60 replies to this topic

[TVCasualty]

I guess it's a little easier to turn your back on it if your front is facing endless backcountry skiing in/near the Tetons and you don't like living alone in the country in TN where it can get kind of hot and humid in the Summer. Her boyfriend isn't leaving those mountains no matter what since he's lived there most of his life and is credited with a bunch of first ascents and all that shit so his whole identity is wrapped up in the place.

 

Oh, and for those who may be interested there is a whole lot of badass whitewater to run nearby and in the surrounding region, all the way up to class-VI.

[PJammer24]

I guess it's a little easier to turn your back on it if your front is facing endless backcountry skiing in/near the Tetons and you don't like living alone in the country in TN where it can get kind of hot and humid in the Summer. Her boyfriend isn't leaving those mountains no matter what since he's lived there most of his life and is credited with a bunch of first ascents and all that shit so his whole identity is wrapped up in the place.

 

Oh, and for those who may be interested there is a whole lot of badass whitewater to run nearby and in the surrounding region, all the way up to class-VI.

I would love to buy this spot if only as a place to explore caves, search for native American artifacts, and store my whitewater kayak....

[Alder Logs]

The missing $21 trillion and Tennessee farms?  What?

 

[Direct Link]

[TVCasualty]

An hour and nine minutes to establish some sort of connection between TN farms and $21 trillion?

 

Is there a Cliffs Notes version?

[Alder Logs]

I think it's about ten minutes in, but I also think that whole interview has good info for many of us.  I'm glad I found it.

[TVCasualty]

I'm just pretty burnt at the moment, long day of frustrating detours.

 

Something you mentioned about plans and first shots in another thread comes to mind; I had to take a freakin' clothes dryer apart today in middle of bunch of loads (Really? Today?? You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!), but I got it running again. Before that I tried to use a garden hose and the nozzle had been driven over or something since when I turned on the water it shot out of a long crack in the handle into my face and all over my shirt. It was kind of cold outside, since it's almost Winter. Been one of those days where so much crazy shit goes sideways that you just laugh when the next one breaks or smacks you upside the head.

 

I'll check the video tomorrow as I'm crashing in a few. Hope my toothbrush doesn't break.

[Alder Logs]

For a generally saintly old fart, I do shout, "FUCK," rather often.  What saves me is seeing that guy do that.

[Soliver]

Looks like a hella-cool spot - caves fascinate me ... too bad most of the good ones are in TN, "Child of God" territory . . . (paddle faster, I hear banjos) . . . 

 

I'm down for an acre - probably worth it just to lose my face with TV some fine day.

 

:)

 

soliver

[TVCasualty]

It's definitely a BYO friends kind of region.

 

 

I'm down for an acre - probably worth it just to lose my face with TV some fine day.

 

 

It would be SO worth it. I've become a pretty good facilitator of such experiences, mainly for first-timers. And taking a trip around the farm with those who are already experienced is a lot easier (on me) and more relaxed.

[Soliver]

It would be SO worth it. I've become a pretty good facilitator of such experiences, mainly for first-timers. And taking a trip around the farm with those who are already experienced is a lot easier (on me) and more relaxed.

 

Same here, but at the homestead - some first-timers, some who experimented in college & got too old for access (mostly the latter).

 

Me & the old lady did a few grams of TC Saturday night, laid out in the driveway with blankets & watched the meteor showers - awesome & precipitated the realization that "fuck, I gotta get more of these going," precipitating a return to the homestead / mycotopia to see what's new  ....

 

:)

 

soliver

[TVCasualty]

About those banjos...

 

 

I have a funny story about the kid in Deliverance who played the banjo on the bridge, since I really was living around the corner from where the story took place (along where western N. Carolina and TN meet, more or less) and they'd hired locals for some of the "inbred hillbillies" parts. Hard to find that look in Hollywood, I guess.

 

That kid on the bridge couldn't play banjo, so in the movie it's someone else's arms reaching around him to play it. But he sure looked right for the part. I guess this means that somewhere on the planet there's someone who has a movie credit for being the banjo-reacharound guy in Deliverance. Though I might leave that one off my filmography, if it were me.

 

Anyway, since he wasn't an actor (or couldn't find any other work after Deliverance) nor a real musician he had a job as a maintenance guy at a nearby rafting outpost where I sometimes ran merc trips ("mercenary" trips, i.e. for companies you don't work for when the one you do doesn't have any for you).

 

So I'm there to run a trip and a busload of the tour group they needed extra guides for rolls up and unloads a bunch of insufferable geeks from the suburbs (geeks=what typical rafting customers are called behind their backs, even if not from the suburbs). A few made the obligatory jokes about hearing banjos (uh-oh! hahaha!). Almost everyone makes that joke when they get there. A bunch of them laughed (almost all of them laugh at it, too). One guy started humming the opening bars of dueling banjos to even more laughter and as they were all enjoying a good laugh about the apparently-amusing implication that there might be a hillbilly gang-rape on their rafting trip the kid who pretended to play the banjo in the very movie they're funnin' about steps out of the raft barn right in front of them.

 

They all see him at the same time and instantly go silent, stop dead in their tracks, their eyes get wide, and they all start looking at each other with the funniest looks on their faces I've ever seen, sort of a mix of "Holy shit!" "WTF?!" and "Is this a fucking joke?" all mashed together. No one wanted to be the first to say anything and I barely held it together until I got behind a bus and then lost it. It was one of those rare Perfect Storm kind of moments, and I still laugh out loud whenever I remember it. They didn't end up in my raft so I don't know how things went after I took off to hide behind the bus to laugh or what they thought after the initial encounter, but what I saw was good enough for me.

[Alder Logs]

Oh my fuckin' gawd, what a great story!!!

[Elementalist]

It's in the heart of O Brother, Where Are Thou? country (I roll up to people's houses and find them pickin' or fiddlin' on their porches occasionally, which is great), so some of the characters you'll meet are some of the nicest and most interesting folks you'll meet anywhere and some are ...not.
 
While the neighbors around this particular farm are sparse, weird, and unpleasant it's still usually an improvement over city life where the neighbors are often densely-packed all around us, weird, and unpleasant.

Yeah its the interesting/ nice people you meet that make life worth living!

[Soliver]

We went rafting in TN - Sevier County or thereabouts - about three years ago.  I used to guide on the Rio Grande in a different lifetime & struck up a conversation with our guide ... the last thing you want is for your guide to assume you're a civilian ... anywhoo, she said the rafts get shot at on a regular basis by local fishermen who don't appreciate the tourist incursions to their fishin' holes.  That's ... so fucked up.  I've lived in lots of rural areas, but the backwoods of TN is just a different world. 

 

In my current location, we've managed to discourage local attention with regular heavy 2nd amendment rights celebrations ("orgies of gunfire," as I like to call them).  The fake security cams probably don't hurt either.  I've never been a 'local' anywhere ever, so I don't really know what it's like to "have the run of the place" only to be denied access, but property rights are pretty much the same nationwide.  Some people are just harder to reach than others ...

 

Guiding a raft is an odd job.  Civilians don't understand basic physics apparently.  I had more than one customer looking for their car while we were unpacking, figuring that we'd "come full circle."  I mean - how do you explain to a grown-assed man or woman that water only moves downhill in a natural setting?  Or that deer don't matriculate into elk after a certain point in their growth?  That said, there's probably several hundred 'geeks' who now believe ungulates use their antlers to catch fish (what else could they be good for?) thanks to good 'ol Soliver's sound world-view.  Thems were good times  :)

 

soliver

[TVCasualty]

I've never been a 'local' anywhere ever,

I can relate, though one day I had the realization that I was looking at it backwards. I think a high dose of fungi was involved. Anyway, while beholding the dumpscape of the city I lived in at the time, it all suddenly looked so ...temporary.

 

The electric lines strung up on poles all over the place are insane, frankly. We've literally just run extension cords all over the planet, and hung most of them on sticks. That's not built to last in the sense that the Coliseum was built to last, to put it mildly. It reminded me of Edward Abbey's observation that our society looks like an invasion from Mars.

 

That was when I flipped it around; I am the local, everywhere and always. This is MY home planet, but it's been invaded and (temporarily!) occupied by extraterrestrial with poor aesthetic design skills and a hard-core fetish for plastic.

[Soliver]

That was when I flipped it around; I am the local, everywhere and always. This is MY home planet, but it's been invaded and (temporarily!) occupied by extraterrestrial with poor aesthetic design skills and a hard-core fetish for plastic.

 

 

That's probably a more healthy way of looking at it.  All these years spent trying to 'fit in' somewhere has me sorta thinking of myself as a sort of demented sovereign nation of weird.  Certainly is easier that way.

 

:)

 

soliver

[TVCasualty]

I should mention that I also formally declared myself to be an Autonomous Region, bordered by the extent of my reach.

 

But that's only because I have so far been unable to commandeer any old British Naval platforms (yet!): https://narratively....ity-of-sealand/

[Alder Logs]

I feel like I own the whole universe.  Many ignorant people think I don't.   I wish they'd just get off my lawn.

[TVCasualty]

Your right to sprawl your lawn all over the Universe ends where my Autonomous Region begins!

 

It seems my whole life has been consumed by keeping an endless incursion of creeping lawns out of my Region. That sentence might even actually mean something, but I'm not sure.

 

But anyway, I guess I need to get back to my ongoing War on Christmas, though I don't expect to win and expel it from my Region this year, either.

[Alder Logs]

The best part of Christmas for me is coming on Thursday.   I indulge my neighbors' rituals to a small degree, and they notice there are no presents from me under the tree, though I might put some practical things like tools in some stockings (this year it's 4in1 screwdrivers and work gloves).   My lifestyle is what is known as karma yoga, which involves giving all year long, and like being happy, it's for no reason. 

 

BTW, I like most of my lawn to include as many trees as can be put there naturally, where you can climb hundreds of feet up to find a place to sprawl.  The humans I wouldn't be inclined to kick off the universal patch would be wild humans, so you're going to be okay there.  Sand and rock, seas, lakes, and rivers are okay yard art too. 

Edited by Alder Logs, 24 December 2019 - 11:51 AM.