That's fine prose by MonkeyBoy!  I'm sure by the time it's thoroughly investigated, it will be a "mix-up with medication, nothing to see here, wouldn't want to tarnish decades of service, let's all get back to our business" affair.  Might have to do some community service which, I guess, would be fucking some LaChappels, Sullivans, and Bolducs to get some new blood in the lines.

choad wrote:

Probably worth mentioning MonkeyBoy knows my old man is 89 and lives on the dementia ward of Tilton, NH's Naval hospital.

So you're saying he didn't write that, recently.  I dread to think about what mental condition the original National Lampoon writers are.  The ones that are still alive that is.

Emmeran wrote:

In light of this I am happy to announce that I have been in Central Massachusetts for more that SIX years.  That officially makes it easily the longest period of time I've ever lived at one address or even city.

Congratulations.  Assuming you're bragging and not complaining.

A closer approximation to what I said was actually

“Tilton and Franklin are where you go when you need a place where everyone is as much a 'tard as you are.  Most of them just get born there and are too fucking stupid to leave... it's like an asylum without fences because they don't seem to know they can leave.  The LaChappels marry the Sullivans, the Sullivans marry the Bolducs, the Bolducs marry and fuck around with both families and their own and after 5 or 6 generations there are people with eyes that just plain look fucking wrong.”

I spent some of the most miserable years of my young life in Tilton.  After a childhood spent ratcheting from Kentucky to the east coast to the deep south to the southwest and back in the nether parts of a Chevy wagon I landed in the late 60’s in the lakes region of NH.  I thought it might be sort of OK until I hit the schools and found out I had fallen into some sort of time portal.

I was both a bit sophisticated from my travels with my batshit nutters single mom and at the same time more naive than many kids because we never stayed anywhere for any length of time so I really didn’t know much about the deeper currents in people.  I’d get to know them now, in the kind of shithole where a man might take his wifes dog to abandon it if he’d always hated that damned little dog anyway with it’s rotting breath and snapping teeth and now the thing had bitten half her finger off and she wanted it gone.

The boys wore shit on their shoes, ducks-ass haircuts and purple FFA jackets, which stood for Future Farmers Of America.  I guess it was sort of like 4H.  The girls wore bobby sox and those stupid two-tone saddle shoes with cankles, old lady sweaters and bouffants and beehive hair-do’s sprayed to the appearance of fiberglass, and their fathers faces over incipient double chins.  Even in the late 60’s all this was eerie, as if time had stopped at 1959 o’clock or a piece of the Dakotas had been stolen and hauled in on a trailer to prank the yankees.

I’ll skip the ugly details of how it went from there but for another mention of Tilton see chapter 2 of “The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins who was unlucky enough to have spent his childhood there in the 1950’s.

I’ve often described my small-town Kentucky birthplace as a town “where Hope goes to lie down in the rain and die”, but New Hampshire has it’s own version in the Tilton-Franklin area. Stay Away.