Radical Georgia Moderate

Anytime you start talking about using public dollars in a private development, you’re bound to encounter resistance (login). Just ask Marietta Mayor Bill Dunaway.

Councilman Jim King, who voted against the proposal, said he couldn’t support [developer] Madison’s plan because public funds went to a parking deck rather than sidewalks, roads and sewers.

“I can’t in my mind justify a parking deck that’s transferred to private ownership as public infrastructure,” King said. “I’m not convinced this is the best alternative for us.”

In this case, city of Marietta would have funded the public portion of the partnership with an estimated $63 million in bonds using a tax allocation district.

It’s always a tough call since these developments can attract other private developers (and more tax revenue), but King’s view is certainly a reasonable one. Still, anything that could be done to breathe some life into the area immediately surrounding Marietta Square would be welcome. The Square itself is a pretty decent place to kill a summer or early fall afternoon, and there a few decent restaurants and shops there, but it’s like someone punched a square hole in a moldy donut. The immediately surrounding area is run-down. Now the question is who will they sell the land to and what will they do with it?

As I mentioned before, my (temporary) line of work has given me a new enemy: people with long and/or steep driveways. You are now the bane of my existence. How I hate you so. Below is an ode to Driveways That Suck. These have been carefully cropped, edited and in some cases modified to remove any marks which might prove distinctive.

Winding, steady incline…

Steep…

Loooooonnnnnnngggggg… and steep… you cocksucker…

Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham today after just three years coaching the Irish. He had a 21-15 record during that stretch, including a 6-5 spot this season which would have been 5-6 had the Great Pumpkin not made a bonehead call with time running out in the second quarter during the UT game.

I‘ve got maybe 15 minutes to fill all of you in on what’s going down here in the world of Rusty. I neglected my blogging duties yesterday due to UPS, my seasonal employer, calling me in with little notice and keeping me working until it was dark outside. After the mind-numbing math required to throw together the NCAA picks results, I had no energy left for griping or rumination.

Yesterday’s “driver helper” orientation lasted an hour and a half, which was totally unnecessary. There are only so many ways you can tell someone “put the box down on the porch and don’t make it obviously visible from the road if possible” before your brain cells start to boil. They misspelled “flammable” in one of the training videos. Awesome.

Then there was a forty-five-minute drive from Alpharetta to meet my driver at a Marietta Waffle House. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I bought an All Star plate and sat down. Damn… sausage, eggs, a waffle, grits and cola in the middle of the day really hits the spot.

Oops, driver shows up just as I finish the first piece of sausage. “Do what you’ve gotta do and I’ll be back in 20 minutes,” he said. Commence wolfing down All Star Platter. Commence sadness in spending $9 on that when I could have just bought a protein ass-tasting shake and derived the same amount of pleasure from it.

A bumper sticker I saw out on my route yesterday

Things went smoother when it was just he and I driving around, cussing at pedestrians and cussing at corporate headquarters and, really, cussing at anything that moved and many objects that didn’t. The machinery operates noticeably smoother without a bunch of corporate dildos standing in the way to muck it up.

Being a “helper” means I get to do 85 percent of the legwork. That sucks since lots of rich assholes have really long driveways. Many of them are uphill. I’m sore today. To give you a mental picture, I was often sprinting through peoples’ yards, holding packages under one arm like a tailback, busting through bushes and shrubs like they were an undersized defensive line, dropping the package, ringing the bell, and running away like I would from a military op gone FUBAR. “Fixed bayonets!” “Umm, fuck that sir, I’m saving my own ass.”

This morning isn’t off to a great start. I pretty well bombed in a phone pre-interview for a technical writing job. The human resources/corporate recruiter type gave me four days to prepare, and there was still a painfully long pause when she asked me, “What do you see yourself doing in five to ten years?” You’d think after hearing that question 78 times in the past year I’d have had an answer for her, but no. If I had a plan, do you think I’d be in the mess I’m in now? I can never answer that question, because there’s not anything I really want to be doing in ten years. I suppose I could bullshit, but there’d be as many holes in the story as there were in the 1934 Ford Bonnie and Clyde were shot in.

The driver’s route runs directly through my neighborhood, so he’ll pick me up at my doorstep in about half an hour. This is a huge bonus since I can quantify gas costs as a double-digit percentage of my paycheck. Somebody shoot me in the head.

UPDATE: Damn, all that rushing to get my shit together for nothing. I’m not leaving til 11:30 now. That means I probably won’t get off ’til four or five. See, I forgot to mention being a “helper” means you’re not on any sort of formal time clock. They say you go in about 10:30 and leave about 2 or 2:30, but apparently that’s a pretty loose standard.

Web stats tell me one semi-regular reader has a real job with UPS. I know who it is, but I don’t know if (s)he would want me mentioning it, so I won’t. Hopefully, (s)he won’t out me for talking about Brown on here, but search engines will probably do the job soon enough anyway.

I reckon this is our final round unless I’ve somehow forgotten about a conference championship game to be played next week. Last Chance City for David and Reggie to catch up with Jen, who has a three-point lead. It’s not at all impossible. Let me know what ya’ll would want to do in the event of a tie. Could there be a bet or two for Tennessee against Auburn other than me after all?

WTF? UPS just called and said they wanted me in at 10 am for orientation. It’s f’in 9 am, and that building is 45 minutes away! Thanks for the notice jagoffs. Worse yet, I haven’t had any coffee. I bet the post office treats their scabs better.

Falcons won, so I’m not a bad luck charm afterall. Free tickets rule. Thanks to my cousin Mike for those.

Tennessee’s Cory Anderson (45) outruns Kentucky’s Karl Booker (10) for a touchdown during the first quarter of their game Saturday, Nov. 27, 2004 in Knoxville, Tenn.

A win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win. It may have been ugly, but now Georgia can’t call themselves “co-SEC East champions.” I take bordering-on-sadistic satisfaction from that result even if Auburn wipes the floor with my Vols in next week’s SEC championship game rematch as they’re expected to. See, for those of you who don’t know, I hate Georgia not only from the perspective of a Vols fan, but also from the perspective of someone who considers Georgia Tech his secondary allegiance. My grandfather played football there, my mother and a couple of my other relatives matriculated there. I grew up rooting for the beloved Yellow Jackets and against the hated Bulldogs. Even before UT broke its losing streak to Florida, and before Georgia snapped its nine-year losing streak to the Vols, I hated Georgia more than any other team. More than Steve Spurrier’s Gators. More than that rotten pack of cheaters from Tuscaloosa.

I happen to like Mark Richt in a Joe Torre-style “I hate your team and everything it stands for but I can still respect you for some strange reason” sort of way. It’s hard for me to imagine him whining like a bitch about UT trying to run up the score the way Donnan did in 1999. Donnan had both his safeties blitz during garbage time in the fourth quarter and expected Fulmer to call a run play? Get real.

It’s not just football, it’s the town itself. Nearly every time I’ve gone to Athens I’ve encountered trouble. Once at a UT-UGA game I attended with a friend, this pipsqueak fraternity boy kept nudging down the bench into my space. I wasn’t wearing any UT garb to set people around off, mind you. They had no reason to believe I wasn’t one of their own, except perhaps for being caught occasionally using words longer than three syllables. I eventually asked him to move back down the bench, and he naturally refused. We had the usual exchange of pleasantries and the inevitable stare-down, which led to a stalemate. So, I spit in his coke. The coward poured it at my feet and complained through an intermediary that I owed him a new coke, but you know how that ended.

Then another time I was at a bar with a friend downing Red Bull and vodka mixes. More assholes. There’s something floating in the air down there that seems to lower civility and IQ points. It was an elbow-to-elbow crowd. If you wanted to get by, you had to nudge people. There were no two ways about that, and I never took it personally when people nudged me. Some neanderthal shrouded in Abercrombie took it personally when I did, and slapped my face as I walked by. So I took a swing at him and knocked him down, walked back to my seat, then told my friend Peter, “It’s time to go, I hit a frat boy.”

I know at least three of my readers attended UGA, and another lives in Athens, but I can’t pull any punches here: I hate that fucking town and the school it’s built around. I can still like individuals from the school and the town. It’s similar to how I’m capable of befriending and respecting an individual cop, but hate cops in general.

I‘ve been watching Clear and Present Danger on TBS. There’s a part where a voice analyst pinpoints the regions of the world one of the drug cartel advisers has lived in and been educated in by the way he speaks. I want someone to run one of those tests on me. I’ve been told my speech patterns are all over the place. There are Southern “ain’ts” and “ya’lls” sometimes followed immediately by a seeming Massachusetts-sounding accent on other words. I’d just like to hear the analysis, because I’m curious to hear how I picked that up myself, considering Tennessee is as close to the Mason-Dixon line as I’ve ever lived.

What’s up with crazy WSB television news personality Monica Kaufman? Every time I flip the channel to her corner of the airwaves, she’s re-mangled her hair and found another outfit that appears as if it might jump off her skin and attack the camera. That’s what I get for watching TV. I know this has been going on for a while.

Also, I just noticed the WSB TV website has a dating section. Is that not one of the stranger tie-ins you’ve ever heard? Why would I turn to WSB to bolster my sad love life?

Random whiskey-soaked thought to end your evening/morning:

“If you own a rug, you own too much.” - Jack Kerouac