So. Georgia sucked.
We stayed at the house of people who do not have soap in their downstairs bathroom.
No soap in the bathroom, not even a tiny, hard, cracked sliver sitting in its own slime on the side of the sink. Who lives like that?
Not to mention, their puppy peed on the air mattress as it was being filled, and I was handed a regular bath towel to mop it up, and when I asked if they had any bleach or anything like that, the answer was no.
No bleach, no cleaning stuff. Nada.
When they served us grilled brats, it was with slices of white bread and nothing else. No plates, no silverware. No paper towels, not even a dish towel. I shook my wet hands off over the kitchen floor, after I washed them with dish soap.
We found no houses. Apparently, all the tankers moving down there are snatching up the rental properties as soon as they come on the market. We drove around for hours, finding nothing but heat and heat and more heat and swamp and pine woods and trailers and more trailers and just when you wouldn't expect it, a coven of trailers hidden in the pines, with a Confederate flag proudly waving over the trash.
It was awesome.
I got so desperate to write, that I sat in the living room, with the mind blowingly unnecessarily violent, grade B movie "Hunt to Kill" playing at decibel blasting levels right in front of me. I wrote on the couch with the puppy wiggling at my elbow, a child on a bike at my feet, bumping the tire into my knees (yes, in the living room). I wrote on, amid the occasional angry, drunken shouts from her father and the constant barrage of insults that the father and mother directed at each other, such as idiot, moron, bitch, lazy, and occasionally slapping one another.
I actually got stuff done; I actually wrote under those conditions.
So, the movers come day after tomorrow, the stuff will be packed and gone in two days. We'll stay after that, camping on the air mattress, cleaning and packing, and then leave a few days after that.
Either we'll rent a house from here, sight unseen, or we'll stay in a hotel, our stuff in storage, and look for a place after we get down there.
Oh, and I got my period the night before the drive, so that just topped the weekend off. Nothing like driving around for hours on end in those conditions.
"I thought we'd be so irritated at one another we wouldn't even be speaking," admitted Keith, when we were a half an hour from what is no longer our home.
"I know!" I said, in wonder. "I thought so too. Just think, this is just one of many, many moves our future has in store for us, moves where we'll be irritated and crabby with one another, and stressed out of our minds. Won't it be great?"
I'm keeping my jogging stuff back when we pack and I'm jogging, come hell, high water or hurricane, every god damn day until we have to drive the eight hours back down into the sweaty arm pit of the south, where we'll stay in a Motel 6 with two dogs and dirty clothes and no place to live.
It's gonna be great.
