Held Hostage At Home

Go Gators…

As I’ve mentioned many times before, we live on a small island located on the Georgia coast. Eight months out of the year the weather is glorious—shorts and flip flops being the normal dress code. Two months in the middle of summer are ridiculously hot, and two months in the winter are what people from Wisconsin would call “cool”, but by and large we are blessed in the weather department.

One of the first things you learn when you move to a resort location like St. Simons Island is the necessity to avoid the tourist crowds in order to preserve your island induced mental sanity. One day your driving around in your shorts and flip flops minding your own business in normal light traffic, and the next day your caught up in the ‘traffic jam from hell” and find yourself losing your mind and screaming your head off in a fit of Atlanta-style road rage.

Identifying the periods of high tourism is fairly easy—Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day, and most weekends in the summer months. That still leaves plenty of time for us to enjoy the amenities of our island without standing in lines or otherwise participating in the vacations of a bunch of uncouth people that “just don’t get out much.”

Unfortunately, this weekend is one of “those” weekends—perhaps THE WORST WEEKEND of all. This weekend we will be inundated with revelers who are either attending or celebrating the GEORGIA-FLORIDA football game that will be played this Saturday in Alltel Stadium just down the road in Jacksonville.

God help us all.

They call it “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”

I say that description, impossible as it seems, is an understatement.

The words “Cocktail Party” implies a civil, mature social gathering, but that is not an accurate description of the behavior attributed to our weekend guests (they started arriving here on Wednesday.)

More accurately, the revelry surrounding the Georgia-Florida game is more like a fraternity toga party for otherwise well behaved adults. (Think of the scenes in the movie “Animal House.”)

I think that living on St. Simons on a Georgia-Florida weekend, for a Georgia Tech man, would be similar to the emotions experienced by a Baptist preacher invited to eat dinner in a whorehouse. I’m a Georgia Tech man and I’m not talking preachers like Jimmy Swaggart here in my comparison either.

These people are crazy.

Every single one of them shows up in town with a pocket full of money and an attitude. They hit the grocery store, the liquor store, and then proceed to hoot and holler and bark “Go you hairy Dogs” and stagger and stumble and drool and pick fights and generally make a nuscience and public menace of themselves.

That describes the men—the women are even WORSE.

Really, unless you are a card carrying member of this sociopathic crowd and share their fanatical football allegiances, on Georgia-Florida weekend you learn to AVOID public places like bars, restaurants, and public roadways in order to protect your physical health and mental sanity.

My girl Pat experienced her first Georgia-Florida weekend last year and I spent most of Friday night trying to keep her from instigating a fight that I would be expected to finish for her. Funny thing, Pat gets more than a little annoyed sitting at a bar when the same woman leans on her and bumps into her and elbows her obliviously for the sixtieth time in fifteen minutes. Of course a woman that is so drunk that she can’t feel her own feet can’t be expected to react to an angry woman tapping her on the shoulder saying “excuse me—could you stop leaning on my boyfriend?”

I’ve made plans to avoid those kinds of situations in the future. Instead of GOING with the flow, I intend to AVOID the flow entirely.

Pat and I conducted our normal weekend ritual last night, having a few drinks down at our favorite bar—Marsh Point—and dining at our favorite restaurant—Blackwater Grill. Having already done our grocery shopping for the weekend, we will barricade ourselves into our condo today and not emerge again until Sunday night when we’ll spend a few minutes picking up empty beer bottles and discarded fast food packaging left in our parking lot by the swarming herds of drunken morons.

I wish I could E-mail some candid pictures of all of our guests to their employers on Monday morning.

A few folks might be looking for work as a result.