Life > January 17, 2008

By Austin H. Jones | Staff columnist

So, it’s 9 p.m. the night before the first day of classes and I still haven’t written my column.

Pondering my current plight brought on by a prodigious bout of preemptive procrastination, I feel a pervasive despair falling over my plans to actually do work punctually this semester.

I’m sure the average university student has made this same resolution and felt this same despair overcoming these plans at some point in the educational process here.

The thing that kills me is that the semester hasn’t even started, and I’m already behind on my work.

And the bank and bookstore didn’t help in this unfortunate situation either. I deposited my money on Friday afternoon and the checks didn’t clear until Tuesday morning leaving me in an unnecessary situation. By then, all the used books for all of my classes were gone.

It would have been much cheaper for me to pay a struggling mobster to hunt down one person in each of my classes and bring back each book that I needed. I bet I could have paid for my remaining ninja lessons with the money I would have saved using contract killers.

It would have been infinitely more efficient if one of the sweet ladies at the bank had just written a little note that said I had enough money for my books.

Then I could have just taken the note down to the underpaid and overstocked malcontents working grudgingly in the depths of Taylor and paid hundreds of times more than the actual cost of my stack of books.

The old way would have been much more efficient.It seems like these days, people in positions of power can’t leave the past alone and are always trying to improve.

For example, take the recent fruition of the utterly ludicrous plans of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

They want to push Harrison Ford past retirement age and, with thousands of pounds of make-up and digital anti-aging, creating a new film in the already perfect Indiana Jones series.

It’s almost as bad as the return of Rambo, directed, written, produced and starring the over-ripe and over-committed, 61-year-old Sylvester Stallone.

(Oh this is absolutely perfect! I was frantically trying to think of some way to include the following utterly terrifying story that was running through my town’s chain of gossipers when I returned for Christmas Break; now I have a transition.)

Speaking of Rambo …

The biggest change that I discovered upon my return to Thomasville, the sweet town located in the middle of what some claim to be the most rural part of south Georgia, was that the newspaper is now interesting.

During the town’s biggest event of the year, Victorian Christmas, hundreds of people dress up in Victorian era garb and thousands more flock to the brick streets of downtown Thomasville to watch those time-stranded wanderers traipse about, dodging the horse-drawn carriages and discarded turkey legs and funnel cakes.

One of the said carriages turned down Monroe Street toward The Big Oak, a 327-year-old arboreal landmark (the only landmark in Thomasville, mind you).

As the carriage approached The Big Oak, something behind it spooked the horses, who promptly dragged the carriage, its driver and several passengers head-on into one of the limbs of The Big Oak.

Needless to say, the legendary live oak did not budge.

The leading horse, Rambo (aptly named, eh?), did not survive the accident.

This sadly delighted the passengers, because they landed softly on the hide of the fallen horse and escaped with nothing more than a few scrapes.

Words of wisdom: every Rambo lives; every Rambo dies; let it be.