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,
 

unless you haven't had your coffee...

 
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?

Of Balls and Boobies, or, What Not to Bring to a Mammogram

WARNING: This Post Contains Too Much Information

So…this is actually happening. There is a golf ball in my left breast.  This is especially alarming as that particular breast is only tennis ball sized in the first place and why am I referring to it singularly as if they’re both not the same size?  Like the other one could actually be, like, football sized?  BUT OH WAIT! 1) I nursed two children into adulthood.  Bridger had a beard before he finally weaned.  2) Waverly was a lefty not a switch hitter (nursing mamas you know what I'm talking about).  So basically, in the breast department I'm batting 1000 with one softball and one baseball--a statistic I've calculated on the grounds that back when the boobies were still perfect they helped land me a really fantastic husband and that my kids have never even had ONE ear infection and their brains are just HUGE from all that breastmilk (which is evidenced by the size of their abnormally large craniums--those kids have noggins like basketballs!) and I can’t even properly throw a ball so where are these sports analogies even coming from and also: THE 2010 WORLD CUP IS AFOOT, BITCHES!  Also: Tour De France.   Rhymes with LANCE! 

This series of events, which are only fortunate if you enjoy soccer, cycling, AND teeing off from my ribcage and are only possible in July of every fourth year leads me to two conclusions: 1) I'm going to have a mammogram. That golf ball probably shouldn’t be in there.  (I believe there's a Tiger Wood joke lurking nearbouts and if I think of it I'll let you know but all I can think of right now is Fergie singing "my lovely lady lumps") and 2) I really need a vuvuzela.  OR cowbell.  Or whatever those crazy Frenchmen use to cheer on the Tour.  (Sometimes they actually run naked alongside the peleton.  I am going to have to get naked enough for this mammogram so I think I'll have to pass on THAT particular indignity.)  In fact, I would like to take my vuvuzela / cowbell with me to the mammogram. Which is at Duke.  TOMORROW.  And I can annoy the SHIT out of those pretentious Duke doctors with their terrible Duke frowns and their terrible Duke nostrils and their terrible Duke football program.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!  Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding! 

(But I’m not thinking about that because as we speak England is being made naked by the Germans and this time Winston Churchill is nowhere to be found and in a fascinating if not serendipitous accident of providence the US is out of the war, having been defeated by some…Africans. Oh the irony! Oh the kismet!)

(OK I started this post a week or more ago.  By now Spain and Netherlands rule the world.  Little has changed in 500 years.  Colonialism waxes eternal.) 

In any case you shouldn't worry.  Spain will defeat the Netherlands, Contador will (I hate to admit it) beat Armstrong, and I will get my boobie pancaked, nay, tortillad, tomorrow afternoon.  In fact, you won't have to miss ANY of the action.  World Cup and the Tour will be broadcast in all their resplendent glory 'cross television sets across the land and I will be live-tweeting my mammogram (!).  EVERY SQUISHY DETAIL! 

In honor of the Tour (and to mitigate my fear of what exactly is growing inside my breast which I am not thinking about LANCE LANCE LANCE)  I might even ride my bike to the hospital.  It will be the Tour de Triangle.  I'll start out riding the Raleigh stage, scenic only in its view of Midtown shopping centers and a desparate suburbia but deadly in its threat of Northern-transplant Volvo drivers and Nascar-wannabe mullethead Camaro speedsters.  The Raleigh stage being only slightly less hazard-prone than the final stage, Durham, with its fine ghetto views and haphazard gunfire but ending in the award of a jersey in any color but red, blue, black, white, or gold WHICH WILL ALL GET YOU CLIPPED, YO, and a successful entry into the Duke campus which is only slightly more segregated / innoculated against its encroaching blackness than Washington D.C.

There.

OK maybe I should drive there, because the only thing less dignified than being carjacked is being bike-jacked.  And both are equally probable in our fine sister city of Durham.  By which I mean red headed stepsister city.  I feel bad for Durham, really.  I think someday that they, and Ft. Worth, Urbana, and St. Paul should all get together and start some kind of civil rights movement for under-recognized twin cities.  Parasitic or not.  We shall overcome.   

So I think I'll wear green to Duke tomorrow.  The maillot vert, in hopes that this journey of mine is just a sprint and not a Grand Tour.  The one with pockets big enough for my noisemakers and Tarheel pompoms.  Because I plan on winning.