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.