First, welcome to an offseason installment of the Pembroke Mafia Football League. I like to keep folks updated about important developments.
Second, here’s something I want to get off my chest, such as it is these days. Being from the South, I can remember as a child five decades or so ago being told to “not say anything if I couldn’t say something nice.”
That was obviously way before Facebook and Twitter, those make-believe playgrounds full of presumed adults supposedly raised to know better, and yet look at them, or better yet, don’t. You know how they are. They go around insulting anybody and everybody who doesn’t think, look or vote like them. It’s largely the level of personal attacks disguised as political discourse on social media that’s made me work to avoid all forms of social media as hard as I can, and that’s pretty hard, me being a supposed media mogul. Anyway, as my late Aunt Retha would say, “Bless their (expletive deleted) hearts, the (deleted expletive in plural).”
Disclaimer: Aunt Retha was from Atlanta and sounded to my ears sort of like the great James Brown, especially if James Brown was a bawdy talking, chain smoking white woman with blue hair from North Georgia.
Aunt Retha cussed worse than any Marine I ever knew, and I’ve run across a few. For one thing, I went to what the Army calls advanced individual training with half a dozen jarheads at Fort Sill back in the 1980s.
Their sergeants didn’t let them near us. I guess they were afraid whatever we had would rub off. So, I probably work harder at avoiding Facebook than I did avoiding NCOs as a lower enlisted peon in the Army. Back then the biggest thing on my agenda on any given day was keeping a low profile and staying out of my sergeants’ line of sight, so they wouldn’t tell me to do something I didn’t want to do.
That’s the thing about the field artillery as I remember it. You were always being ordered to do something you’d rather not.
Anyway, I know it’s not college football season but rest assured, fans of college football and the PMFL, we’re working on a new format and new ideas and other things that will make for a more pleasurable reading experience.
For starters, our CEO, B.J. Clark, has decided he’s going to start selling beer gloats in Pembroke, for free. To get one, stop by City Hall and see Pembroke City Administrator Alex Floyd - he’s our official PMFL bureaucrat and proud dad of a kid named Ellis who just turned 1, but that’s neither here nor there. You have to see Floyd to get the keys to B.J.’s beer and ice cream float locker, which is kept in a secret location that isn’t ever underneath that occasional rainbow in the left endzone of Bryan County High School’s football field.
B.J., of course, is retired Navy and likes to hear “Anchors Aweigh” before he eats breakfast with his lovely wife Marsha, and both B.J. and fellow PMFL member and retired sailor Ernie “The Groveland Gnome” Mitchell are not only big cheeses in Pembroke American Legion Post 164, and maybe the only two members who wear jockstraps every day, but they are also vice admirals of the North Bryan Navy - which is quite famous in parts of Black Creek and a certain pond somewhere toward Statesboro.
Oh, and, Ernie doesn’t even live in Groveland, that’s how famous he is.
And then there’s the King of the North, Noah “Biscuits and Gravy” Covington the District 1 rep on Bryan County’s Board of Commissioners; and Richmond Hill City Clerk Dawnne Greene, our token New Ennglannder who actually won the thing last year; and Bryan County Administrator Ben “The Sock Kardashian” Taylor, who finished second and probably cheated; and Pembroke First Baptist Church Pastor Brad Butler, our guru; and Mike “Vanilla Mike” Clark, who has groupies who like tractor parts; and our minister of higher education, Mark Rogerson, who is only 13; and the Bryan County News’ Michigan bureau chief, Ted O’Neil, now a vice president of some sort with Ford Motor Carriages; and I’m probably leaving someone out. We might even have a new member or two next season, which is something like 160 days away, according to groundhogs.
And now you know as much as I do. But stay tuned. And, on a serious note, a whole lot of folks are rooting for Mr. Bobby Carpenter, a great postmaster and Richmond Hillian.
Please keep him and his family in your prayers.