Squirt-Guns

A good few months before the media got ahold of the scoop and twisted it into personal resume building news clips of doom with a smile and carefully recited station code, or bylines followed by drunken sentences denoting certain hate and instigation covered with sterile banality and political correctness, no...before the whole ordeal became so widely known that Waffle House waitresses could carry on a somewhat-informed discourse with some equally dull patron...I'm talking late aught seven, Indian summer, those with eyes could easily see the slow-motion shit as it was heading toward the proverbial fan. And no one, not even the painty-waist worrywarts!, did a damn thing to halt this slow-rolling calamity. I saw it coming, oh yeah, but it was like reading the end of the world in Revelations out of the Bible: You know it is on it's way, but what to do but pray? And pray I did...well, that and drink and look at the night sky in my yard at night, which did nothing except cause my neighbors to watch my weird, kinda drunk-ass.

I believe the opening salvo in the war between the states had to be based on nothing but sheer disregard for others and a complete lack of any kind of idea at all to resolve the problem. When ignorance and selfish collide, watch out. We kept looking for more water from our puny sources and those states below us or dependent on us keep getting less and less water. Politicans bristled in pompous oratory displays, lawsuits were filed everywhere causing legal clerks many caffeine-addled hours of stress, environmentalists raged, folks with boats and lake houses sulked and felt cheated, the grocery stores began to crawl the price of bottled water upward, and we idiot masses lived in houses with dead yards and drove dirty cars. It hadn't sunk in then even! We thought it was like gasoline, there would be some from somewhere at a higher price. But no, water was not gas. And what really confused us was that the media was screaming about the melting glaciers due to global warming, yet we weren't allowed to water our grass...and hell, I didn't even know if filling my bird bath was still legal, though I did it anyway so screw 'em.

But back to the opening shots in the war over the diminishing water: Who would have thought it, though the timing makes some horsesense now that we can see hindsight with clear eyes?
A trailer park in the middle of nowhere Georgia, bordering nothingville Alabama, is where our story truly begins. And the sentry of the night, the non-sleeping, the rotten mouth meth-head trailer hicks noticed the unfamiliar traffic down their dirt roads one Sunday early, meth-addict early...like 2 or 3 in the a.m., and were witness to the first definitive act of war in this state-to-state rights of waterway pissing match.

To be continued...