From Bremen to Boone

It all started changing with TV. All the small towns that had once been protected - or was it sheltered - from the world, got keyed into the idea that there was something else out beyond the county line. Now, most of it was awful, mind you, this stuff they started pumping in. They thrust it into homes in the form of a hypnotic box. There was killin's, and wars, and hate, and grease, but there was also Milton Berle, and Lucille Ball, and WKRP in Cincinnati, and Love Boat, and Wendy's and Panera Bread. And all of a sudden, just like it happened in the suburban Atlanta where I spent my school year, the little west Georgia towns, like Bremen and Moreland, were annexed into the United States of Generica by General Eisenhower's Interstate System and RCA's little living room box o' fun. Boone's headed that same way now, but we were far enough from I-77 to hold out this long.
Of course, this here internet is the TV of this century. It used to just be America, but now we can see everything that's going on from every 'corner of the globe.' (That's got to be the silliest saying ever.)
I can get on here and type anything I could think of to type, and some 14-year-old in the Kingdom of Bhutan can pull it off, throw it into a translation website, and read the whole thing. Now, I'm not saying it's plausible, but it's possible. Quick trivia, "Atop which mountain range is the Kingdom of Bhutan located?" Answers come at the end of the 'column'. (I don't see any reason to change 'column' to 'blog', I'm fighting the power of the internet vocabularists. These words are still stacked line upon line. That makes it a column.)
I also love that y'all can just post and say anything you want. Which reminds me, I was talking about Generica because the Boone of today and the Bremen of today and the Bhutan of tomorrow are all going to be the same. It's awful in a way, but I think there may be an upside. If we all have a few things we can identify with, then it can be easier to build bridges between otherwise rival populations. The future is going to be global, the present already is. The problem, of course, is whether you want to build a bridge out of McDonald's French Fries, or out of conversation and open dialogue. We have to be able to say whatever needs saying, and we have to be able to communicate clearly with one another in the coming days. People are too sensitive and high-strung, and they are keeping us from having a conversation. So, the last I'm going to say about it is this: I think it is OK for there to be a Chick-Fil-A in Hanoi, but I also want a Vietnamese joint in Boone. CFA can put all its subliminal religious paraphernalia out to the billions of children of Asia, and the Vietnamese menu can have a Buddhist quote on it, or maybe even a yin-yang. Everybody gets something unusual and tasty to eat, and everyone gets a few more points of reference to have in common when we have to figure out how to cooperate and share the limited resources available on a planet of 7 billion inhabitants.
Unfortunately, we currenly send the same first Am-bastard-or to all these countries. I'm sure the people of the world can recognize the Golden Arches quicker than the American Flag. That's our face out there, Mickey-D's. "Beware young Ang-Yin, America is going to seduce you from the inside with all white-meat nuggets and a Kung Fu Panda action figure. Now, go play with the big yellow clown. For he is America, your saviour!"
I'm sorry, that felt like a bit of a rant there. Just goes to show you can say anything you want on these innernets. Which was not the case with the newspapers with which I was involved.
That became quite clear for me in 2002 when The Avery Journal was bought out by the multimedia conglomerate corporation from Tennessee, and the Glenn Grizzard column ended up at the center of the negotiations.
Oh yes, Bhutan sits high in the plateaus of the Himalaya. Pronounced there as "Him-All-Ya" much like here we say "Appa-Latch-Uhn," I reckon. But maybe someday, we'll all say everything the exact same way. I gotta go, I'm hungry for nuggets now.

My Journal of Avery County

Everybody's talking about gas prices these days, but I guess it's still better than if that Y2K had happened, huh? We laugh, or simply forget, about it now, but I wrote a front-page profile on a guy out on the highway that opened an actual Y2K store. You could buy giant tins of powdered everything and water tablets and gas masks and all. Whenever I think about him, I wonder whether he was ticked that it didn't happen. I think we can at least assume that he's holed up in the same bunker to this day either way.

Meanwhile, a mile away from the Y2K store, up on Dick Watson Road, when the calendar turned on all four of its dials. . . The perfesser was nine and a half months pregnant. I was named publisher of the Avery Journal. My son was born. I turned 30. And all this before the end of February.

I was knocking out a column for each week's paper, and I had plenty to write about. And sometime, when I wasn't looking, I became the eye of the hurricane. I quickly realized that things that are taken as obvious and acceptable in Athens, and even Boone, are still frowned upon in Newland, North Carolina.

Take, for example, drinkin' beer by a river with your buddies. "What's better than that?" I asked my Avery County audience in one of my weekly diatribes...Now, I had a radio show out of the A.M. in Newland, and that week's show was a barn burner, I tell you what. Was I unaware that demon spirits is the hand of Satan in the world? Why yes, I was unaware of that. "Mr. Gizzard, don't you realize that alcohol destroys families and takes Daddies away from the Lord Jesus?" Um, I hadn't thought of it like.."No you haven't!!"

But the best was the Baptist minister who stood in front of the cameras that Sunday, and broadcast to his congregation and his dozens of local cable access viewers, that 'the feller down at the Avery Journal has sinned.' He held up the paper and quoted my heathen words: "What's better than sitting by a river with your buddies and drinking 10 or 20 Budweisers?" Then he balled it up and threw it across the front of the church! If I were you, I would think this was an exagerration, but someone sent me a videotape of it. I'll see if I can set up a link to it someday.

Anyway, the drankin' stuff was just the beginning. Turned out that the county had been dominated by a rampant, conservative political machine for years and years. There were two parties, the good ol' boy mountain republicans and the newcomer Floridian republicans. As a regular opponent of corruption, and an advocate for the greater good, I ended up falling in with the Floridiots, and I mean that in the sweetest sense of the word, for you Floridiots that might be reading this. So the old mountain machine (or the 'Green Hat Gang,' as I dubbed them due to their leader's choice in haberdashery) came to despise me. I've got a million stories about the showdowns, but the best was when one of them stood up in front of a meeting of about 100 good ol' boys in the courthouse and blamed all their problems on 'that Gizzard at the Avery Journal.'
Or maybe the best one was the $500 bounty to anyone who gave me a beating. Really.

Of course, the number one story might have been the meltdown of the relationship between me the publisher and the matronly Southern lady that had served as the 'editor' of the paper for the last couple decades. As a member of one of Avery's old-time families, she was more comfortable in the pocket of the Green Hats. In a matter of weeks, we found ourselves on opposite sides of the campaign to remove the sheriff and replace him with a former sheriff that the Green Hat Gang could control. The HI-larious part was that they were accusing the current sheriff of embezzlement and beating prisoners, and the one they wanted to return to office had resigned after admitting to embezzlement and beating prisoners. And there was another guy who had just been sheriff, and had barely lost the election and had never been accused of beating anybody! By the time the meeting of the committee that decided the outcome rolled around, I had already played Lyle Lovett on my radio show and dedicated it to her..."I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore..."

So Y2K may not have seen the end of our technology-driven world (but hey, maybe when the oil runs out, we can pull out the powdered turkey and dressing after all). My year 2000 started a couple of crazy years when my writing brought truth to many, and frustration to almost just as many, and it was a rush. And I was selling papers at the same time.

Of course it's nothing compared to the influence my words are having on the six of you out there reading this. See y'all in next week's Journal.

Appalachian Word Association

Sorry to have missed you these last couple weeks, I was free-loading at a friend's in Hollywood with the family and couldn't sit down long enough to pontificate. But we're back, and with our time, I'd like to take you to the place my wife's psychology professoring job would take me. So, in the spirit of psychology...
I'll give you a word, and you say the first thing that comes into your mind...
Appalachia.
What'd you say? I didn't hear ya. Don't worry, I said the same thing in 1996.
Somehow or 'nother I ended up following my girlfriend to somewhere called Boone, North Carolina for her to teach at a place called Appalachian State University. Now don't get me wrong; I was in no way prejudiced against the Salt of the Earth homefolk. I had hewn my accent over stints in Bremen and Carnesville, Georgia, but Appalachia? I had a full-blown, ignorant, bigoted idea of moonshine stills and barefoot overall-wearin' Jed Clampetts.
Turns out I was mostly off. They got TV here too, and now that there internet, and Applebee's and Panera Bread, so you have to mostly let go of the corn cob pipe guy you were picturing when you thought of Appalachia.
And, by the way, you're pronouncing it wrong. Anyone who watched any sports programming over the past year has probably heard about half the announcers correctly pronounce Appa-LATCH-un, when they recount the tale of the greatest football upset in the history of mankind. And a big sorry it had to be you to those Michigan fans out there, but in addition to making Boone a lot more popular, I think it was also instrumental in the domination my Georgia Bulldogs provided the underdog Hawaii Rainbows in the Sugar Bowl.
But, outside of football, in the "regular old world," Boone is pretty great. It's way cooler than Atlanta here on June 19 (in the thermometer sense of the word), the mountains and the creeks and the animals ain't bad, and it would be Boone that gave me a chance to tumble backwards into the newspaper business.
There wasn't a teaching job to be found. Too much competition, too many old ties, for whatever reason, I took a job instead as a sports reporter for the Watauga Democrat. I convinced them to let me start writing a weekly column in addition to typing in the agate type of the Northwest 4-A Girls' Volleyball standings and spending Friday nights at the Watauga Pioneers' game.
Speaking of putting together the scoreboard page for the Democrat, and getting back around to football, I was sitting there every Monday morning, making all the columns line up under the right headers (real high-skill use of the 'TAB' key) and I would take the time to read over the statistics for the teams in ASU's conference each week. So every week, there was this kid from Marshall University, a freshman, putting up ridiculous numbers: 200 yards receiving, 3 receiving TDs, two kick returns for TDs, just week after week. I made a point of remembering his name so that I could keep an eye on him when Marshall made the highlights. I still remember that freshman, it was Randy Moss.
The columns I was writing, on the other hand, let me express a little more imagination than the agate page, but thanks to the conservative leanings of the administration of the ironically-name Democrat, I was barred from telling any stories that involved raucous behavior or the things that contribute to such behavior. Now, being a Grizzard, I was none to eager to cut that much funny right off the top. Apparently, since I covered high school sports I was supposed to be a role model for teenagers. So I quit. (To keep the irony fairy busy, I would end up teaching teenagers once again, and be forced back into the role of model once again, but that's after almost a decade in the paper biz.)
I went on to start a local entertainment paper, and then fell back into the clutches of the newspaper company when it turned out I needed to be making money as well as dribbling pearls of wisdom onto 5,000 copies of PEEK Magazine each week. I started laying out The Avery Journal, the red-headed, freckle-faced stepsister paper of the Democrat.
And that, dear readers, is where I finally found Appalachia.

Tejas

So, if you're saddling up and riding to Texas, you have to decide whether you're going to be the Gus you want to be or the Call you ought to be.
If you've never read 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry, you should get up from the computer right now, and then sit down again and go to Amazon, and order yerself a copy of that there book. If'n you ain't got the energy to take up such an assignment, you should at least click over to Netflix and get them to send you out the best mini-series ever made.
To summarize for those who have foresaken my encouragement and stuck with this epistle, Gus and Call are old cowboys in Old Cowboy Texas and the challenge is to ride that there herd of cattle all the way to Montana. Now it might not seem on the surface to be much of a plot, but there are both hijinks and adventures that ensue -- plus the most attractive 'sportin' woman' and the scariest Native American ever captured on the printed page -- and you, dear reader, will find yourself carried away to an America that is so foreign to the one in which you live, that you might just start mixing a little rye whiskey in with your Starbuck's Mega Grande.
Your two main compadres in the story are the wild and whimsical Captain Augustus McCrae and the decidedly practical Captain Woodrow Call, both heroes of the fabled Texas Rangers. They get sucked into old Jake Spoon's stories of a magical wild land to the North, and Gus and Call have no choice but to saddle up and go find what's out there for them in life.
Which reminds me, I was in the middle of the ongoing autobiography of an overeducated redneck boy that was on his way to the biggest state in the lower 48.
With public school teaching behind me and a surprisingly serious girlfriend befuddling my mind, I went about the business of shutting down my Eastern life and setting my sights on Tejas, the Spanish translation of the Caddo Indian word for 'friends.'
As I stumbled my way towards Atlanta, and argued with myself over the implied advantages of I-20 to Dallas vs. I-85 to Mobile, it really hit me. I was leaving Georgia. I was taking my little provincial production "on the road." Oh sure, I had spent the last couple of summers in Boston with the boys, and I had logged my share of road trip miles, but I always knew that if I really needed my passport or my old softball glove, my stuff was in a bedroom, basement or under a loose floor tile somewhere between Bremen, Marietta and Athens. Now, Texas,... Texas turned out not to just be a continuation of the story. Tejas turned out to be a whole 'nother' story.
I sent out the applications like a good little boy. I hit all the districts in Austin metro, and all the counties within driving distance. Surely, I thought, my next teaching job will come as easy as my first. I mean, almost as easy, since I got that one in an phone interview sitting in my boxer shorts in a Boston summer sublease. But, yee-haw son, turns out life in the slightly bigger city than Athens ain't all soft butter and hot cornbread. First of all, there's 10,000 annual UT education school graduates who have no intention of leaving this city I've just discovered is the center of the universe, and they're all hotter than me. Secondly, two years of teaching experience in nowhere Georgia is not the job seeker's equivalent of a Visa Gold Card. And, most importantly, I knew that Austin was a one-year semi-retirement, and I wasn't going to convince any public school H.R. person that I was doing anything more than messing with Texas.
I already knew I was going to end up wherever the girl did. Somehow, over the course of my year of (T)Exile, we managed to hold it together. When my retirement money ran out, I had started subbing in the neighborhood daycare center. I took care of babies as little as 6 weeks old. I specialized in nap and snack, but mostly outside time. My buddies ended up in the same line of work as well. It seemed so odd at the time, but fast forward to when my own kids came, and later when I ended up running a school for kids ages 1-12, everything seemed to make a lot more sense.
When I tell the good stories about the year in Texas, it sounds like an extended frat party, and in a lot of ways it was. But really, we had to dance that final Fandango (ooh, after 'Lonesome Dove' get Netflix to send you 'Fandango' starring a much cooler than you think Kevin Costner). That last round at the Showdown Saloon on Guadalupe left me certain that going with Lisa to Boone, somewhere in the North Carolina mountains, was the only thing for this cowboy to do.
And somehow I knew they weren't going to have a teaching job for me either. But I knew that going after my own Clara Allen would be the only way for me to continue to be the Gus I had to be. And settling back into a nice, quiet newspaper job was the most practical way to be the Call I ought to be.

Schoolteacher?

So, I ended up teaching middle school in Carnesville, Georgia. If you've never heard of Carnesville, don't feel too bad, I never had either, and I'd been living within a half hour of it for 7 years in Athens. Really, the only thing you need to know about Carnesville is that when you pass the exit on 85, you're almost to Lake Hartwell, and Baty's Barbecue (Fri-Sat Only) just south of town is now closed, so don't get off the highway and go looking for it.
I'd finished enough beer in Athens, and I'd already pocketed a pair of teaching degrees, so it seemed that Growing Up was the only option short of a Ph.D., and I just ain't that kind of studier. I figured a state paycheck made more sense than going in on the bottom rung of the newspaper business, which, barring a Southern-Fried Seance so that Lewis could tell the publishers of the Atlanta Journal about his offer, is where I was headed at that point. I'd written one article for the Red & Black newspaper on campus. One article in 7 years -- my lone newspaper columnist basket was full of scrambled eggs.
But whether I was lucky or just practical in my schoolin', here I was, headed into my own middle school classroom. Now, there may be a story or two worth telling about this period on down the line, but suffice it to say for now that, like Lewis' exile in Chicago, for two years I was posted in the wilds of Franklin County on a reconnaissance mission of epic proportion. I discovered that rural East Georgia shared many things with rural West Georgia, and the greater proportion of these things leaned a little more to the Right than your humble narrator. The night before the Super Bowl of 1995, me and a couple boys decided that we were too big for The East to hold us anymore. We were gonna have to move to Texas.
Now most people pulled in by the gravity of Texas are lusting after that dusty land of cowboy hats and J.R. Ewing, but we were pulled to a different Texas. I must admit, that we were originally pulled to the Great Barrier Reef and kangaroo-coated Australia, but it turned out that my matched contributions to the Georgia state employees' pension were only going to pay for the first four letters of the dream. At 25 and with $3,000 in the bank, I was retiring to Austin to live down the road from Governor George W. Bush.
It was a tearful farewell from Franklin County Middle School, but it was time. This preceded the dropping of the shroud of standardized testing upon our public schools, and I was already rubbing against the conformist grain of the System. I loved those kids too much to teach them the way the gubb-ment said was best.
And just when it seemed like everything was falling into place for the Big Plan, and just when I was about to trade in my teacher tie for a Texas t-shirt, this chick from Virginia Tech stopped by with friends for an evening in Athens. Who would think that it's possible to fall for a Hokie chick? They weren't even in the SEC. For Herschel's sake, they weren't even in the ACC then! But fall I did, and it was going to land me in more than just trouble, it was going to eventually land me in Appalachia...and back in the newspaper business.