Functionally ReTodded

For those that don’t know, I live in a quiet little suburb about half an hour from downtown Atlanta.

It is a meteorological fact that it doesn’t snow here much.

It’s a God given absolute that most people in this town can’t drive worth shit.  I blame that as much on cellphones and makeup application as I do the fact that all of the  illegals undocumented worker visitors, that do our city’s house painting drive white vans with no windows carrying roughly 138 extension ladders tied on with duct tape.  Combining that cumbersome load with the fact that they come from places like Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and other tropical locales where snow is rare and driving in snowy conditions is rarer, and you get a city of panic, gridlock and uninsured motoristic insanity.

What you may not know is that folks in these here parts get right nutty when local weatherman Holden McGroyn has the audacity to stand up in front of his green screen, point somewhere and use the words frozen and precipitation in the same sentence.

So yesterday at about 3pm or so, I started hearing mutterings around the lobby about the dreaded S word.

No.  Not sadomasochism.  Not Scientology either.  I’m talking about SNOW.

It’s quite funny really.  Once word starts to spread, it’s like everyone turns into a seven year old kid with ADD and Tourette syndrome.  Zero gets done the second the word snow is mentioned.

So I headed home last night to everyone saying “good luck getting in tomorrow” or “Hope you don’t get stuck.”

Whatever.  There hasn’t been a semi-bonified snowstorm here since SnowJam ’93.  (See?  Snow of any consequence is so rare here that when it snows, we name it something).

So you watch the local news, and all you see is hicks flocking to the local Blue or Orange big box store where they buy all of the generators to sell on the black market.  Then they hit the local grocery like crazy folks the day after Thanksgiving, only instead of Tickle Me Elmo they want all of the milk, bread, bottled water and canned food that the store can stock.

It’s retarded.  I contend that in the last 15 years, there hasn’t been a snowstorm in Atlanta that a family of four couldn’t have survived by eating only what was on the bottom shelf in their pantry for the duration.  And besides, if I were truly snowbound for a period requiring a dozen loaves of bread, a generator and 12 gallons of milk, I assure you that I would skip the four major food groups altogether and head right to the beer section.

(In college, we had a fairly big snow/ice storm back in 1988.  Nearly the entire town shut down.  No grocery stores were open. No classes were scheduled.  Hell, even the restaurants were closed.  But every liquor store in town was running a generator to keep power in the store, and the one near us had a line of thirsty people outside of it that made you think Springsteen tickets were being given away inside).

So what did I do on the way home you might ask?

Hit the Home Depot of course.  You can fuck off if you think I, FRT, am going to be caught unprepared.

The only problem was that they were all out of bottled water, generators and kerosene heaters.  So I did what any sufficiently panicked snow-tard my age would do:

I bought 71 rolls of duct tape, 1200 Fantasy blue petunias and a John Deere riding lawn tractor.

Happy trapped in the snow fuckos!!