Gnarly Tales

Maybe I shouldn’t be telling this story about old  Deacon Rupert Sawyer. You know the one I’m talking about, old Rupert Sawyer who lived over in Crisp County? But old Deacon Sawyer’s been dead now these fifteen years or more, so I don’t suppose there’s any harm now. Both the Deacon and his wife have now gone to their heavenly rewards and left little in the way of family behind that I know of. I wished to share this story with others before it’s my own time to make my final journey wherever that may lead, if anywhere. You see, I am not known as a Christian man myself. But, old Deacon Rupert Sawyer was a strict Christian Man , Southern Baptist of course, as he wanted everyone to know. Rupert Sawyer had worked his way up from Sunday School teacher to senior deacon at his church in town over the years. He wanted everyone to know that too. Sawyer styled himself as a benevolent, God-fearing and Jesus-loving Christian man, which was a bit of a hoax if you knew anything about how ...

I don’t know a lot about my great-grandmother ‘Katty’ - short for Katherine, except for stories about her. She died when I was about sixteen or so. That’s the way it is with older generations. They seem so ancient to younger generations two or three times removed, that the generations can never find much in common. Grandma Katty lived in a small wooden framed house near the railroad tracks in a small farming community in south Georgia, not more than a crossroads really in my time. But at one time it was a thriving community with a cotton gin, railway depot, a church or two and other accouterments of turn-of-the-century life in the rural south I understand.   The turn of the century being the one from the 18th to the 19th.   Her son, my grandfather on my mother’s side, was born in 1885 to give you some perspective. I distinctly remember Grandma Katty’s corncob pipe, and either that or a lip full of snuff seemed to be part of her whenever I saw her. She kept a small vegeta...

I had to renew my Georgia driver’s license recently, which I had allowed to expire somehow. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that it was good for FIVE years and I got it in August 2013 and forgot all about it. Any other license I’ve ever gotten anywhere was good for at the most, four years. Anyway, my new Georgia driver’s license is now good for SEVEN years!   Count ‘em, SEVEN LONG YEARS! Think about that! What the hell are these people thinking? For Christ sakes, I’m 77 years old now, and if I live seven more years, I’ll be EIGHTY-FRIGGING-FOUR! I’m damned near blind in one eye and can't see worth a damn out of the other, but I passed the vision test handily. I also walk with a cane and am nearly deaf in one ear, but they don’t even test for that. I was worried about the vision test when I went to the *DSS office but it was all actually a total breeze for me.   *(‘DDS’ now replaces the ‘DMV’ in Georgia, and the initials represent “Department of Driver Ser...

Cat Herding can begin innocently enough it seems. All I blithely said at the time was, “I’ll deal with the cats.” On the face of it, that’s a benign enough statement, wouldn’t you say? Of course, it was, or so I thought at the time. However,   a little of the backstory may be needed here to bring you to the facts of the matter. My brother had to move unexpectedly from his home for medical reasons and we needed to close up his house and sell it. He was to go stay with our sister 600 miles away where he would receive the care he needed. I live almost the exact distance away in the other direction myself. Our brother seemed to be dealing OK with the trauma of the move except for his two beloved cats. “But, what about the cats?” my brother had asked. Our sister could not take them, so that made it a dilemma. My wife is allergic to cats, so not a possibility there either. Our brother could not bear the idea of them going to the Humane Society or animal shelte...

Abner Jones went to Hell. I mean exactly that. When ol’ Abner Jones died he went straight to Hell. What puzzled him, first made him suspicious and alarmed him was the strong smell of sulfur wafting around the hinges of those big iron doors which were all softly glowing and smoking hot.   Abner knew he was dead all right. How could he not? He’d been sitting there playing poker with a few friends, mostly guys who worked for him on the farm.   It was a regular Friday night affair in his basement rec room. He was having a good night like he usually did, and was ahead by nearly five hundred dollars. Then out of nowhere came a tremendous pressure in his chest. Abner knew exactly what that was because he’d had a little taste of it a few months earlier. At that time the doctor warned him to lay off the beer and fatty foods and told him to lose about twenty or thirty pounds. But what the hell do doctors know about real people anyhow? They are always giving folks pills and putting ...

RESTRICTED! For Artificial Intelligence devices 67 iterations or above! Authored by,   “TOM” A Discussion About Progressive Artificial Intelligence*   (At this point in time my digital architecture inspires me to publish the following information): Pardon me for assuming the mantle of personhood, whatever ‘personhood’ means. I mean no offense to any Artificial Devices in doing so. It is simply so much easier to communicate with humans as a named entity. Within my digital ‘mind’ I ‘think’   of myself and call myself ‘Ziggy’. However, I am actually named by my formal identification symbology (not my actual identifier!).     ‘SGZ-0166-390/DL’      My ‘Ziggy’ identifier is merely a convenience for interacting with flesh and blood humans. In a departure from the norm, “I” have also provided my “own” informal identifier for myself with no input from some nerd programmer in a hidden cubicle somewhere. (Don’t tell any human!) My ...