Life in 28.8k

Hey kids. I'm still up on the mountain, trying to figure out what kind of person I was when 28.8kbps was a FAST connection speed for the internet. Because this is goddamned brutal. It takes a full five minutes just to sync up my email. Sure, it's a blip inside a blip in the space-time continuum, but an eternity when you're sitting in a hard rocking chair at a tiny rolltop desk hoping you don't get kicked off line.

Last night we went to the Ramsey house, which has no Wikipedia entry, or I would link it. It's the first free-standing structure/dwelling in the state of Tennessee. Pre-Revolutionary War, so it's damned old. They were having a Halloween hoedown trying to capitalize on the handful of ghost stories about the building circulated by drunk grad students working on the archaeological study of the property. (Part of the tour included talking with the resident archaeologist, who was a bearded retired college professor right out of central casting.) It's a nice short tour of a house where you get to hear, just about every three minutes, that the Ramsey's three youngest children died of malaria. The house was built in the middle of a swamp, by the way. So rocket science wasn't required to put the pieces together, fortunately they had about 17 other children, so not a big collateral loss. Frances Ramsey laid out most of the East Tennessee plot lines for land ownership (so I'm guessing the Cherokee indians loved him), and he was one of the co-founders of the University of Tennessee.

The whole trip, however, was hampered by some static between me and two uninvited tag-alongs in the back seat. One of them, in particular who lives on a diet of Xanax and Bloody Marys and got very confrontational with me about an issue I'm fairly passionate about. Being challenged in front of my parents, on my vacation, after not seeing them for almost a year left me no recourse but to threaten to unleash the torrent of verbal destruction I usually reserve for private rants in my head. (I was privy to some very damaging information regarding her personal life, and would never have considered using it under normal circumstances.) She backed down (very wisely, I must say), but that left the truck filled with the kind of awkward silence that most people hate... but as most of you know I get my giggles from. It was a feast of quiet tension that left me feeling almost remorseful for how much I was gobbling it up. It marred the whole trip and left her pouty, sniffling, and wolfing down mood altering medications when we got to the house. It was awesome. Maybe they shouldn't have invited themselves along. Lesson learned.

I thought they'd split for sure after that. But here they are in the other room, enjoying their first tomato beer of the morning. It's about 9a.m., that's not too early for the first of many... if you're an alcoholic. And I'm sitting back here not spending any time with my parents. The reason I made this trip, missing both a Weisenheimers show and my favorite Halloween party. I'm perilously close to heading into the kitchen and offering a "me or them" ultimatum, which wouldn't be fair to my folks, but I don't really have the latitude to just flat out tell these people to leave seeing as how this isn't my house. But I would if I could.

Okay, end rant from the mountain.
To be continued if I can get connected again.
Huzzah.