And I Are a Gator Turd

Remember the good old days, when people like me--the important people who really matter--were more worried about hurricanes than being bitten in the ass by rogue alligators? Me, too. Here's a passage I wrote back in 2004:

Everybody thought Camille was a big deal until Andrew came along. Andrew tore the living ass out of Dade County. Maybe Camille was less damaging because the eye came ashore in a dump called Pass Christian, Mississippi.

I feel safe in calling it a dump because, hey, what are the odds that anyone in Pass Christian has a computer?

Believe it or not, someone left an angry comment, so evidently Pass Christian has the Internet now, or more likely, a Pass Christian resident was visiting the United States as a foreign exchange student and used a computer at a public library. Where he wondered what all the shelves full of papery things in hard covers were for.

I don't remember what the comment was; I've deleted all my comments before a certain date. Something about how I wasn't a big man just because I had more than five teeth and had ridden an escalator.

Anyway, Pass Christian made the news again today, in a very limited manner. Says the "What's Happening" section of The Sun Herald, one of those papers from a region so desolate the editors are afraid to alienate potential readers by claiming to be published in a particular city, "Gator Bait Story Time, 10 a.m., Pass Christian Library. Susan Gregory and her pet alligator read stories, teach fishing tricks. Details: 452-xxxx."

This is a chick I have to meet.

Do you know how hard it is to convince a typical American woman to let you keep an alligator in the house? I mean a normal woman, not a tattooed mall rat who calls herself a Goth and thinks she's a vampire. It's damn hard. So Susan is a real find. Guys, remember those mail-order anacondas I mentioned a while back? Here's a lady who won't bat an eye when the UPS truck pulls up. She'll be like, "Put it in the garage next to the cobras."

I don't know exactly what a "fishing trick" is. Maybe she pulls a bass out of a hat.

I'll bet she's hot, too. She probably does the show in a T-back bikini and pumps.

"What's Happening"...that reminds me of the TV show with Dee and Raj and Rerun.

Oh God. Oh God. Someone put a hose in my hear and flush out the image of Shirley Hemphill in a bikini.

I can't believe they'll let you take a live alligator into a library in Mississippi. When I was in law school, the librarians wouldn't even let me bring potato chips. Good thing I rarely went in there.

The story says Sue and her pal "read stories, teach fishing tricks," but it doesn't lay out the division of labor. Maybe Sue reads the stories and the gator helps her with the big words.

Looks like another Floridian has fallen victim to the gator munchies. According to the website Ocala.com, "A Dunnellon teen fishing in a shallow, swampy area of the Florida Highlands was bitten by an alligator late Monday afternoon."

See if you can spot the problem with that sentence. Yes, that's right. The Florida "Highlands" are shallow and swampy. I wonder what the lowlands are like. I guess that would be the Gulf of Mexico.

This kid had two puncture wounds, and the story says he "was transferred Monday night to Ocala Regional Medical Center, where he received antibiotics. His injury was non-life threatening, and he was not expected to lose his arm."

This underscores one of the horrors of rural living. And that, of course, is the high likelihood of receiving emergency treatment from a graduate of a foreign medical school. Yes, Dr. Sathyavagiswarantandoorikebab, I have no doubt that in Bangladesh you would amputate in order to avoid exhausting the country's only tube of Neosporin, but here in the US, we like to give tiny puncture wounds a chance to heal before we get out the flint axe.

You know you're in trouble when you ask the doctor if your son is going to live, and he says, "Depends. What caste is he?"

As usual, we have a fun quote from local officials. "FWC Officer Kat Kelley said the gator probably thought Muller was a fish or piece of meat and let go when it realized its mistake."

"Mistake?" Technically, a person IS a piece of meat. The mistake was grabbing one too big to swallow.

Here's more: "A trapper contacted by wildlife officials Monday night set a baited hook of beef lung and planned to stay overnight in the swamp looking for the gator."

Where do you go when you want to buy a beef lung? Because I think I want one. I want to put it under some couch cushions in a hotel lobby and get the Guinness record for "world's largest whoopee cushion."

I have seen some disgusting stuff at the local grocery store. Tripe. Pig ears, complete with earwax. And of course, the beef testicle "family 12-pak." But I have yet to see a lung.

One more quote: "The unprovoked bite rate of alligators is about one bite for every 2.4 million residents, Kelley said. She said about 7,000 nuisance alligators are trapped in Florida every year."

Seven THOUSAND? If that's true, shouldn't alligator shoes be a lot less expensive? And where are we sending them? My vote: Pass Christian. They're apparently quite welcome there.

We now know the unprovoked bite statistics. But what about provoked bites? What about guys named Earl who watch The Crocodile Hunter on stolen cable and then go outside and poke sleeping gators with a yardstick? Is there a separate database for that? And if you get bitten by aggravating the crap out of a gator, do they still relocate it? Wouldn't it make more sense to relocate Earl?

What's one more trailer in Pass Christian?

That's all I feel like writing today. I've learned that the secret of gator-blogging is to conserve your material.

I'll sit back now and wait for the lynching party with Mississippi plates.