Thursday, June 26, 2008

Revenge of the Skank-Ho

I’ve introduced my brother Stephen, a.k.a. Redneck Casanova, in a previous post, and he will be the subject of yet another blog from me. I can’t seem to help myself. He’s just too damn rich in material. Stephen is one those people in life that was never meant to be a marginal character. He takes center stage.

Stephen is a charmer. Where he acquired the charm, my sister and I haven’t a clue. We grew up with him in a house where there was only one bathroom. There were lots of times that my sister and I could have killed him. Charming is the not the adjective that I would use to describe Stephen. Lucky for him that some females are not picky. He can walk into a bank to make a deposit and walk away with the teller’s phone number written on his receipt. He meets women all the time in places where you would not think that a woman would enter. (The pictures with the deer antlers speak for themselves.)

As pointed out, Redneck Casanova can find a woman, but he never seems to keep her. Not that I’m saying that he should keep any of his victims. He’s only dated one person whom I would have gladly welcomed as my sister-in-law, but she was too logical and intelligent for him. His great loss. The rest are entertaining tidbits in my life, such as the Skank-Ho whose nickname shall be Butch.

Butch came to my attention last summer at my son Colin’s fourth birthday party. I had cleaned my house and invited the family to celebrate with us. Stephen showed up with a female that I wasn’t too sure was female. I had heard about Butch a few days before from my mother. At the time, Redneck Casanova was living at our mother’s house, and being unable to flee her own home, mother was introduced to numerous women in Stephen’s company. Not that he was permitted to bring a woman home for a night of debauched sex at his mother’s house. Mother would meet them the morning after when Stephen was dropped off after a night of debauched sex at the female’s house. One morning Mother walked outside to check on the dogs or something, and there was Stephen sitting in an unknown vehicle, kissing what looked to be another man. Mother immediately turned around and headed back into the house to wait on Stephen. After some time, he came in, and Mother proceeded to ask him why he had been kissing a man. LOL! I wish that I could have seen Stephen’s face. Stephen shit. He hurriedly informed Mother that he hadn’t been kissing a man, but a woman. Mother replied, “I know a woman when I see her, and THAT wasn’t a woman!” Stephen finally convinced Mother that Butch was indeed a woman, which brings us back to Colin’s birthday party.

There stood Stephen and Butch in my den, looking like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, in their mirroring attire. When I questioned Stephen later about their clothing choice, he looked embarrassed and said, “I had no clue that she was going to wear that.” Both were wearing boots, jeans, belts, navy blue and white striped polo’s, and baseball caps. No kidding. I have a picture. Now what type of sister would I be to ever allow my brother to leave without a shot to preserve his humiliation? But I haven’t figured out how to load the picture onto this blog page. As I told Ely in an e-mail, when Stephen and Butch stood side-by-side, you couldn’t tell where Stephen ended and Butch began. They were just one big stripey flow. (Is "stripey" a word?) When Stephen asked me later in the evening what I thought about Butch, what was I suppose to say?!? Lie to him. Never. Sometimes in life a sister has to be brutally honest with her dear brother, and I rose to the occasion, hysterically so.

Stephen wound up breaking Butch’s heart. Threw her battered manly-ish heart to the side with his other victims, but Butch wasn’t one to take rejection very well. She trained horses for a living, and she meant to train the Redneck Casanova, too. And she had a plan.

Stephen, being the idiot that he is, agreed to drive Butch and a group of “her girlie friends,” all of whom look and act like Butch, to Beale Street in Memphis for a fun night. I guess Stephen thought that he was really going to have a good time with just him and a group of women. How dumb can one man be? Where is his internal detection for warning signs? Wait that would take a brain. He was alone with Butch and her friends. Stephen said that he drove, and Butch rode in the back seat on the way to Memphis. During the drive, Butch kept thumping Stephen in the back of the head, which in turn pissed Stephen off. They argued, and he vowed to himself that he would not get back in a car with Butch, he would find another way home. His reasoning was that he had never been to Beale Street and not run into someone he knew. But Fate would decree otherwise.

Once on Beale Street, Stephen managed to separate himself from the Amazons, but Butch didn’t want to be separated. While Stephen was fleeing, she, being the predator mode, stalked him through the clubs. Stephen knew that she was hot on his tail because she had text messaged him the whole time, telling him that he would never get away and that she and her friends were going to take him back to her house and teach him how to treat a lady. The hunter had become the hunted.

Eventually, Butch snared her prey. Stephen’s shirt was almost ripped off him in the capture, and he was bullied into Butch’s car by the Amazon pack. At least Stephen was smart enough to be scared. He knew that he had to escape. They had to stop for gas, and the women decided to fill up the car at one of the truck stops on Hwy 78/Lamar and Winchester. While at the truck stop, Stephen managed to escape and hide himself in the maze of eighteen wheelers in the parking lot. I can just imagine Stephen running around idling eighteen wheelers, stopping periodically and squatting to look underneath the the sea of trailers for running legs. Crouching Redneck, Hidden Skank-Ho. Butch was furious. She had a plan, but she was unable to capture her prize again.

Stephen made it to the truck stop across the street and hid there until he was sure that Butch had given up. Then, he called another ex-girlfriend, waking her from sleep, and asked her to drive all the way to Memphis to get him, which she did. Is one woman's loss another woman's gain? Snag him while you can. What are these women thinking? *shaking head*

You would think that the Redneck Casanova learned his lesson, but remember that he’s not that smart. It’s been almost a year since Stephen’s escape transpired, and Mother told me a couple of days ago that she thought that Stephen had hooked-up with Butch again. What the hell? LOL! Is my brother stupid or what? I can’t wait to hear about what happens this time. That dumb ass.

What about you? Any family members who never seem to learn their lessons? Any friends who refused to see reason? Any experiences like the Redneck Casanova? What are the odds that this will lead to another revenge from the Skank-Ho?

*NOTE: My brother is not crazy. He's rather intelligent in many areas of life. He's just dumb when it comes to women, like a lot of men. I love him, and it's my hope that one day he will settle down with a wonderful woman for his happily-ever-after. Until then, he keeps me entertained.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Snake Charmer...NOT!

Have any of the rest of you noticed the high volume of snakes this summer? The warm weather began with Bill killing two small snakes in our yard. I told him to rake the leaves last fall, lazy man.

That slaughter was in April. Since then, my cousin, Tina, has been dealing with an invasion of snakes in her yard. She’s lucky because Jake, her yellow Labrador, and his sidekick Black Betty, a canine of unknown origins, enjoy killing any snake that wonders into Tina’s yard. Black Betty finds the snakes, and Jake kills them. Unfortunately, Jake spent a few days in the vet’s hospital from a lethal dose of snake venom a few weeks ago. He survived and is back to his favorite pastime of dispelling all snakes around his home.

Besides snakes in yards, I’ve seen snakes streaking across simmering asphalt several times in the past month. Two weeks ago on a week night, Hannah and I driving through the neighborhood on our way to Books-A-Million for a caramel macchiato witnessed just two houses down from my house, a snake slither out of the brush in front of my vehicle. I screamed, and my legs flew up in the air, well, as much as the steering wheel would allow. I know. I was in the safety of my Explorer so why throw my legs up? Beats me. It’s just a natural reaction for me. Bill and Hannah have tried to rationalize with me about the absurdity of my reflex to snakes outside the vehicle, but my brain refuses to compute. This past Friday, I was driving through the local back roads to a job interview at a county school, and a snake swirled across the road into the heated knee length grass on the side of the road. Yes, my legs went air born again.

Seeing snakes on the roads cannot compete with what I witnessed this past Thursday. Tina, Chrissy, Maw, Stuart, Mary Eden, and Grant met me, my mother, and Colin at my mom’s house to follow us to my sister’s house to go swimming in her pool. (Poor Tracy was miserably sweating it out camping in Grenada, and we were relaxing in her pool. *g*) After we returned to mother’s house, Maw, my grandmother, wanted to gather some vegetables from two small gardens that my mother and stepdad have planted in their yard. My mother went to the lower garden, and my grandmother went to the garden beside the driveway.

The garden that Maw decided to visit has a small shed beside it. Unbeknownst to Maw, lurking in the small structure, was a very big, ugly, and nasty snake, which had staked a claim to the small shelter because of its appetite for mice. Stuart was the first to spot the snake, and Maw, being the country girl that she is, grabbed a hoe and began to do battle. Now, Maw is 77 years-old, but in that aged body beats the heart of a warrior. (Cue Xena battle cry.) Her sight is not as well as it used to be. However, her hearing is just fine to Hannah and Kristen’s amazement. As they say, you can’t cuss around Maw! But I digress. Sorry. Now, back the story.

Maw with her chosen weapon commenced to whack at not the snake, but at a green painted chain that was curled up next to the snake. She walked all over that snake as she pounded the chain, and she was miraculously never bitten. The snake, being the smart type, that of slithering for its life, was trying to get the hell out of there, but Maw realized that she was taking whacks at the wrong thing. She began striking blows at the snake, and the snake, knowing that retreat was futile, began fighting back. The rest of us, except for my mother who was not witnessing this battle, were frozen in mute horror watching the matriarch of our family do ferocious battle with this venomous enemy. Too bad the damn hoe was blunt and not sharpened. Poor Maw was just beating the hell out the snake instead of cutting off its head. And the snake was rising up in the air to a striking poise and exposing its fangs and tongue as Maw leaned in for each whack. If she didn't chop off its head, then at least it would be one brain damaged snake. Later on, Maw claimed that she believed that she knocked the snake out a few times, but the snake refused to stay down. Maw said that the more that it would hiss at her, the more she thought, “I’m going to kill you.”

During the fight, Tina, being the seasoned snake killer that she is, realized that Maw needed a sharper hoe. None of us volunteered to take Maw’s place. I’m not that brave. We knew that the blunt hoe would never end the struggle, and gladiator-hearted Maw was tiring. Somehow, Tina saw another hoe on the carport and yelled for me get it. We got the sharper hoe into Maw’s deadly hands, and the snake’s head was lopped off. Upon investigation, the snake was discovered to be at least several feet long and almost as big around as a 16 ounce Coke bottle. Also, the triangular head identified it as poisonous and the markings on its skin revealed it to be a Cotton Mouth, or Water Moccasin, a very deadly breed of snake that inhabits the south. *shudder*

On discovering what had transpired while she had been in the lower garden, my mother scrambled into her house and refused to go outside again. I’m scared of snakes, but my mother is terrified of snakes. I’ve seen her kill a huge Weeping Willow tree as a repercussion of shooting at a snake. I missed that tree. It was great for playing Tarzan. Even with this recent snake killing by Maw, my mother wanted to know why nobody had yelled down to the garden for her to get her gun, a 30.06 (thirty-ought-six), and scope the blasted thing. She would have blown away the small shed and anything else in the vicinity, too. Poor Mother is afraid of other snakes lurking in her yard, and she is threatening to buy a pig. Supposedly pigs kill and eat snakes. When I asked her how she was going to keep the pig in her yard and out of the road, she said that it would be easy. She has an underground wire system running around her yard to keep her Schnauzers from getting into the road. The wire has a small electrical current running to it, and the dogs wear collars that shock them when they get too close to the underground wire. My mother said that she would buy another collar for the pig. My mother and her ideas! A pig running around with a dog-shock-collar on! LOL!

It’s Sunday, and no pig has appeared at my mother’s house. But I’m not ruling out the possibility of a pig showing up in the future, especially if another snake is spotted in or near her yard. She lives within the city limits, and I highly doubt if the city would turn a blind eye to her pig or the smell.

What about you? Any snake problems, stories, or remedies to get rid of snakes? If I can keep my mom from a pig, lots of people will be grateful. I've heard that moth balls work, but then again, I've heard that they don't. I'm sick of snakes. I hate snakes, and everyone is predicting that snakes will be out in droves this year because we had such a mild winter. I guess I could always dig up my roots and move the family to Ireland. Now, that doesn't sound too bad. :-)