ancona
Praying Mantis
Those who visit PM Bug on a regular basis already know my dumbass, mouth-breathing hardcore, redneck neighbors. These people are just a half a step up the evolutionary ladder from bacteria, possessing barely the minimum amount of brainpower between them to stay alive, and then, I sometimes question that. As a logical being, fully self-aware and sentient, I tend to be a linear thinker. My ability to think a situation through to its natural conclusion is a skill which I take for granted……that is until I see my idiot neighbors outdo themselves time and time again.
This weekend as it turns out, was to be no different. Friday night was quiet and uneventful, as I sat on my porch smoking a nice Cuban cigar and knocking back some bottles of suds with my very good buddy Scott. We were about finished with the first bottle of the evening when the Clampetts came ‘draggin up in their piece-of-shitmobile, with Hank Williams Jr. blaring out of the windows. Knowing full well that these idiots were half drunk already, we sat back and waited.
Our wait turned out to be much shorter than usual as Jethro came walking over to the porch, [something my neighbors never do] and says, “How do neighbor, I was wonderin if y’all got a snatchin’ chain or sump’n what I could use to jerk a truck out a ditch”? Intrigued, I asked him what happened. “Well, it’s like this, we was turtlin’ [redneck for turtle fishing] down to the bottom of Clearlake ‘an the truck starts a slidin’ down the edge of the ditch”. “Time we got to ‘er, she was up to the floorboards. When my boy tried to drive ‘er outta there, he dug in down axle deep, so now we gotta snatch ‘er up outta there”. I look over at Scott, who is desperately working to stifle a laugh, then back over to Jethro. He’s covered in stinky ass ditch mud, wet from the waist down and barefoot. I tell him I’ll drive over to the shop and I’ll let him use some tow straps we have, and we’ll meet him at the bottom of Clearlake at the turn in.
We pull up on the mud hole and see two guys trying to figure out what to do with an F-250 that’s buried so deep in the mud that the doors can’t be opened. Apparently, while Jethro was at my house borrowing straps, these two geniuses decided the truck was stuck because there wasn’t any weight in the back, so they piled a bunch of good sized rocks from the rip-rap at the culvert, causing the thing to sink another foot or so. I could tell this was going to be good, so we backed down the head about thirty feet, sat back on the tailgate and popped open another bottle of suds.
We didn’t have to wait long for the fun to begin.
Jethro ran down the slope to the water edge and started to cuss out the two knuckle-heads who buried the truck even deeper, with his wife right behind him doing the same. After a few minutes of this, Jethro walks back to the truck and grabs the straps and a long, rusty-ass logging chain. The two idiots who put the rocks in the trucks bed were designated mud rats, and were dispatched to hook the ends of the sorry looking chain to the trucks frame so Jethro could snatch the truck out of the mud. Since the truck was so deep, they had to hook the chain up blind, by forcing their arms through about a foot of mud to feel their way to the frame. After about ten minutes of cussing and mud wallowing, it appeared that they had secured the chain and were setting up to attach the strap to it.
Jethro backed a little closer to the hole, hooked the strap to his hitch rack then got in the truck to start pulling. When he got the line good and tense he gunned the engine, throwing mud, rocks and sand at the two idiots who were now scrambling through the mud bog to get away from the pelting stones, and cracking the windshield on the stuck pick-up. The truck in the mud went nowhere. Scott and I were laughing our asses off.
Jethro gets out of his truck to look at the scene and try and solve his puzzle. His tiny brain just couldn’t compute what to do. What he decided to do next was hilarious. Jethro used all of his brainpower, all of his years of experience and his vast base of knowledge about physics to plan this next great move. Thinking that all he needs is a little more speed to put a nice jerk on the line, he attaches a second strap to the first, giving him twenty five more feet of running room. Jethro the genius signals for dumbass #1 and dumbass #2 to “Git back now, cuz I’m a gonna’ yank this fucker out”!
What happened next will go down in local history as an epic “Hey y’all, watch this”! moment, and the tale will probably be regaled for years to come.
Jethro gets in his truck, which is perpendicular to the roadway, guns the engine and pops the clutch at about 3000 rpm. The truck lunges forward accelerating rapidly toward the road edge. The straps jump up off the ground as they go taught, and the entire front axle of the bogged down truck comes flying out of the hole. Jethro, who was apparently caught off guard, is unable to process all of this information at once, forgets to take his foot off the gas, and ends up nose first in the ditch on the opposite side of the road at about a 35% angle. The axle, complete with fully inflated tires refusing to defy the laws of physics, bounces two times and smashes in to the back of Jethro’s truck with enough force to fold his tailgate completely in half and literally shear back the whole right quarter panel and shatter the back window.
I laughed so hard I do believe I peed my pants just a little bit.
By this time a small crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle, and they were on the ground laughing, every single one of them. Jethro’s useless idiot buddies came running over and met him at the head of the ditch. It was starting to get pretty dark by now, and to add insult to injury, my idiot neighbor had to ask me for a ride home, since both of his vehicles were now completely out of commission. Good neighbor that I am, I helped him roll up the straps he borrowed and loaded them in to my truck. I let him, his wife and two idiots ride back in the back of the truck. I even gave them each a beer. He expressed concern about someone stealing his vehicles during the night, but I turned to him with a straight face and said, “I think they’ll be safe for the night right where they are.
When Scott and I got back to the porch, we resumed our evening of suds and stories but kept laughing from time to time as Jethro’s friends began stopping by one by one as the story spread, and he recounted his adventure. By Saturday morning, the police had apparently taken interest in what must have been a puzzling sight for them during patrol, and the vehicles had been taken out of the mud and dropped at the impound yard.
While my neighbors may be some stone-age looking, knuckle dragging mouth breathers, they sure are good for some laughs on Friday nights.
This weekend as it turns out, was to be no different. Friday night was quiet and uneventful, as I sat on my porch smoking a nice Cuban cigar and knocking back some bottles of suds with my very good buddy Scott. We were about finished with the first bottle of the evening when the Clampetts came ‘draggin up in their piece-of-shitmobile, with Hank Williams Jr. blaring out of the windows. Knowing full well that these idiots were half drunk already, we sat back and waited.
Our wait turned out to be much shorter than usual as Jethro came walking over to the porch, [something my neighbors never do] and says, “How do neighbor, I was wonderin if y’all got a snatchin’ chain or sump’n what I could use to jerk a truck out a ditch”? Intrigued, I asked him what happened. “Well, it’s like this, we was turtlin’ [redneck for turtle fishing] down to the bottom of Clearlake ‘an the truck starts a slidin’ down the edge of the ditch”. “Time we got to ‘er, she was up to the floorboards. When my boy tried to drive ‘er outta there, he dug in down axle deep, so now we gotta snatch ‘er up outta there”. I look over at Scott, who is desperately working to stifle a laugh, then back over to Jethro. He’s covered in stinky ass ditch mud, wet from the waist down and barefoot. I tell him I’ll drive over to the shop and I’ll let him use some tow straps we have, and we’ll meet him at the bottom of Clearlake at the turn in.
We pull up on the mud hole and see two guys trying to figure out what to do with an F-250 that’s buried so deep in the mud that the doors can’t be opened. Apparently, while Jethro was at my house borrowing straps, these two geniuses decided the truck was stuck because there wasn’t any weight in the back, so they piled a bunch of good sized rocks from the rip-rap at the culvert, causing the thing to sink another foot or so. I could tell this was going to be good, so we backed down the head about thirty feet, sat back on the tailgate and popped open another bottle of suds.
We didn’t have to wait long for the fun to begin.
Jethro ran down the slope to the water edge and started to cuss out the two knuckle-heads who buried the truck even deeper, with his wife right behind him doing the same. After a few minutes of this, Jethro walks back to the truck and grabs the straps and a long, rusty-ass logging chain. The two idiots who put the rocks in the trucks bed were designated mud rats, and were dispatched to hook the ends of the sorry looking chain to the trucks frame so Jethro could snatch the truck out of the mud. Since the truck was so deep, they had to hook the chain up blind, by forcing their arms through about a foot of mud to feel their way to the frame. After about ten minutes of cussing and mud wallowing, it appeared that they had secured the chain and were setting up to attach the strap to it.
Jethro backed a little closer to the hole, hooked the strap to his hitch rack then got in the truck to start pulling. When he got the line good and tense he gunned the engine, throwing mud, rocks and sand at the two idiots who were now scrambling through the mud bog to get away from the pelting stones, and cracking the windshield on the stuck pick-up. The truck in the mud went nowhere. Scott and I were laughing our asses off.
Jethro gets out of his truck to look at the scene and try and solve his puzzle. His tiny brain just couldn’t compute what to do. What he decided to do next was hilarious. Jethro used all of his brainpower, all of his years of experience and his vast base of knowledge about physics to plan this next great move. Thinking that all he needs is a little more speed to put a nice jerk on the line, he attaches a second strap to the first, giving him twenty five more feet of running room. Jethro the genius signals for dumbass #1 and dumbass #2 to “Git back now, cuz I’m a gonna’ yank this fucker out”!
What happened next will go down in local history as an epic “Hey y’all, watch this”! moment, and the tale will probably be regaled for years to come.
Jethro gets in his truck, which is perpendicular to the roadway, guns the engine and pops the clutch at about 3000 rpm. The truck lunges forward accelerating rapidly toward the road edge. The straps jump up off the ground as they go taught, and the entire front axle of the bogged down truck comes flying out of the hole. Jethro, who was apparently caught off guard, is unable to process all of this information at once, forgets to take his foot off the gas, and ends up nose first in the ditch on the opposite side of the road at about a 35% angle. The axle, complete with fully inflated tires refusing to defy the laws of physics, bounces two times and smashes in to the back of Jethro’s truck with enough force to fold his tailgate completely in half and literally shear back the whole right quarter panel and shatter the back window.
I laughed so hard I do believe I peed my pants just a little bit.
By this time a small crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle, and they were on the ground laughing, every single one of them. Jethro’s useless idiot buddies came running over and met him at the head of the ditch. It was starting to get pretty dark by now, and to add insult to injury, my idiot neighbor had to ask me for a ride home, since both of his vehicles were now completely out of commission. Good neighbor that I am, I helped him roll up the straps he borrowed and loaded them in to my truck. I let him, his wife and two idiots ride back in the back of the truck. I even gave them each a beer. He expressed concern about someone stealing his vehicles during the night, but I turned to him with a straight face and said, “I think they’ll be safe for the night right where they are.
When Scott and I got back to the porch, we resumed our evening of suds and stories but kept laughing from time to time as Jethro’s friends began stopping by one by one as the story spread, and he recounted his adventure. By Saturday morning, the police had apparently taken interest in what must have been a puzzling sight for them during patrol, and the vehicles had been taken out of the mud and dropped at the impound yard.
While my neighbors may be some stone-age looking, knuckle dragging mouth breathers, they sure are good for some laughs on Friday nights.
. Even wind didn't help too much - the only difference was, it was like fan-assisted oven 
