#redneck meme

[catgirl-coven]

When you’re working on the farm and your cousin passes by on the tractor:

[braindizzle]

[imfrompeebles-blog]

Super Peebles

This is the mighty Appalachian Highway, a four-lane wonder that connects Cincinnati to the Appalachian Mountains.  Before the Appo was finished, getting to the city was like backpacking to Mordor.  Cincinnati was a two-hour drive on a two-lane highway, clogged with tractors and hay wagons.  Now the city is a smooth 70 minutes away. 

  It seems like the Appo has been around forever, but it was finished in 1982.  That means it’s only a little older than a Thundercat.  In a way it still isn’t finished.  The highway was supposed to be Phase 1 of an ambitious project to remodel Peebles.  Phase 2 of this plan was to create a massive artificial lake just north of town.  The idea was that this lake would attract scores of tourists and new business.  Positioned between the lake and highway, Peebles would become a boomtown, or a “Super Peebles.”

  The plan fell through because it turns out a lot of landowners didn’t want their homes to be underwater.  I still have to wonder, 30 years later, what kind of town Super Peebles would have been.

Bigger, for one.  More people means wider borders.  The school would be bigger too. We would have had a football team or our own TV studio.  There would have been more money for the township for building a fancy town hall, like the clock tower in Back to the Future. 

  We wouldn’t have been a dry township for so many years.  Tourists’ money means bars, liquor licenses, maybe even a monorail.  We’d have the cash to beautify main street—or heck, build a whole new main street just outside of town.  Commerce would bring Wal-Mart, followed by the Super Peebles Shopping Mall.  We’d have a multi-sceen movie theater, so no more driving 23 miles to see Twilight.  Super Peebles would also need a small concert venue, where we could see the Goo Goo Dolls.

  Infants would have higher birth weight in Super Peebles.  Tom Selleck would buy some land just out of town, then tell his celebrity friends about this quaint country town, sandwiched between a picturesque lake and a convenient highway.  During the season we’d spot George Clooney or Renee Zellweger shopping around town.

 Carpet bagging tourists would wander down to Old Main Street in Old Peebles, and they’d see us in the diners, wearing John Deere hats and talking about how the town used to be, before the highway.  They would adore our quaintness, then snap secret pics with their smart phones.  We’d get tweeted.  They’d make memes of us. 

They’d never know that before the Holiday Inn and Applebee’s, buried underneath the Apple Store, Starbucks, Ikea, Brookstone, Old Navy, Target, Honda Dealerships and Best Buys, this used to be a real place.  People lived here for the land, not for the shopping malls.  Super Peebles would become an everytown, or even worse the dystopian Hill Valley from Back to the Future 2. 

But, that didn’t happen.  The highway came in, and maybe we lost some businesses but we gained some population.  New people move into Peebles all the time, even though they commute an hour to the city.  They could move closer to work, but they like it here.  It’s small and quiet.  Not super, but it’s home.

[horriblehumor-blog]

http://elementclash.tumblr.com/

[cosmicvoodoo]