics I downloaded.
So that’s my trip, kids. Gimmie some love in the comments and I’ll be seeing you back here soon. And possibly with a new look and feel with a move to WordPress or TypePad. I think I’m just about ready to make like the Jeffersons and move on up.
Huzzah.
I resolve to post more consistently this year. However, I’ve made that resolution two years in a row now. After a few days I talk myself into believing you would rather have quality over quantity, right? I mean, if you’re bored just go back through the archives and read all the previously hilarious posts (I’m sure there’s a couple in there somewhere).
Anyway, onto my recap of the holidays.
Since the reader/subscriber base is almost exclusively friends of mine, you already know about my trips to Tennessee and Nebraska over Christmas. And if you don’t, now you are aware. Either way, I have pictures that help make it painfully real for you.
The prologue is this: December 17th I left warm, sunny Austin to go to gray and constantly rainy Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Gatlinburg is a little town nestled in the foothills of the mountains that separate East Tennessee and North Carolina. While you may not be familiar with Gatlinburg by name, you’re probably more familiar with its adjacent city, Pigeon Forge, which is famous for housing - among other attractions - Dollywood.
Then on December 21st I left Tennessee for icy Omaha, Nebraska. My hometown. While Omaha was a wintry wonderland full of it’s own holiday misadventures, I’m going to focus the bulk of the post on Tennessee. Because for compelling trashiness, nothing can compare with The Volunteer State.
Case in point:
This is the door to the convenience store we stopped at to gas up the rental. My folks claimed they go in there every once in a while, as it’s on the way to their grocery store. According to my dad, they had originally made the sign regarding pants coverage in a nice printed out page with a crisp sans-serif font. But apparently, it looked too “out of place” among the other signs scribbled on scrap paper, so they wrote one up to make it match. He wasn’t joking about this. Oh how I wish he was.
So on my first full day with my folks we decided to get all the unpleasantness out of the way. The entire day was dedicated to the stuff none of us really wanted to do, chief among them was drive to Newport, Tennessee to put Christmas flower arrangements on the graves of my relatives. I’ve never understood this aspect of American culture. Remembering your loved ones fondly? Sure. Flipping through old pictures or watching old home movies and misting up? Naturally. But going to visit their “earthly remains,” which are thankfully 6 feet out of view once you get there, and then jamming some plastic poinsettias in the ground has always bewildered me. What’s even weirder is that mom confessed that they hadn’t visited the cemetery since the last time we went together. So it had been about two years. Why is this something she’s compelled to do only when I’m there?
Anyway, let me tell you a little about Newport. As little as possible, actually. Newport was actually a sweet little settlement town where the Pigeon River flows into the French Broad river. Sometime between then and now Newport became a crime-ridden shithole. It’s a hotbed of cockfighting, cheap meth, and the remnants of what was a booming organized crime racket in the 80s. A genuine nowhere of a town.
However, many relatives on my mother’s side of the family are buried at Union Cemetery, which actually overlooks beautiful mountain vistas. You have to drive through a lot of Deliverance-chic to get there, but it is actually a nice cemetery. In one of the burned-out malls that line the highway to Newport you may happen upon this:
It’s God’s Storehouse. While I didn’t go inside, I imagine this to be a Sam’s Wholesale Club mixed with a Parables family Christian bookstore. This is where presumably you can guy God in bulk. Need a case of bibles? (Who doesn’t?) Get ‘em here. 50 gallon drum of holy water? We have ‘em by the pallet. Like Megadeth said, Peace Sells, but Nobody’s Buying. The parking lot confirms this.
That’s not to say Newport is a total loss, there is some swanky 40’s Deco-to-pre-Googie architecture in the heart of the town. Kind of a mountain meets contempo style. Back before everyone in this part of Tennessee started talking with a hillbilly patois and building a go-kart and miniature golf emporium. Example of actual legitimate architecture:
That’s a font right out of a James Lileks fantasy. The only thing is that it’s marred by the utilitarian modernization of the ATM. But it’s still a truly lovely space. Particularly when held against the rest of this town. Driving around I created a little tense awkwardness in the car when I admitted that had we lived there (which to my knowledge was never even a remote possibility), I would’ve have started running away from this town as soon as I could walk. I believe the quote that created the biggest icy silence was. “Where’s the nearest gallery? What kind of art scene do you have that DOESN’T include barns painted on saw blades?” And the ultimate zinger, “I would’ve killed myself if we had lived here. It’s like a whole town of nothing. It couldn’t be more creatively bereft if it were barren undeveloped land.” This was, of course, a shitty thing to say. Very snotty, and kind of sad for a 34 year old man to drama queen it up like a teenage girl. Suffice to say I didn’t grow up there -- thankfully -- and it’s amazing I have any interests beyond putting a bitchin’ stereo in my Camaro, considering I was raised in a not-much-more creative environment-burb of LaVista, Nebraska. So grain of salt. But Newport is an easy town to hate.
We eventually did put flowers on the graves, including that of my Great-Grandfather, who I have mentioned before was the inventor of the greatest culinary treat in the history of the American South. And here he is:
Between him and the inventor of RC cola, there is a great deal of responsibility for the loss of many teeth in the American South.
There’s really no good way to segue this story, so I’ll just dive in.
Seymour, Tennessee is a dump. It’s a necessary evil that you pass through if you take Chapman Highway from Knoxville to Gatlinburg. It is, by far, the quickest way from the Airport to my folks’ house. The other route can heap upwards of an additional hour onto your drive. So I know that I will have to go through Seymour at least twice - once in and once out - on my trip. But lucky me, there was an additional trip through Seymour. On the way to the cemetery where the above photo was taken we stopped for coffee in Symour at the McDonald’s. It was reasonably early in the morning and my parents were still bleary-eyed since they’d usually had three pots each of truck stop-intensity java at this point. Since we were on a mission to take care of business they were way behind in their caffeine consumption we stopped at the first marginally clean place with caffeine, but there is no way to clearly convey what happened next. I’ll do my best.
In the parking lot at McDonald’s my mom turned pale when she opened her door and started gasping and pointing at the ground. “What? What is it?” I asked, concerned that there was a dead animal on the ground. My mother, responding in the only way she knows how, scream/whispered, “RUBBERS!” and pointed at the ground horrified. She was convinced that two discarded prophylactics were discarded on the ground outside the car.
My rapid-fire responses were all of the following, in turn:
1) Well they’re not mine, and presumably not yours. So why get upset about it?
2) Since when does anyone in Seymour give a shit about birth control. It just seems unlikely. You know how many 15 year olds I’ve seen pushing strollers in this town?!?
3) If those are used discarded rubbers then good. Because if there are people resigned to fucking in the parking lot at the McDonald’s in Seymour, Tennessee, then that is about all the happiness they’re ever going to squeeze out of life. So they should try to enjoy it as much as possible. And thank heavens they’re not procreating, so ideally they will prevent a future generation from enduring the same sad fate.
Before I could get to thought #4 I went to examine these “rubbers.”
Here’s the pic:
If you are not legally blind and/or insane you will recognize those “rubbers” for what they are: discarded pickle slices. My mother initially refused my assessment, claiming that she knows what she sees. Aside from the fact that most properly used condoms would not have cucumber seeds in them [feel free to insert joke here], another dead giveaway is the fact that they are green on the edge. Finally, a used condom usually has more of the appearance of a small windsock on a windless day. These? Well, they look more like... pickle slices, because that’s WHAT THEY ARE!!!
I guess I should be glad that my mom can’t tell the difference at a glance. But still, it’s cause for concern. Also it sort of grosses me out on the concept of pickles, albeit not to the extent of this young lady:
Of course, no trip to Pigeon Forge would be complete without a trip to the Golden Eagle “As Seen On TV” Store. I’ve done a couple phone photoessays there in the past and can assure you, it’s a place full of amazing garbage. It’s a weird melange of EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT you’ve ever seen in an infomercial (except for whatever reason no Shamwows, rather a pale imitation, the “Super Wham Shammy.” Spelled just like that), dollar store items, discontinued/overstock foodstuffs, imported crap and miscellaneous redneck-centric t-shirts. It’s truly a grand shopping experience. While the pickings were a little slim this time, there were a couple great items, including:
I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of the Infared Ray Function Robot Series was the Space Wiser Berserker Fourthly IV. Why did this not catch on with the kids? Who wants a crummy old Voltron when you can wrap your verbose little mind around the wordy adventures of Space Wiser Berserker, upgraded considerably from Thirdly III. Honestly, this whole aisle was like the Island of Misfit Toys re-imagined as a rundown former Kroger. You can actually taste the misery in the air.
And timely? You bet! Still for sale:
Is your Windows machine ready for Y2K? This is the kind of item where it’s so charming that someone still thinks it’s a viable thing to sell you allow yourself to override the function in your brain that makes you want to take it off the shelf, wave it in the manager’s face and yell something along the lines of, “What the fuck are you thinking?!? Are you INSANE?!?” At $9 it seemed a little steep. BTW, it was on the shelf next to a Lotus Notes-ready digital organizer. We are living in the future that wasn’t supposed to happen. Ugh.
The centerpiece of the trip was a visit to one of Pigeon Forge’s dinner shows. A Christmas themed singing/dancing/crappy-food-eating extravaganza. Here’s a YouTube “ad” (???) created just for the show I saw:
Since I quite literally could write a 6-7 page essay about the experience of witnessing this show, I’ll leave it at this: If it sounds dangerous to mix hillbilly country bullshit with high levels of off-broadway camp, it is. This was the kind of show I would recommend you take a group of your snarkiest friends to and you will have a great time being the best sort of miserable. Don’t go with your parents, because at some point in the show you’ll look over and realize that they’re enjoying it unironically. This will make your brain explode. I’m speaking from experience here.
I tried to take some iPhone snaps in the dark, with limited success. But as you can see, it is real:
Real as walking nightmare and gay as a goose. Salt n’ Pepper shakers not to scale.
What the photos and the clip fail to show is the juggling, ping pong ball tricks, weird racism towards Italians, the totally gross almost carb-exclusive meal and the “it’s a small crowd tonight so who gives a shit” attitude of at least two of the performers. Amazing on literally every level.
A moment of sincerity: It was great seeing my folks again and I promised it wouldn’t be a year, so I’ll probably have to go back in the summer and see them. The seeing them part I like, the dealing with the rest of Tennessee I could do without. Aside from the natural beauty of the mountains, which are already pretty heartily bespoiled by fat-fuck tourists who hurl their KFC bucket off the lookout at Newfound Gap, there’s not much there. My parents and I have a kind of weird relationship at times, but I do love seeing them. i would just much prefer to see them back in Omaha, where at least there are normal people. Seriously. Tennessee rednecks make Omaha/Council Bluffs rednecks seem like dandy fops in top hats and monocles dropping wry Oscar Wilde-ian witticisms.
So after four days I was back on a plane:
That would be either barf or poop splatter on the bulkhead. YAY for modern travel!
See where it says Omaha 2:30 On Time? Yeah, well I took this at 3:30. Yay for O’Hare!
To be fair, it was a disaster of a travel day. The Sunday before Christmas and an arctic blast was playing hell with the air traffic in Chicago.
Whatever. No sense in grousing about it. I made it back. And now it’s 2009 and I can get back to blogging things that really matter, like gross cookbook photos and weird pics I downloaded.
So that’s my trip, kids. Gimmie some love in the comments and I’ll be seeing you back here soon. And possibly with a new look and feel with a move to WordPress or TypePad. I think I’m just about ready to make like the Jeffersons and move on up.
Huzzah.
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