Smokey Mountain Breakdown

'Twas brillig and my slithy toves have been gyring and gimboling all over my effing wabe. Which is to say, it's been a warm fall day with sunshine and good air quality. I was a bit worried first thing this morning since the Smoky's signature fog enveloped the house and my rocks were coming today. But the sun burned off the low cloud ceiling and the day bloomed.

The foggy morning provided some foreshadowing. It would have been more obvious with a foreboding soundtrack. I get the call the rocks are on the way and I hop in the jeep to make my way down the mountain to meet the truck. I meet the truck down at the Pigeon River Smokehouse and lead the 25 ton truck gleefully up the mountain. A girl has never been more ready for her rocks.

We get to the house and I pay the man--we'll call him "Daryl" (not his real name)--and tell him where to start dumping the rocks. The concern all along was how far one 20 ton load would spread. It's a pretty long road. I tell him about the clayey bits right in the middle. He tells me a couple of times that he ran the truck off the mountain when his brakes went out last week. But there wasn't any harm done. Yeah, yeah--let's get to spreading some rock--I swear I'm like a second grader with one of those tapes of big trucks, just so thrilled to have this manly bit of machinery on my property. I'm such a sucker for big tractors and earth haulers. Daryl's not nearly as decorative as the road scraper guy--but hey! He's got rocks and lots of 'em. He asks me if I have any transmission or steering fluid--but I don't since I get all that stuff done in town. Still, I'm not hearing the scary music that surely must be playing.

Have you seen one of these things in action up close? It's awesome! The container part of it rears up like a freaking tyranasaurus rex all hydraulics hissing and snapping. The rocks come out of it as he drives this monster down my road--they fall like hot, noisy pudding completely covering the road. And he keeps going. Daryl rocks my entire road--that we were thinking would take two loads--in one smooth stretch of giant rock truck driving genius. I'm so impressed, I'm thinking, Daryl--you totally rock, buddy!

He disappears around the curve and I get in the jeep to catch him so I may praise his masterful application of gravel. When I get to the foot of the road, the truck is there. With a tree-sized limb jambed between the now stuck truck bed. Evidently, Daryl forgot to take note of the great whopping buckeye when he drove in and took off a sizable portion of said tree.

"Oops. That's gonna need a chainsaw," I say.

"You got one?"

"Yeah, but it won't start. Haven't taken it into Dean's yet this season."

We stare at the tree a while.

"It hit the cab."

"Yeah, but you did a fabulous job rocking the road," I say. I hate this for him. The rear glass is out of the cab and it's got a big ding.

He gets in the jeep and I drive back to the house. I call his office for him, and I can see he's relieved I'm doing the calling. And his dispatcher is a bit peeved, I can tell. I give them directions and tell them to bring a chain saw.

"Can't he just push it out of the way?"

"Well, no," I say, "the limb is as big as my thigh and I got pretty big thighs. It's a tree shaped limb."

I hear her telling someone in the office what has happened. Peeved. Really peeved.

"But he did a wonderful job with the road. A better job of dumping out rocks, I have never seen. Really."

So, I'm looking at the pretty white rocks stretching down my road and thinking about Daryl. Hoping he doesn't take too much flack for the unfortunate dump truck vs. tree accident. Guess somebody's going to need to reset the "We have gone ___ days without an accident!" sign.

The day was well underway by the time I rolled out of bed at the crack of afternoon. Dogs restless, eyes bleary, nightgown twisted--I'm hung over from too much sleep. Fall is such a sleepy time of year, but it didn't hit me until today. The quality of the light changes, becoming more golden and somnolent.

I make a pot of lapsang souchong, steeped exactly 6 minutes--it's my special tea, different from the Middle Eastern Assam Earl Grey I drink on a daily basis. I have to drive to Asheville to find it unless I'm having formal tea at The Gallery. Don't know why I decided to drink the Sunday tea on a weekday, but it tastes like fall--tastes like a faraway fire. I go and sit on the bench looking out over my view--the dogwood is just beginning to turn over on Sol Messer Mountain.

I close my eyes then open them, focusing on the tiny bits of thistle and motes blowing through the air. It's one of those things I always look for in spring and in fall--the change of materials shuttled on the back of the wind. The wind column coming from the holler 300 feet below carries chaff stirred up by the bush-hogging in those fields. The air sparkles with seeds and small lives.

A pair of blue-tailed skinks have taken up residence on my mantle. Not sure how they got in, but I've enjoyed their company, these two small beings. Every once in a while, one will lose balance and fall, sounding like a pencil dropping. I wonder if skinks feel embarrassment somewhere in their lizardy brains. Surely, it's a cause for shame to lose footing when your prehensile toes fail to grip? I don't know why I haven't put them outside. They have poisonous tails, they say.

It's just one of those days, I guess. Sparkled and sleepy, where somewhere between Zen seeing and skink tails, you dance on the head of a pin. Alone.

The God of All Blackberries appears today on Dew on the Kudzu: A Southern Journal.

Idgie was the first editor to notice my work and publish it, so I really owe her a debt. I'm not sure I would have started subbing my work had it not been for her. I've got another one coming up there soon, an all new one. And something on the next issue of Right Hand Pointing.

******************
Lookit! I got's wild turkeys in my pasture this morning! All hens, but close enough to shoot from the front porch. Not that I'd do that. Okay, maybe if there was a tom, but only because I love the feathers.

Of course, once Max noticed them, they ran for the hills.

Well, my birthday is tomorrow and I decided to splurge big time. Hey, I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the next five weeks, but I got's me a big rock. Actually, I got's me a lot of rocks. 20 tonnes of rocks in a great whopping truck. Yay, me!

I'm actually pretty excited. My road has been washed out so badly by the heavy rains that I've thrown the jeep way out of alignment. So...rocks. It's a good thing.

I think Bravo needs to do "Real Housewives of Grassy Fork." Just a random thought.

Time moves swiftly now--I remember when a summer seemed an eternity. When fall came unexpected, as though it snuck up upon us. Goldenrod was always that first sign and my mother's favorite precursor to fall. She'd point it out growing on the verges of the Highway 17, big clumps of yellow. A prettier yellow I did not see until I moved to Europe and saw the fields of rapeseed blooming. Goldenrod makes me a child again each time I see it. I'm sitting in a station wagon with bumpy clear plastic seat covers--thighs sticking, wearing shorts that will soon be thrown in the attic with hopes I can fit into them again next year. If not, they'll add to the house insulation. I'll find those same shorts fifteen years later and remember that afternoon. The goldenrod blooming and my mother's face glowing in anticipation of the coming fall. Oyster roasts and hooking night trout under the dock light.

Here, it has some medicinal uses. It's an anti-inflamatory and sometimes used for kidney ailments and tonics. Though here in Grassy, the old folk tell me roots of Queen-of-the-Meadow are preferred. Queen-of-the-Meadow blooms at the same time here--same plant sometimes called Joe-pie weed (though they swear it's a different plant--it's not). Not to be confused with Meadowseet that blooms at the start of summer and is also called Queen-of-the-Meadow in some parts of the country.

I have a story up on Writer's Bloc, Rutger's University's online literary journal. It's a newish journal, only in its third issue, but I like the clean look of the thing and I appear in some good company--Roxane Gay, Michele Reale and Dennis Mahagin to name a few.

The story, "The Storm in the Park: A Flash in Five Acts," is a series of five vignettes, each telling the story of five interconnected individuals who, for various reasons, are in Forsythe Park at the same time before a storm breaks. The characters are completely fictional (though I did actually know a guy whose pets intentionally matched his carpet) with the exception of the dog...who is modeled on a much beloved dog that belonged to some close friends of mine.

Friend and noted Appalachian playwright, Gary Carden, has a clip up on his blog, Holler Notes, of his play Nance Dude--perhaps the most popular of his works. You've probably seen or heard Gary narrating documentaries on PBS and the Documentary channel if you are an Appalachia buff as I am. He's a lovely gentleman, accomplished and talented out the wazoo. (I've got a bit of a crush on him, truth be told!)

I first heard a bastardized version of the Nance Dude tale told here in Cocke County. The actual story happened in neighboring Haywood County just across the state line. I considered it a story fragment at the time and did base a short story loosely upon it. It's a archetypal tale, Medean and horrible--just the sort of thing they love here in Cocke County. So, of course, they co-opted it into their own mythos. I've been here long enough to have some of my fiction told back to me as fact--it's all part of the rich Appalachian storytelling tradition.

Here's some background from Gary's post on the Nance Dude story:

Nance Dude is a "real person" who was charged with the murder of her two-year-old granddaughter back around 1913. She was sentenced to 30 years of hard labor and was released after 15 years. She was 80 years old and came home to find that her own family rejected her. She ended up living in a one-room shack on Conley Creek in Jackson County. She remained a social outcast and was considered a witch by many of her neighbors. Her only companions were a pack of stray dogs that followed her. She supported herself by splitting kindling which she sold to "the Floridy folks." She died alone at the age of 104.

Pretty amazing, eh?

So, go visit Gary's blog and check out Elizabeth Westall performing her monologue from Gary's play. She's been performing the role of Nance for 12 years. Check out some of his other posts while you are there--he's a wonderful writer.

blossombones is a literary e-zine that prides itself in featuring work that in some way deals with the female experience.

And, if you've been following my writing--I tend to show up more often than not in publications like this. It's not that I ever try or consider myself to be a "women's writer." But I've noticed my stories are sometimes polarizing--often by gender. The theme for Blossombones' Summer '09 is "Marked."

The narrator of Batik is a woman with hands so beautiful she must hide them in gloves. This is one way in which she is marked. I don't think I mention that she is a woman--it's one of my lesbian stories. And it's not really important that she's a woman--or a man--I'm just attracted to characters who have one uncommon and exceptional feature that stands out. And lesbians have this thing about hands. The story is about an encounter she has on the ferry crossing the Channel. She's the sort of woman I would fall hard for. Courtly and aloof.

The title of the story always draws attention. When I wrote it, the title just jumped into my head. It refers to the technique of dying cloth using wax to protect areas between dyes. The wax protects the fabric from dye, much like the woman's gloves protect her. And there is other marking going on here involving a batik design rendered in an unusual fashion.

I am so behind in my promos it's not even funny. So, the lovely folks at The Fabulist had this to say about my story, "The Skin Shop"....

You'd think Ms. Griffeth's home "on the verge of the Great Smoky

Mountains National Park" would give her work a pastoral bent. Yet

this wicked bit of flash fiction is sharp-edged, gristly and

grinning, packing some casual consumer biotech and a wryly

fashion-conscious narrator.

I loves me some blurbs.

The thing I love about The Fabulist is the edgy nature of the material they publish. It's not your momma's spec fic--it really goes more into the high literary, magically realistic, surrealist fiction. And when I jump into spec--that's usually where I'm going. When I found them, I was 99 percent sure I'd found the perfect landing place for "The Skin Shop."

I totally get why that crazy bastard Van Gogh was so nuts for them. I have to take pictures of mine every summer and it just never gets old. I especially love how the fat bumble bees dance around on them. They were particularly good this year. I planted them around the house and I expect them to draw the birds all fall. The heads are huge! They are big and droopy now, but I snapped this when they were really lovely--the petals soft, fat and lemon drop yellow.

I've been planting moon vines every season since 1992 and have only just now been successful in getting them to grow. No doubt, the lack of goats has been a good thing for my horticultural endeavors. But finally, I have these dinner plate sized blooms twining my porch rails. They start crumpled, like tissues thrown out after a crying jag, and unfold into the twilight. Very O'Keefey, don'tcha think?

I just found out through The Google that my chapbook of queerish themed shorts, "Dancing Dogs and Other Forgotten Tapes," was a finalist in Gertrude Press' 2009 Chapbook Contest. It's nice to know these things.

Happy Sunday.

Set your Tivo for the Travel Channel tomorrow for 10:00pm. If you aren't familiar with Samantha Brown, she's sort of like everyone's favorite BFF-girl next door--very entertaining gal. And she's going to be covering some places we all know and love--LeConte Lodge, Natahala Outdoor Center and Tuckaleechee Caverns to name a few.

Erin Pickard with The Travel Channel sends me the following release:

I work with the Travel Channel's online community team and thought you might be interested to know that Travel Channel's Great Weekends with Samantha Brown, will be featuring the Smoky Mountains in this week's episode, which airs Saturday, August 22, at 10pm E/P.

What is Travel Channel's Great Weekends with Samantha Brown?
This series serves as the definitive guide to the very best in weekend getaways. From Sundance to Montreal, or Philadelphia to Savannah, "Great Weekends" will have Sam traveling to destinations all across the U.S. and worldwide, and this weekend, she's in your neck of the woods!

Smoky Mountains Details

Sam’s tapping into her rugged side and trailblazing her way through the great outdoors of the Smokey Mountains. This weekend she’s joining a local outfitter and getting a Backpacking and Camping 101 primer in the most visited National Park in the United States. Whether it’s seeing the underworld that exists in the caverns beneath the park or taking a daring night hike in pitch black, Sam’s taking outdoor vacationing to the max. This is a roughing it weekend as it was meant to be. No cell phones or pots of honey allowed.


Some places Sam visits in the Smoky Mountains:

THE LODGE AT BUCKBERRY CREEK- Samantha stays and enjoys the view before a day of hiking.

http://www.buckberrylodge.com/

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK

http://www.nps.gov/grsm/

LECONTE LODGE – Samantha has a rugged stay here after hiking up Mount LeConte.

http://www.lecontelodge.com/

TUCKALEECHEE CAVERNS – Samantha explores the underground caverns and formations.

NANTAHALA OUTDOOR CENTER- Samantha goes rafting and kayaking on The Nantahala River.

http://www.noc.com/

Tune into the Travel Channel this Saturday, 8/22 at 10 p.m. E/P to catch the all-new episode.

And in case you haven't already, find us on our Facebook page or on Twitter. Hope to see you there!


Community

You can become part of Travel Channel's Great Weekends online community by becoming a fan of our Facebook page or following us on Twitter. Hope to see you there!

Thanks, Erin!

This is the best time of year--on into the fall--to spot insects. I've already seen the first Tuliptree Silk Moth. Anyhow, this huge fellow was munching through a weed I'd kept in the border because it had big, okra-like leaves. He'd eaten quite a lot too. I love the markings on his back legs. Isn't there a children's story where the fairies ride grasshoppers? I can really see that with this guy.

He's a Spur-Throated Grasshopper:

Category: Grasshopper or Cricket
Common Name: Spur-throated Grasshopper
Scientific Name: (Melanoplus ponderosus)

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Orthoptera
Family: Acrididae
Genus: Melanoplus
Species: ponderosus


I got punked at our little one room post office today. I dropped by to mail my netflix movies so I could get movies on Saturday. Our regular mail guy was not visible when I walked in and the guy who takes the outgoing mail was kicked back in Tom's chair. He goes into this jaw dropping story about how he was left there to keep the post office open because they came and trucked Tom away in a straight-jacket, kicking and screaming--how he'd gone completely crazy--and, well--it is the post office. And I'm thinking, damn, these people in Grassy Fork will gossip about anything and Tom's family sure didn't need this getting around (while simultaneously wondering who I would tell first). We all had a good laugh. He was really believable.

I've so lived here too long already.

Okay. I must interrupt my planned, Oh-gee-my-sunflowers-are-amazing, OMG, have you read Kim Crawford's book or what the editor of The Fabulist said about my writing made my nipples hard and my Hitachi Magic Wand jealous--to talk about effing Miracle Whip.
There are some ad campaigns I can't be silent about. No. Really. I will not tone it down. Miracle Whip, the white trashiest of white trash cooking ingredients--that secret ingredient to everything from seven layer salad (The Miracle Whip cooks the frozen peas...really!) to the mysterious Miracle Whip Cake--that erstwhile companion to lime jello has decided it wants to be hip.

Christ on a cracker, it's like watching your grandma take out her teeth to do some crunking. Can Miracle Whip ever truly be X-treeeeme? Cheese-Whiz, the beee-otch--yeah, I can see it making the crossover--it's got that slutty cheese in a can thing going for it--but Miracle Whip? I'm just not feeling you, MW.

They hired Hardee's slacker dude to do the voice over--which is even more embarrassing.

I'm relatively certain I'm not violating any corporate secrets by telling you that if you take a half cup of regular mayonnaise, add a teaspoon of sugar or high fructose corn syrup and an extra squeeze of lemon juice that you have Miracle Whip. It's mayonnaise. With sugar and extra lemon juice in it.

See, Kraft has this fantasy that Miracle Whip's demographic looks like this:



But see, Miracle Whip eaters are my peeps. They live in my hood. They look much more like Mickler's cover girl.


And you will find truly surprising uses for Miracle Whip in WTC--but, you know, it's never going to be Baconnaise or some shit like that. 'Cause, you know--it doesn't go well with Jägermeister.

This is another story I've got up right now. I already put a link up on FB so this note is for the blog readers--but some of you might have missed it first time around.

"Claude's Puppet Show" is live on LitnImage.

This is a fun, kinky little story I wrote prompting off an experience I had in Savannah once at the old Lamp Post. The Lamp Post was a legendary dive on Bay Street back in the day. You couldn't think of a better place to get knifed. Really. I've written at length on said experience and won't go further (you can read it yourself here if you like--it's long). My father was so incredibly furious when he found out I'd wandered in there. Furious like turned purple and had veins throbbing.

I'm sort of surprised that place has faded away without mention--it was infamous. There used to be so many odd little dives in Savannah. Anyone remember Jim Collin's? I know my sister does since she turned me onto it. Place didn't even have a sign. Was in the basement of this old dude's house downtown and had five tables. Pictures of Bob Dylan next to pictures of Jesus. Hank Williams on the jukebox. I went there years after my sister had visited and he still had the tape of her singing. It was just that sort of place. You'd end up there on the shank of the night and end up drunk and singing along. Had a really good hamburger, too.

Hope you enjoy this one. I was definitely going for that freaky Savannah vibe.

I have some writing to share with you. I've become a bit slack about my promos. Have been keeping up on FB, but I feel another hiatus coming on from FB.

"Kurosawa's Rain" is up on The Potomac. I really love The Potomac's combination of literature and politics and really hope they keep publishing. Please support them--this is a smart publication--not just arty.

This is an intensely personal story about love, madness and failure. How you can’t always protect the ones you love from themselves and how maybe you shouldn’t and how you’re going to feel like shit about that anyway. The Kurosawa references are specific and if you come away saying “WTF?!!!” to yourself, it’s okay. One reader in workshop told me the story would be okay if I took out all the Japanese crap. But I didn’t. Because it was important to me. Anyway. I don’t usually explain what I meant when I wrote something, but I dug around in my marrow with this one.

It’s got two commas that don’t belong. See, back in the olden days we used to write our stories in notebooks and on typewriters (if we could type—not everyone could back in those days). I now have multiple drafts of the same story where I used to just have one dog-eared manuscript with many scribbles that would then be typed fresh. Anyway. Sent the wrong draft. Two commas. Crap.

Sometimes a curse is called for. You know what I mean. An invocation to the PTB to bring misfortune upon an evil-doer. It basically does jack-shit but there’s a trill of maniacal power that hums when you say it making you feel better at a time when you need to feel better. Threats, curses, self-righteous proselytizing—they all serve the same purpose. Give you the mistaken impression you have power over a person or situation.

So, I’m in the Dread Sigil Walmartus yesterday to buy white sewing machine thread. Since Walmart made the idiotic decision to do away with their fabric department, even in rural areas, it’s left a gaping vacuum. See, the fact that they even carried fabric put most fabric stores out of business and now I must drive two hours to buy fabric. Yet another reason Walmart is a purveyor of The End Times. The Reasonably-Priced Horseman of the Apocalypse. But they still have some notions. But they only had three small spools of white thread yesterday.

I snap up those spools and head with my cart to the grocery section to get some milk, but on the way have to stop to use the facilities. I dutifully leave my cart outside of the bathroom and when I come out, some tooth-sucking asshole has stolen my cart. With the only three spools of Coats and Clark white All-Purpose Dual Duty in the store. Fuck me.

I’m in a bad mood already so I go into a major whine and mobilize 10 managers to run around the store looking for the thread. I don’t care about the cart, I say, those are the only three rolls of white thread for sale in Newport and I must have them. I sit on the bench in the shoe department directing my minions with ill-tempered demands, deliberately becoming every retailer clerk’s nightmare. And I know the poor bastards don’t get paid nearly enough to put up with this sort of abuse. It’s not pretty.

Suddenly, my ire turns on the slack-jawed trailer trash who took the cart and I start to level a curse upon their no doubt mulleted heads.

I hope they….

At this point reason kicks in and says, for Chryssake’s woman! They stole your damn shopping cart—it’s not the end of the world and the poor dumb fucks no doubt live in a hell of their own choosing, far worse than anything you could think up.

So my vicious “drop dead” turns into a weak, noodley,

…have a really bad day…

Oh. Yeah. I told them. Have a really bad day.

It now occurs to me we need a wider range of curses. Something to use when the Old Testament is just overkill. Here are a few I think might work:

May inanimate objects love your feet.

May the hem of your skirt be caught in the waistband of your pantyhose without your knowledge and may you walk down the aisle of your church or some other public place with your ass hanging out.

May your Axe body spray offend the object of your affection. (Okay, that's sort of a given...)

May you have an enormous, disfiguring zit on your wedding day.

May you suffer bloating and gas in a no fart zone.

May your mother walk in on you masturbating...

So that's a start. I'm sure you can come up with more and invite you to do so. We really need some milder curses. After all, living is harder than dying.

The problem with dropping back into the world after dropping out is that you will never be quite the same. It changes you, making you a bit less able to navigate the so-called "real life." Think about the characters we know of the sort--von Munchausen, Crusoe, Gulliver...the message is pretty clear. Yes, of course we want to hear all about your fabulous tales, but you must be some sort of freak. Yeah. It marks you, if only with some sort of invisible, anachronistic rune.

Recluses are also weird in the public conception. Salinger, Hughes, the late great M.J. There's no doubt that nothing says "not like us..." like keeping your own company and much of that is just being out of touch.

I never wanted to be like any of these people, yet, here I am. I was trying to explain to teh therapist yesterday about how "sensitive" I was as a child and how the only relief I had from the anxiety of socialization was the moments I could steal by myself. (Luckily, this was not so difficult.) How I seem to have sought that peace for myself as an adult and how it seems now, ultimately, to be a source of regret. But at the same time, it was inevitable, a foregone conclusion. Fate.

They drug children such as I was now. Rightly so, I suppose. But I have to wonder if it is a bit like helping a chick out of an egg? Chicks like that fail to thrive and usually die. I wouldn't be who I am without that struggle. But at the same time, I know it would have been an unspeakable cruelty to allow me to founder in that emotional misery had there been some other choice. I was so lucky to be born to the mother I had--she was such a fierce protector of her wounded chick.

Anyway, what brings this ramble to the surface is pretty funny. Friend Patti and I went to K-town the other day to meet with a group of like-minded women at a local coffee shop. Friend Patti doesn't carry my stigmata since she is not here by choice exactly and fights the good fight to keep up with the outside world and its strange magicks.

We had a good time and it was the first time in years I'd been outside in a social situation in ages. And yes, I speak of Cocke County as though it were some hinterland shrouded in mist because that's exactly what it fucking is. Mist shrouded hinterlands-R-us.

Toward the end of the evening, we are listening to an attractive 20-something bemoan her attempts to connect with the object of her affection. It's a familiar tale, told again and again from caveman days. I love you so much I can't bear to talk to you and anything I say is going to be wrong anyway so maybe I shouldn't talk to you at all--whaddayou all think? Huh? Huh? Puhleeze??

Love sucks. Don't let anyone tell you different.

This discussion swirled around exactly what the perfect text message to send might be. So I say, "Hey. Look. What would be wrong with just calling her up and saying, 'Hey, would you be up for dinner tonight?'"

Everyone looks at me like I just intoned, "Yea verily, what say you to inscribing in cuneiform your sentiments on yon clay tablet and dedicating it to her honor with the blood of a virgin sheep?"

Someone rescued me by breaking the stunned gaze and saying, "Yeah, what's wrong with that?"

I haven't had a cell phone in seven years and apparently missed the point in polite society where a text message could bear the considerable weight and import of a heart, besotted, tortured or broken.

Old school, baby. It's how I roll.

The God of Blackberries requires child sacrifice, blood and scratches, owies laid open, knees scraped and elbows skinned. Walk into the brambles and shuffle the canes, picking as you go, but leave behind rich redness and pain. The God of all Blackberries demands a price, stinging skin pierced by thorns you didn’t know about until the lemonade spilled. And who is to say at the end of the day whether or not you lie when your red-smeared mouth proclaims you ate none, brought home all.

Did everyone have a fun Fourth? Have your fill of hotdogs? Damn, I loves me a skinless Nathan's, know what I mean? Me? I spent a pretty quiet day. Watched some episodes of Oz. Drank some hot tea. Mowed the lawn. Watched the fireworks.

Anyway, my buddy, Leslie, over at Leslie's Omnibus, lured me over to blog story writing with her Take Three exercise. It's a bit more constricting a prompt than I'm accustomed to working with, but I gave it the old college try. The prompt was to write a story in under 1000 words with the following three sentences:

I hate nature… and WalMart.

And that’s when Nana went commando.

Moments like this make me very, very nervous.

So...I give you for your blogging consumption...

Hippie Chick Gets Us Busted at the Walmart Parking Lot

Donnie threw a hand up to shade his eyes, looking across the Walmart parking lot and the four-lane highway to the county sheriff's depot. The wind blew just right, 10 mph the paper said, wafting right into the right-hand corner of the Wal-mart parking lot. The monthly marijuana burn was about to commence and Donnie was looking forward to a free contact high.

He squinted and spat, kicking some garbage left by the fireworks vendor who'd vacated that bit of concrete that morning. Walter and his hippie chick girlfriend pulled up in the parking spot next to Donnie's truck.

"They started yet?" Walter hung his head out the car window, his squinty ginger eyes fading into the freckles of his ginger face and ginger hair.

"Nah, but they moving everything out onto the bonfire."

Walter and the hippie chick joined Donnie on the tailgate of the Ford truck.

"Hey man," said Donnie, "You got any crack?"

Hippie Chick scowls. Walter rolled his eyes. "Nah, Sasha don't let me do none."

"It's not natural," Sasha the hippie chick said as she jumped from the truck and began dancing a jerky, inelegant dance, not at all inconspicuous.

"Moments like this make me very, very nervous," Walter said, as shoppers turning into the Walmart rubbernecked at Sasha's dance, her hairy armpits all exposed. He passed a few hydros into Donnie's silent palm while Sasha wasn't looking.

"She's gonna draw a crowd."

"No shit. Rentacops too, prolly."

"So where'd you get these? I thought your uncle had your granny?" Donnie popped the hydros.

"We done got her back. Unc let her get away from him in Home Depot. She got one of them lawn tractors started and that's when Nana went commando."

"Christ, man! Shut the hell up! I don't want to hear nothin' 'bout your granny's va-jay-jay!"

"You perv!" Walter shoved Donnie in the arm. "I mean she went crazy! Mowed down half of lawn and garden. Put three guys in the ER before they stopped her. Anyway. Court ordered her back with us so Momma's got control of her meds and social security again. Unc's madder'n'hell."

Sasha pirouetted, bare dirty toes gripping the concrete as a cloud of blue, marijuana-flavored smoke rose from the depot and came roiling across the parking lot. She spread her legs wide, picked up the hem of her blouse and fanned the smoke into her face. She wasn't wearing a bra.

"Let us thank Gaia for her bounty!"

"Fuck me, what the hell is she on, Walter?"

"Mushrooms. Jimson weed. Tree bark. Christ, I dunno. She don't take nothin' less'n it grows in the woods."

Sasha stripped her top completely off.

"Make her stop, man! Woah--that's more 'nature' than I need. Shit man, Walmart done called the cops," Donnie said as the city cops came peeling into the lot.

"I hate nature," Walter said, "and Walmart."