The mountains, sans bears - Part I.

I spent all of last week in Gatlinburg. It was actually the first time I'd ever been to the area for any real amount of time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The chalet that my roommate had reserved was spectacular. It was eerily spacious, with plenty of room for everybody to have their space. It was also a primo place for hide-and-seek. More on that in a bit...

En route from the I-40 offramp to our residence for the week, I was a bit apprehensive. Sevierville was bland as hell - the place had nothing to see but a Super Wal-Mart, a couple of outlet malls (gag), and a handful of chain restaraunts. I could see the mountains ahead, so I just kept my apprehension to myself. Then we hit the next city...

I was a little taken aback by the heinously neon Pigeon Forge. I just didn't care for it. Luckily, I wasn't the only one caught off guard, and I wasn't nearly the most vocal with my disdain for the place...

I felt like I needed to have a pack of mullet-headed rube-children following me around, tugging on my clothes, begging for change from their "pa" to throw at the hordes of go-carts and do-it-yourself gem mines littering the strip to feel comfortable there. I'd make the kids get dressed in their best (actually wearing SHOES with their overalls...) for the only-slightly-classier ventures ranging from a dinosaur jungle boat ride (wtf?) to stores where Christmas comes 365 days a year (again, wtf?). It was definitely a tourist trap. Thank God we were too smart to be snared...

Gatlingburg was a cool city. It made up for the rampant mediocrity of Sevierville and for the eye-scourge of Pigeon Forge. It was chock full of shops that sold useless devices, weapons, ridiculous souvenirs, all the shit that I find so entertaining about tourist destinations (Magnet World was my favorite purveyor of unnecessary crap...). What set it apart, though, was its cleanliness and character. The city maintains a kind of charm that many other cities would lose the second that a Mystery Mansion or an Old Time Photo is built. It's a quaint, comfortable city filled to the brim with ridiculous schlock, but it works. It may, in fact, be enhanced by the schlock. It makes people watching outrageously fun. The plethora of fried foods and candy shops made it even more so. It's a city with such an extreme amount of tourist bullshit that it's impossible to not find something, or someone, to laugh at while meandering the well-maintained and historic main strip. (I highly recommend playing "count the FUPAs" if you get even the slightest bit bored there. The number we saw was staggering.)

The proximity to Smoky Mountain National Park attracted a different, more acceptable (if less entertaining) kind of tourist. These, by and large, went unnoticed, by me at least, until they were encountered on a trail. They are a fairly unremarkable, FUPA-less sort, and will not be discussed further than saying that they basically cancelled out the flashier tourists, making Gatlinburg infinitely less horrible for me than Pigeon Forge.

I'm tired of writing now. I'll leave my encounters with trails and woods, mountains and ice, 4.0 Christians and hide and seek for tomorrow, I suppose.

On that note, keep in mind that the experiences I will describe speak volumes more about the trip than the prior paragraphs describing the place in general...

In layman's terms, some funny shit happened...

Ha.

I'd planned on posting more than I have. I've found myself thinking about how I would phrase many things if I were to type them out. Because that is not a normal human way of thinking, I will cite it as proof that I do think about things, and I think about writing about the things I think.

I think that covers my thought that I need to write more about what I think.

I'm just not a kid person.

I have no idea what kids, legitimate children, as in, not teenagers, do for fun these days. I don't know what the median age for discovering one's taste in music or movies is. I know nothing about popular children's television, about what kids are and aren't allowed to do, about what kinds of toys or games they like, or what is or isn't socially acceptable in their ridiculously juvenile cliques.

I've never come off as a child-friendly person, which makes it all-the-more odd that my boss would volunteer me to take on a job shadow kid for a day.

Last year, he pulled the same shit. I was stuck with a fourth grade girl for five hours. That wasn't fun, largely because I'm a fairly worldly guy. I had to go out of my way to keep my language and attitude squeaky-fucking-clean. The good news, last year, at least, was that kid seemed to be easily entertained by virtual mini-golf. That made my dealings with her fairly effortless.

The kid I got this year, a 12-year-old from a private school, wasn't even the slightest bit interested in the exciting world of aerial-view online putt-putt, though. Bad news, bad news...

The kid just wanted to draw, and by draw, I mean hog my personal computer to create absurd "houses" while droning on and on about how "interesting" it was. I did my best to make small talk and to help the kid out with advice on how to use the program, but he really wasn't interested in talking to me, he was more interested in ignoring me like a little douchebag and doing whatever the he hell he wanted to do on my damn computer. Kids weird me out. Know-it-alls piss me off. Know-it-all-kids weird me out and piss me off. Big time.

Don't get me wrong, I remember being a kid and being interested in all kinds of things. I never tried to act like I was significantly smarter than I was, though. I was always mature enough to know that there are limits to one's abilities; limitations are natural. I knew what my limits were and slowly and painstakingly learned to exceed them, to reset them. That's how people grow and mature, not by acting like they can do everything without help.

When the kid did want to talk, he wanted to talk about crazy shit, like ghosts. He told everybody that a "full-body apparition" pushed him down recently, not to hurt him, but just to let him know it was there. What the bloody hell do you say to that?

"Oh, that's neat," was my boss's response.

I couldn't be so courteous. I just stared, jaw gaping, thinking, "Are you fucking serious?"

I'm so glad that I've gotten better at keeping my thoughts to myself...