Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Absence Make the Heart Grow Fatter, or, Home Sweet Illiterate Vacation Home

So I'm back from a long weekend at Harkers Island and all I can say is Home Sweet (high ceiling, open floor plan, more-bathrooms-in-it-than-people-living-in-it) Home. 

(OK that might have been one of the most obnoxious sentences I've ever written. Some people live in the BOXES they fish from grocery store dumpsters. And not even the General Mills boxes, which are corrugated and somewhat weatherproof, but the Piggly Wiggly cereal boxes made from tissue paper and flour paste that dissolve into a sticky paste when rained upon.  So I should SHUT UP NOW AND BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT I HAVE.)

And I am.  Grateful.  But do you have any idea how long I'm going to have to wear THIS metal bikini before Master Luke shows up to renegotiate my mortgage with Jabba the Hut? 


DO YOU? 

Anyway Northern and Western readers if you MUST know Piggly Wiggly is the most ghetto-trashy of all ghetto-trash grocery stores. Apologies to my good friends at Living Without Walmart but Piggly Wiggly is the baddest (and I don't mean Michael Jackson bad) of all bad food-buying experiences. THIS is where the country people go to buy fatback and pickled pigs feet.  Every single item in that store contains either multi-mega-hyper-global-transgendered-transatlantic-transform your muscle tone into cellultite- transfats OR morally-ethically-spiritually-physically-positively-absolutely-undeniably-partially hydrogenated oils!

That Piggle will make yo ass jiggle.  They should have named that store Piggly Jiggly.

(More on Horrible Ideas in Branding in another post. Seriously? Who thought squirming swine made for a good corporate identity? WOW.)

ALSO: their logo.  (What is that hat?)


This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.  This little piggy went to his day job as a country store butcher and chopped his brothers and sisters into pork chops and bacon ALL THE WAY HOME.
 


(OK this really wasn't supposed to be a post about how much I dislike Piggly Wiggly.)
 
So I'm at the Piggly Wiggly in Beafort...because there are no grocery stores on Harkers Island.  That's part of its charm.  Along with the fact that NOT ONE RESTAURANT ON THE ENTIRE ISLAND HAS A LIQUOR LICENSE.  But the hush puppies are good and it is pretty much bereft of tourists so all in all it's not a terrible place,
 
 
and well, actually, we love it there.  It's small, it's quaint, it's where we go whenever we can get away from The Big Town of Raleigh.  Among its many charms Harkers Island is known for its quietude, the craftsmanship of its hand carved duck decoys (not a joke), its long history of boatbuilding, and its particular brogue.  Even amongst the nearly-indecipherable Down Easters (the good folks of the Southern Outer Banks) the Hoi Toiders (as they are known) are a rare (in)breed and known for the peculiarity of their accents.
 
Also: their mad English Spelling and Usage skills.
 
Spotted just this last weekend:
  • On a placard advertising a church fundraiser breakfast: "Pancakes and Bisquits".  (I assume they're made with Bisquick?)
  • On a hand painted sign in someone's front yard: "Obamacare Will Rationalize Cancer Care to the Elderly.  Fire the Democrats!"  (Because the last things seniors can handle is a bunch of rationalizing.  You can't justify anything to those people.)
  • "Far Wood 4 Sale" (Yeah I don't need to say anything at all here do I?)
And don't even get me started on the overabundance of apostrophes in this town.  The island is positively INFESTED.  I have notified the Army Corps of Engineers AND the USDA and so far no one shares the urgency of my sense of doom.  I'm like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day trying to convince the President that ALIENS ARE POISED AT THIS VERY MOMENT TO INVADE THE PLANET.   Decoy-carving unintelligible teetotalling Republican aliens with fifth grade educations who can't write the letter S without apostrophying it from every angle!   It's punctuation anarchy!

Wanna know what's funny / ironic / serendipitous?  There's no apostrophe in Harkers Island.



(Also:  if you scour this post thoroughly enought you will find at least fourteen errors in usage, spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  I like to sprinkle these here and there just to fuck with all of you.  It's like Where's Waldo only even nerdier.  PLEASE, write to me about them.  I absolutely LOVE to be corrected.)

Because really, what else do I have to complain about?

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