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| I am not going to drink my own uncle's pee. I won't. |
Once we got Florida one of the first things we did was
to go by my dad's cousin's family's amusement park.
If you have never
been to the south the one thing you must know is that everyone is a cousin to everyone and they all know
how they are all related. This is because they have kept the gene
pool relatively parochial, with no need to mix with northerners. This
amusement park was modest and abandoned but at one time had a roller
skating rink a swimming area in the spring and slides and a diving
board. There were also pinball machines and a dance for or as the
hillbillies liked to call it a 'juke joint'. It was called White
Springs the first time I went my cousin told me it was more like
white trash springs. Being from the racially homogeneous and
harmonious west I had never heard the term white trash ans assumed
that he was referring to it having a lot of garbage around. We were
there in the middle of the winter so no one was swimming and my
siblings cousins and I we running around on the equipment and in the
roller skating rink and down by the stream that ran off from the
spring. My cousins all started jumping over the stream and my dad
yelled down to us to not jump and to run back around because it was
time to go and he didn't want us falling in a getting wet. I was, as
many nerds are, overly optimistic about my physical prowess so I
decided to thoughtfully decline my father's request and go for it
anyway. It went badly. I jumped about six-inches short of terra
firma and landed instead on a patch of moss and slid as quickly
as gravity and my momentum could manage face first into the bank.
From there I went ahead and fell into the stream proper and got
soaked and a bloody nose as well as a respectably thorough spanking
for my troubles. I have since decided to always look before I leap
and then don't. In later years white springs was closed to swimming
and is now used by a bottled water company as a 'source untouched and
protected for millions of years'. Lies. I know for sure that I have
peed in it, and I think it would be safe to assume that most of my
kin did also. To be clear, the befoulment of this pristine source was more
recent then the millions of years claimed on the bottle.
