hospital ⦠theyâll never wake up in scary places with even scarier bedmates ⦠they wonât have to run from some drug-crazed freak ⦠and theyâll always have a job as long as Wal-Mart and Dunkinâ Donuts are in business.
Sadly, despite all the good work being done by Chuck Norris and his âKick Drugs Out of Americaâ campaign, weâll never completely stop people from using drugs.
Even rednecks get hooked on drugs every now and then. One of the most damaging is uncoated aspirin, which leaves a lot of long-distance truckers with gruesome stomach pains.
Weâve also known some people who were hopeless Coke addicts but recovered after therapy at the RC Rehab Center over in Potato Ridge.
And of course, the middle-aged redneckâs drug of choice is Preparation H.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Itâs a plain fact that drug users canât keep a job.
Whenever we want to impress that fact on our kids, we just point to Herbie the Hippie.
Herbieâs never held down a regular job in his whole life. Heâs kind of a sad figure, really, all alone in the world.
He used to live in Minnesota. Then, in 1969, he heard about the Woodstock Festival and decided to drive to it. But Herbieâs brain was so fogged by marijuana that he couldnât read a road mapâand he ended up in Woodstock, Georgia, just outside Atlanta.
Well, Herbie kept driving around looking for the other Woodstock until his pink VW microbus blew an engine here in Chicken Neck, Tennessee.
When Herbie first arrived in town he had a long ponytail, an earring, and a little mustache. A lot of people mistook him for Pauline Perkins.
But now heâs got a full beard and has been here for nigh onto thirty years, marooned kinda like Gilligan.
Herbie lives in a little abandoned fishing shack out beside Lost Gizzard Lake and grows his own vegetables plus a little âwacky terbackyâ for his personal consumption.
Sheriff Gardner knows about Herbie the Hippieâs illegal crop, but lets it slide because Herbie never bothers anybody. Potheadsâunlike crack headsâainât violent.
In fact, the only trouble weâve ever seen out of a marijuana addict happened over in the town of Potato Ridge, thirty miles from here.
This red-eyed, long-haired dude went up to an old woman in a supermarket parking lot, pointed a silver-plated hairbrush at her, and said very slowly, âOkay, lady, keep the cashâjust give me all your Twinkies!â
Surefire Cussinâ Remedies
Ivory. Camay. Dial. Irish Spring. Tide. Leviâs thirty-four-length leather belt.
Huntinâ and Fishinâ
Thereâs an old country saying: âWomen do the cookinâ, men do the hookinâ.â A manâs place ainât in the kitchen, itâs on the riverbank.
As soon as your boys get old enough to toddle, take them fishing. Itâs not just entertainment, itâs a survival skill. One of these days they might be out of work and need to fish to feed their families.
Hank Williams Jr. says in one song: âWe can skin a buck, and we can run a trot line. / Country folk can survive.â Thatâs why every daddy needs to take his kids fishingâeven when his wife gets mad because the roofâs still not patched and itâs about to rain.
Take your children deer and rabbit hunting, too, especially the boys. You donât actually have to shoot the animals. Just getting out in the woods amongst all the wildlife and trees is healthy for kids.
Rufus McKinney goes hunting all the time, and the only thing heâs ever killed in his life is a six-pack. He ainât even taken along any ammunition since the drunken day he shot at a buck and bagged his left foot.
Even more shocking, Rufus woke up to find Wiley Watkins trying to mount his foot on the den wallâwith Rufus still attached to it.
When Nature Calls Collect
Unlike Rufus, most rednecks figure the best thing