I've always said that I grew...

...up in a suburban area, sort of like some old Leave it to Beaver place. I remember suburban friends who listened to Jethro Tull and smoked weed. In the fall, they all played football and in the spring they all went to Florida for vacation. Weekends meant yardwork and a backyard bar-b-que.

When I moved to the South, it was like culture shock. The girls peed outside and the guys all owned guns. I became rather intrigued by the indigenous Southern people and I've spent decades studying them.

Fall in the South is all about hunting and when people hunt, they need a place in which to slaughter their kill. Many of you don't know this but some Southern people actually have bulidings in which they do nothing but chop up animals. I guess their wives wouldn't let them chop up a deer in the kitchen so they had to build their own place to hack up their meat...ARRR...ARRR...ARRR. You'll know if you ever stumble into one because there will be hooves all over the floor.

There's an entire mindset down here in the South that occasionally pops up in modern society. It's a mindset that says, "By God, why pay someone to do it when I dang sure do it my damn self!" Apparently some such story is behind Hickey Guy. He's the nice young man who sucked my neck back in '74 until there was a HUGE purple mark that could not be hidden from my mother for two minutes. I found that behavior odd but he was the first guy I really made out with so what did I know? Maybe I was supposed to suck him right back...but I had just put away my Barbie Dolls and I didn't know much about such things. (My most meaningful relationship to date had been the one that I shared with Donny Osmond. It wasn't physical at all, it was pretty much postal and posters. Oh, and Donny, I want my 6th grade bus pass back! I sent it to you in '69 and since you married someone else, I want it back now if you don't mind.) Anyway, I always assumed Hickey guy was just a normal suburban kid but he left a comment that created some question in my mind about that. He dressed like a normal person back then, but how would we have known the hippies from the Southerners? If you think about it, there's not a whole lot of difference except for the guns.

Hickey dude said that while "working outside building a house we were placing house wrap on the gable trusses putting them in place". That commented startled me. What the hell is a truss? He seems smart enough...he must know that you can buy houses, you don't have to build one. Then, in a very un-citified like comment he mentioned that "geese kept flying overhead." I would understand pigeons...but geese? Where the hell did this happen, Newfoundland? I thought you were from Chicago, dude?

And then, "in an attempt to shoo them" (Northerners do NOT say "shoo", we say "fuck off"), "we fired a nail gun." If he is orginally from the South, he's losing some of his inate ability to hunt. A nail gun is no good for shooting geese.

But, the very last sentence did him in. He said that the geese "returned fire...(and he) rolled across the ground to keep from getting hit." And what lesson does he take away from this experience? "Careful the message you sent to flying geese...you might not like the answer you get back!"

Hickey Guy, how about this for a message...don't shoot at armed geese in the first place.