Percival

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The weather is better today, and is forecast to be the average winter temperatures for the next week. That's just wonderful. The cold weather has not helped my arthritis, but since there's nothing I can do about the weather, and not much I can do about my RA, then making lemonade is my best hope for comfort.

My sinuses have been clearing up since I started spraying them with the silver colloids. This is much less painful than the salt water method I've been using the last forty years. Of course, my cessation of smoking tobacco has had to help a lot, but I stopped smoking over three years ago, and this is the best condition my sinuses has been in for a long time.

It's really evident when my youngest brother and I go out walking at night. There is a small hill we have to climb as we approach his house and go around behind it to start the next round, and it's the toughest physical part of our walk.

The "hills" are not really hills to most folks who live in other parts of the State. They're just the other side of the low areas and swamps create where there are rivers and streams. The river that runs through our family property has a flood plain that extends for a few hundred yards on either side of it.

This condition is easy to observe on the roads that pass through this bottom land. Between here and Fayettenam there are numerous creeks and streams, and the Cape Fear River where the road suddenly drops down into the flood plain, then, after you cross the water course and the flood plain on the other side of it, rising to the flat coastal plains causes the road to look like it's a hill.

It seems silly for me to attempt to describe something that any fool can perceive without getting confused by it. This sort of description is what is the most difficult for me to write about. It's difficult because of my perspective readers.

Anybody of any educational level or none at all can readily observe the flatness of the coastal plains. The flatness of the coastal plains is not any different than the flatness of any kinds of plains. That's why the flatlands are called "plains".

It truly surprised me to hear my American Indian friend naymed Billy say that he had never actually seen a mountain in his entire life. I feel a little privileged to have been the person who was in his company when he did garner his initial experience of being on top of a mountain for the first time in his life.

It's not like we climbed up there hand over fist. There is a National Park on top of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, and a long winding, curvy paved road upon which anybody can drive a car to the uttermost crest of this medium-sized Appalachian mountain.

People do it all the time. there was a fair crowd inside the Park itself for the whole time we were there. There might have been even more people milling around the souvenir shops near the entrance to the Park. In all due respect, particularly for Tennessee, this historical spot is a neat and tidy community. Lots of family types with kids running wild. People seem to feel safe there.

Like I said, it was strange to be in Billy's company when he walked around up there in the Park. There were lots of fenced in areas around the rim of the mountain. Especially where there were clear views of the Tennessee River and the city of Chattanooga.

It was the first time I'd actually been atop Lookout Mountain. I've driven around it or walked by it a thousand times. It's on an ancient Indian trade route on the western side of the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi up to the Great Lakes.

Chattanooga is a crazy place geographically. Why it's crazy can been seen from the Park on Lookout Mountain. There is a huge bend in the Tennessee River, and Chattanooga is located on this bend. From the looks of it on Google Maps, it appears to be about as far eastward into the Appalachians a cargo boat could go via the Mississippi and Ohio river systems.

I would have to look it up, but I think the Natchez Trace goes to Chattanooga. Highway 64 goes through the Smoky Mountains to Murphy, North Carolina and thus the Atlantic seaboard regions from Chattanooga.

That took second place to observing Billy's enchantment, but it's newness, to me too, sure made it easier to empathize with his visible excitement. I think he had felt a little deprived to be an Indian and never seen a mountain before too. This visit remedied any of that non-sense.

I wrote the stuff below earlier today. I liked the way I wrote it and wanna save it someplace to read it when I get old, so I'm putting it here.

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You appear to be projecting some hurtful wound of your own upon me. Why would you attempt to rain on my charade over a topic you seem to care less about?

You know more than I do of the Grail myth in which Percival failed the Grail king's test of his worthiness. He didn't get the Grail Cup because he chose to react out a knightly Code of Chivalry over humane compassion when the Fisher King was brought before him in a litter.

So tell me, great priestess. Where does it hurt? What insensitive bastard has lain you up and made you feel helpless. With nothing more to do in your present state than to fish in the shallows of a minor stream instead of a mighty river?

You can tell even me. Despite the Pope's latest edict, you CAN confess over the internet, and to anybody you damn well please. Go big or go home.

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