Once again, I'm embarrassed to be related to my relatives. The same relatives that inspired "Discipline your fucking kids".The latest adventure occurred over the weekend in their annual white trash camping getaway. Since I live over two hours away from most of my relatives, I'm normally able to get out of this yearly embarrassment to the family, but not this year. This year, the campground selected, Butt Crack State Park (or something like that) is about half an hour from where I live, so I didn't really have a good excuse not to at least show up for a little bit. The event usually starts on Friday night, they camp Friday and Saturday nights, and then concludes Sunday when everyone finally packs up their shit and leaves. I told them I had to be at work at 6:30 on Saturday and Saturday (the truth) and had to work Friday night (a bold-faced lie) so I would only be able to stop over for a couple hours Saturday evening. So with my mom, I decided I would be able to arrive at Butt Crack around 5:00 to have dinner with the family, but wouldn't stay too late, as I would need to be up at 5:30 the next morning. I figured this way I was avoiding most of the horror of the camping trip, while still maintaining the appearance of giving a shit so as to encourage of the giving of wedding presents when the time rolls around.
So Saturday I drove over to my fiance's house to get her (because I wasn't about to sit through that horrible experience by myself) and off we went to Butt Crack State Park for what I thought would be some polite small talk, a couple hot dogs, a Smore, and then goodbyes. Then my mom called my cell phone on the way over and lo and behold, I was no longer to meet them at the cabin they had rented. I was to meet them at the marina. And not because they had rented a boat. Because they were fishing. If I may do my best Charlie Brown impersonation:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
First of all, it was cold at the campground, even though it wasn't at my apartment, so I was out there in shorts and a t-shirt freezing my dick off. Second of all, the water looked like diarrhea. Third of all, all the ground we were standing on was covered in duck shit. Ducks are small animals, I had no idea their shit could be this long, but it was long, and it was everywhere. It looked like someone had laid a duck-shit-themed carpet all along the marina. This place was the single white-trashiest place I have ever been in my life. You could tell just by looking around. There were people with mullets everywhere. The nice guy next to them who was helping my hell-spawn cousins bait their lines was telling a story about how he butchers his own meat, including road kill. When he comes up to a deer lying dead in the road, he stops his car, puts the dead deer in the back seat, drives home, skins it, guts it, and cooks it. And nobody in my family told him to get the hell away from their children. Of course, these are the same children who kept throwing small fish (that were supposed to be bait) at people and sticking them in their hair. And the same children who were allowed to play with matches and lighters the night before. And the same children who were excited about playing cornhole and hillbilly horseshoes. For those of you not from the midwest, cornhole is a game involving tossing a bean bag at a board or some stupid shit like that. It is NOT (in this context anyway) an activity involving the butthole. Why they call a perfectly legitimate game the same word as a disgusting body part is beyond me, but there you have it.
Then one of my cousins caught the smallest fish in recorded history, and everyone took pictures of him holding it up as though he had actually accomplished something. Yeah, congratulations, you're a fucking hillbilly, let's record this event to show off to future generations. This fish was smaller than my penis and he was proud of it. As I'm standing there, looking at my cousin posing with his midget fish against a backdrop of Butt Crack's brown water and duck shit, freezing my dick off, listening to all the surrounding hillbillies blabber about who caught the biggest fish, it occurred to me that it felt like I was standing on the scene of a country music video. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if Billy Ray Cyrus had come out in all his white trash glory and started singing. And the sad thing is, if he had, my relatives probably would have sung along.
You see, fishing is a hillbilly activity. Much like rodeo-watching, country-music-listening, and sister-fucking. When I think of people fishing, I don't think of normal people who know how to read, have all their teeth, maybe some higher education, and don't have sex with relatives. And why is that? Maybe because normal people realize how God damn boring and retarded fishing is. You put a worm on a hook, sit on your ass for a few hours, and if you're lucky, you've got a couple fish which you then have to gut, clean, and cook. Why wouldn't you just go spend five bucks at Kroger's and buy the fish? It's much faster, it's much better, and then you can use that time you would have spent fishing to do something else, like maybe have sex with somebody who isn't related to you. Maybe that's why hillbillies have sex with family members, they don't have time to meet other people because they spend all their time fishing. That must be it. You see, when I picture people fishing, this is what I see:
Fuck fishing.