I’ve been whining a lot in this space lately. Growth bad, traffic bad, Ohio bad, etc., etc. Yep. I’ve been whining so much you’d think they were fixing to turn this whole place into Pooler.

Which is sort of the complaint I heard recently from a lifelong North Bryan resident hailing from generations of North Bryan folk whose ancestral stomping grounds are not far from the looming Metaplant.

One of her concerns, in so many words: that the rural area she calls home will turn into Pooler. And nobody except Pooler wants to be Pooler. I’m not even sure Pooler wants to be Pooler. I wouldn’t if I were Pooler.

In fact, if you want a poster child for everything wrong with what’s been happening to Coastal Georgia for the last couple decades, it’s Pooler. So, sadly, it’s not only possible my friend’s home will one day get Poolerized, but entirely probable.

Also, this ongoing Poolerification is happening around the clock seemingly. Driving home from work at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night I came across dump trucks, concrete mixers and all the other tools of the trade out there busily helpling reshaping Bryan, Bulloch, Chatham and Effingham counties.

Heck, you can hardly drive a mile these days without seeing 20 more new subdivisions crammed with vinyl houses, a road project and five or six industrial parks in the throes of construction.

And that’s not counting the crews laying cable or power or water and sewage infrastructure, etc., and occasionally cutting phone lines and somehow making it impossible to use your cell phone when you need it.

All fun stuff. I’m not whining anymore. I have decided in what time is left to me at this newspaper to look on the bright side. From now on I’m walking on the sunny side of the street. And it’s wonderful.

For one thing, my mirror tells me I’m starting to look like a wise old monkey, which is what tends to happen to us white folks.

For another, I’m very glad there is no such thing as roof snakes. I would absolutely hate to be outside at the old homeplace and suddenly have an excited roof snake land on my shoulders. I also would not enjoy looking up at my roof and seeing snakes lounging about. They might get in the upstairs windows, or through a vent, and then we would have a problem.

In a similar vein, I’m glad skinks do not attack people. I do not like skinks, which are snakes with feet. Still, I let skinks be so long as they run when they see me. If that ever changes and they decide to stand their ground, or, worse, go into attack mode, or get like five feet long, then I will wind up in a cardiac ICU somewhere eating through tubes.

What else is grand? School’s starting, if you haven’t noticed. But you probably have. It’s a staple of community journalism, which has had trouble paying for itself for years.

My mother, an erstwhile local media critic, notes she’s tired of local TV news channels in-depth reporting on back to school nonsense. “School’s starting,” she will say. “It always starts. The story is if it doesn’t start.”

True. But we in news tend to keep doing the same thing thinking we’ll someday get a different result, which is why we’re broke.

Besides, that’s probably why I never cared all that much for school. It starts, even when you wish it wouldn’t. Unless you have kids. Then you probably wish it was year round just to get them out of the house. If I had kids I’d send them off to boarding school in Antarctica and then sell up and move to some dinky place nobody ever heard of, like Turner County.

Also good is that school smells weird, like graham crackers and fruit juice and feet, and teachers tend to be know-it-alls. Some of them, anyway. Some I know are quite nice.

But some are mean and probably haven’t changed their underwear since George Bush was in the White House. The first one.

Or maybe it’s my upper lip that smells weird. Or somewhere else, because as we all know once you get past 60 you start mildewing. This happens because us older people can’t move fast enough to escape the more active of the various fungi that tend to view us as all you can eat buffets.

And that’s actually a good thing, because given our penchant as humans for messing things up it’s likely if fungus didn’t get us at some point we’d end up spreading throughout the solar system like cancerous cells convinced that what we’re doing is wonderful, but all the while we’re ruining and pillaging left and right and ultimately killing the thing that keeps us alive by turning it into a giant nonstop Pooler.

Have a nice day.