Ideal Bite

True story... I lived in the NW corner of Alabama for 3 months while my then-boyfriend tried to finish a book that he probably still doesn't have an outline for. It was like a study-abroad experience. It definitely felt like a movie, with crazy Southern accents and ideologies (and remember, I am from Atlanta so I promise you they were pretty damn extreme). The craziest part, though, was all these stories that the old timers had, and somehow the press wasn't powerful enough (or brave enough) to bring them to light.
The one I remember most clearly is the case of a certain big bad awful company dumping toxic sludge from a PVC plant into a river. Their scientist supposedly tested the water all the time and it was just fine. But when a local non-profit did the test, they found levels of carcinogenic chems at 3000x the allowable level. When they put a fish in the water in a walled-off area, it only took him 5 minutes to start swimming side ways. Of course the true old-timers will tell you that they saw three-eyed fish in that there river before it was fenced off for health reasons. I believe them.
Humans are so damn clever, you know? But clever to a fault. We've figured out how to make things that can't be destroyed (genius if we actually kept a shower curtain for 1,000 years in our family). HOPEFULLY we will soon shift that cleverness to the right direction, like getting off oil and returning to what is really SMART...connections between land and people.
-Jen... off to drink a beer. That was intense, dude...