Oh, poppy, pretty poppy, and other mountain ditties

The good news from Sen. Rand Paul’s injury by a neighbor is that Coach Mark Stoops has found a new free safety who will rush his opponent and who won’t arm tackle. Though he would have liked to find somebody who wasn’t in his late 50s.

The bad news is that his prospect might be moved from one gated community in Bowling Green to another gated community. You cannot target senators, even those trying to gain yardage on you.

In the mountains, there is a progressive method of retaliation when someone is dumping stuff on your property.

First you go to the boundary and cuss them an hour or two. If that doesn’t work, you escalate to “turn out” and “burn out.” You have them turned out of the church; and if trespass continues, you burn them out — a tactic which replaced homicide.

We mountaineers forgive those who trespass against us, sort of.

We are victims of various wars. First we got fracked to death and lost the war on coal. That was the biggest blow to our economy. The war on dope did two things to us: it outlawed a harmless plant that might well have provided enough uplift to the saddest congressional district in America that we wouldn’t have required opium. Because of DARE and other fool programs, we have turned into a giant opium den, and poppies won’t grow here. The deer would eat them.

The second-biggest blow was first thought to be the war on chicken fighting. Where have all the barrels gone? To us old country people who used to get a box of 100 squawking Red Top baby chicks every winter, there was something elegant about a chicken now being worth $500.

True Story: A woman came into my office a few years ago and said she was going to file for divorce but didn’t expect to get a thing. Why?, I asked, and she explained: “He’s got his chickens in his brother’s name!”

But chickens probably come in third in bad stuff for us. No. 2 is no doubt the war on Eric C. Conn. He may have been crooked and now wanted by the FBI, but the “eric-c-conomy” brought hundreds of thousands of other people’s money to us, and we do not mind.

Eric deserves a ballad, like Pretty Polly or Omie Wise. I’ll do the lyrics and any of you faithful readers who can put this to a melody should call me and we’ll split the royalties and go on stage together to get the Grammy. The name of the song is “SSI.”

Put up a sign, say you can do it,

Buy off a judge, then you can prove it.

Before he went on the fly,

Eric C. Conn won my SSI

SSI, for thee I sigh,

Eric C. Conn won my SSI

Don’t know what on God’s green earth would I

Do without my SSI,

Two of the best doctors I never saw,

Helped Eric get me on the draw

Before he told the feds to go to heck

Eric C. Conn got me on a check.

This story was originally published November 10, 2017 at 8:27 PM with the headline "Oh, poppy, pretty poppy, and other mountain ditties."