Misspelled Words and Drunk Chainsawing...Cassville Pastimes

Nothing drives me more crazy than mispronounced, misspelled and incorrectly used words. It is my number one pet peeve. Some people don't like smacking food at the dinner table, people who click pens 1,000 times while they are sitting at a desk, or late night barking dogs, but I'm ok with it. You can smack at the dinner table but you better not misspell "Hollandaise." Your Rockwaller (Rottweiler) can yap all night next door, but you better not say "I got up and consequently went to work," or I will scream "redundant, useless adverb!" and throw things at your car.

However, the result of my number one pet peeve is often quite humorous. Down here, we are not afraid to misspell words and completely destroy the English language. We Southerners lay waste to verbiage worse than Amy Winehouse at an "all you can smoke" crack buffet. (Still too soon? Oh well.) Hell, in my tiny map dot, we are downright famous for our butcherings. As mentioned in a previous post, within a 1/2 mile of the store, there was a road sign that had been vandalized with "No Mercey" in red paint. It remained there for years. We also had "Peach's For Sell;" "Houses 4 Sell Buy Owner;" "Gerage Sales;" "Church Benifit for Pawpaws Serjury;" and my personal favorite, "Larry's Lawn Care and Maintenants: Fast n' Convineenent."

No, really. The guy came to the store with a roll of duct tape and a neon green posterboard and asked if he could put his advertisement up. Who was I to say no? He quickly affixed his masterpiece to the Coke Machine among the other posters: A wrestling ad informing the Cassville faithful that "Beautiful" Bobby Eaton would be at the Dairi King (yes, King, my C'ville peeps may remember this place) as a guest referee and another ad for chow puppies. In Cassville, we are not afraid to have some chows. In fact, any small town down South is full of chows. I guarantee that when somebody fills out an application to live in a trailer park, there is a box to check that says "Chows." If yes, how many and are you expecting puppies? If no, please return from whence you came. Anyhow, apparently "convineenent" was a little too long, so the first five letters were huge and the last few were tiny, so he could squeeze the entire word on the posterboard. Resourceful. I almost fired our lawn guy right then and hired Larry.

Speaking of resourceful, one of our old neighbors, Danny (name changed to protect the...innocent?) had trouble with a huge oak tree on his property. It had been struck by lightning and was dying more and more every day, to the point where he was worried that it was going to fall on his house, or worse yet, his truck. He talked about it for days. He couldn't afford a tree service and Georgia Power refused to take it down because it was not physically touching the power lines. What does Danny do? What any good Cassvillian does in this situation. You buy five cases of Natty Light, have a party and when everybody is ripped out of frame, you get out your chainsaw and annihilate the offending tree yourself. Hell, he even bought a chainsaw file from me that morning. That's determination. There were several problems with this, though:

Number One: The tree was GINORMOUS. (not a word, I use it for effect, sue me)

Number Two: The tree could only fall one of two ways, in the street or on his house.

Number Three: Everybody is piss drunk, Don Williams' hit "Tulsa Time" is blaring over the speakers and nobody is paying a lick of attention to Danny, sawing away shirtless with jean shorts and a Marlboro hanging out of his lip.

Two hours of cutting and the oak tree is ready to hit the dirt. It lurches, pops and cracks, and falls directly in the street, destroying the power lines, the transformer and the pole it was affixed upon. A huge ball of flame erupts from the transformer and the power in Cassville is history for three hours. I scramble around at the store, putting milk and lunch meat on ice trying to keep it from spoiling, cursing Danny but laughing at the same time. The cops and Georgia Power arrive in a flash (aka slower than frozen pond water). There's Danny, covered in wood chips, drunk as Cooter Brown's second cousin....saying "I tried to tell y'all!" The cops take charge "throw down the chainsaw, sir." Danny replies that he paid too much for this Husqvarna (he can spell that correctly, by God) and opts to return the chainsaw to its case gently. "Now, it's touching the gotdam par (power) lines!" he exclaims. He is hauled off to jail as Georgia Power begins the long process of fileting the dead tree and replacing the power lines. Danny is a legend, he really is.

So, what do we surmise from this? In Cassville, we may not be able to spell very well, we may have too many chows, and we may not be able to drunk chainsaw worth a damn, but we know how to get the State of Georgia and its numerous entities to get off their keysters and help us.....whether its convineenent for them or not. Bless us.