Today, because of a burning desire to try out a new local place (I know, I need to find an ointment) I tried lunch at Fanci Free Boutique and Garden Cafe in Prattville.

Prattville is a community of about 30,000 thought of by some as an alternative to Montgomery for those fancy big-box stores such as Target. It has tried, and sometimes stumbled, in its attempt to play with the big boys, with the big stumble being a development atop Cobb’s Ford designed in the style of Destin Commons but without the foot traffic or retailers.

So I went off the beaten path to the quaint historic downtown in search of lunch grub. Upon walking in the door, my eyes were assaulted by the ridiculous assortment of junk, the various colors swirling in a psychedelia-meets-Candy-Land haze, except less cool and more Tammy Faye Bakker. We’ll get to the boutique in a minute.

I chose to have the chicken salad sandwich and asked for a water. I guess the server lady thought there was something funny about the way I said what I didr, because when her colleague asked what I wanted, she mimicked my intonation as she repeated my order.

Mocking me happens to be one of my red flags. It’s something the kids back in elementary school used to do in Saraland, Ala., when I was newly arrived from South Florida and “talked like a Yankee,” and it’s something people have been commenting on, in one way or another, my entire life. It’s disrespectful, and I expect to be treated with respect when I drop my dimes on an establishment.

The experience didn’t get better. The chicken salad tasted like it had been soaked in sweet pickle juice — yuck! Nicer cafes tend to add nuts, celery raisins or grapes to a chicken salad to vary the texture. Not this place. Just chicken, Miracle Whip and mustard, as far as I could tell. The croissant on which the yuck laid was hard. The nut cluster I selected for a dessert was definitely nothing to write home about — the chocolate tasted like it had been infected with peppermint, and it was generally tasteless. The chips were chips. This embarrassment of a lunch cost me more than $8.

The only good thing about the entire meal was their use of a reusable plastic cup for my eat-in order, though the cup looked like it came from their collection at home.

And now for the so-called merchandise, a blend of tacky and useless junk. A headache spread between my temples as I gazed from my tiny table at t-shirts with Auburn and Alabama-themed crosses (borderline sacrilege), various denominations of metal angels, houndstooth purses, purses and handbags with loud, tacky prints (such as zebra stripe with a pink border), goblets and ceramics done up like a middle-school art project gone awry, bowls, pictures frames with catchy phrases like “Dream: Home is a starting place for love and dreams,” wind chimes and jewelry. This poor use of our natural resources makes the Native American in that commercial from the 70s cry.

The coup de grace came when the lady who had mocked my speech patterns began talking to a local, saying that she was waiting to spend money until after the election and saying that if Barack Obama is elected, the shop will close. At this point, I knew exactly the type of people I was dealing with, an establishment whose owners probably watch Fox News nonstop with all the alarmist claptrap, noise, and lies, and believe every bloviate utterance, who think single mothers are what’s wrong with the world today, not the billionaires who are sending jobs overseas and whining about their 16-percent tax rate. And so forth. And so at that point, I just left, thoughts of peacefully finishing my glass of water gone.

Please, vote for Obama. Let’s see if we can make the world free of Fanci Free.

In the interest of health and to break out of the rut of the 2 yoga and exercise-related DVDs I already own, I’ve been checking out yoga DVDs from the library, a sort of yoga journey exciting and new.

“Yoga for Health, Depression/Gastrointestinal” has been a somewhat disappointing stop on that trip, basically because for having two classes, both seem nearly identical. While not exactly the same, there’s not enough difference between the two routines to make me feel like they are basically the same class over and over.

The class leader, Jenny Cordero, is a gaunt woman, and thus some of the poses are created with a rail-thin body in mind. I have learned by experiencing this workout routine that there are some poses I hate, for instance all inverted poses.

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Giant spider in my backyard threatened to ensnare the waning gibbous moon.

On the job — site of a green neighborhood being planned for Montgomery near downtown, along the Selma to Montgomery trail. Since the specifics of the green neighborhood is still being hashed out, am delving further into the history of the neighborhood, how the interstate began its demise. Also must return to take more pictures.

What I need is a camera to capture the carnage, the plant shriveling carnage of very little rain for the past two months. While I was away, leaving my plants to the mercy of rainfall, my jalapeno plant shriveled, going from potentially three or more jalapeno buds to just the one nearly grown but runty jalapeno.

Beyond my small concerns, everybody’s garden is in pretty bad shape. The corn fields to the right of 1-65 as I travel south from Prattville to Montgomery have all turned into giant fields of deathly brown. It’s national news, as half the U.S. is in drought, the worst drought in decades, yet another revisit of the worst X in Y disaster construction we’ve seen too much of recently.

How dry is it? We’ve had 2.63 inches of rain so far this month, according to weatherchannel.com, and it’s now July 24. The average for July is 5.24. In June, 2.72 inches of rain, compared the average of 4.

Reports state the drought will affect food prices all over the globe, leading to death and social upheaval — same stuff, different year.

Here is a short roundup of recent drought stories to help paint a picture of the situation. With words.

Local

Farmers deal with dry conditions, by Marty Roney, the San Francisco treat, Montgomery Advertiser.

National

Another reason to bug out: Drought puts electrical production at risk by Phillip Bump, Grist

Interactive: Mapping the U.S. drought, by NPR.

Drought Disasters Declared In More Counties; 1,297 Affected So Far by Mark Memmot, NPR, July 18.

But of course, there’s no such thing as climate change. Of course not. There’s just hell on earth, apparently, perfectly normal rising of temperatures and CO2 in the last decades. The whole “activities of man” thing is a pure coincidence. It’s like finding a body at a crime scene and someone with a large knife covered with blood. He didn’t kill anybody. Of course not. He just happens to like knives and being covered with blood as part of his performance art. Someone else must have put the body there. He never met that person, nope.

This guy discusses climate change is in much clearer terms than I can atop my soapbox.

Yes, I’ve decided to begin an inaugural Lack of Atmosphere award, with photo courtesy of Gregory H. Revera via wikipedia, and yes, I know the text isn’t centered, but so what? This is an award of ill repute.

I usually don’t like to bust on people and places on the Interwebs. I usually reserve my irritation for squirrels, chipmunks and dogs roaming the neighborhood without leashes. But today, Yazee Yogurt of Prattville went above and beyond in an atmospheric assault on a customer.

I had gone for what I thought was going to be a pleasant writing, eating break, taking in a dessert crepe at a local establishment. What I got was an assault on my ears and body. Sounds dire? Let me explain.

Usually, Yazee Yogurt has just a T.V. going with some inane Disney show my son enjoys, which is tolerable if not the greatest ambiance. This time, I was greeted by a new flat-screen monitor blaring some Fox News show where the various anchors blabber over each other some nonsense. And if that wasn’t enough, they had religious music playing at the same time. It was like a bad joke. Or a bad dream. Even with iTunes playing as loud as I comfortably could bear to have piped into my ear channels, I could still hear the Fox babble and Jesus singing. Having all that at the same time caused a sensory overload.

And if that wasn’t enough, the air conditioning had brought the temperature down to around 68 degrees Fahrenheit, so for those of us coming out of the heat in shorts, it was quite frosty. 

I don’t mind people having religion. That’s fine. But it seems to be the practice of local establishments in these small Bible belt towns to put a coat of Jesus on everything. I’m calling it Jesus washing, and it’s getting a little irritating. It’s almost like people are in a competition about who can be the most “Jesus” — and so far The Special Grind coffee shop in Prattville, which has Bible verses written on the walls, has them beat. At least they beat their Jesus drum soundlessly, with nary a TV on.

With all these folks blasting their religion, it’s hard to take them seriously when they claim “Christianity is under attack,” as I’ve heard a minister at church say before. What seems to be under attack are people who don’t necessary want other people and businesses screaming “Jesus” at them 24/7. 

I think I’ve visited Yazee Yogurt for the last time, Nutella crepes be damned.

Traveling often reveals as much about the traveler, and the baggage he or she carries, as it does about the places visited. In my case, traveling by train helped erase, at least temporarily, a certain regional myopia developed over years living in the South and growing accustomed to pervasive poverty that I skirt in my daily travels through the region.

It had been decades since I traveled by train. In the summers back when I was growing up in Mobile, Ala., my family, via train, visited relatives in locales such as California, Ohio, and Connecticut, via the Sunset Limited to California and the City of New Orleans and the Crescent to points north and east. Train travel was not as expensive as plane fares and, despite the sometimes bumpy ride, a more pleasant way of travel than the multiple stops and somewhat dodgy clientele that rides the bus. Through the train windows we saw the vast deserts of the southwest as well as the harrowing mountainsides of the Cascades when we took the long way to California via the Pacific Northwest.

Trains, along with car travel, provide travelers with a more up-close assessment of the areas traversed, a vantage point of not available via jet jaunts at 40,000 feet, where flyover country is crossed and ignored. From a bird’s eye view, the world, if seen at all, is more of a totality, a province of shiny, tiny pools, lines of trees, clumps of buildings, all the dust and muck of living out of sight, out of mind.

A ground level view provided me with a sobering vantage point. It had been decades since I had been to the south Mississippi/New Orleans area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, an area never known for tidiness and even glorified for the impromptu nudity, corruption, decrepitude and inebriation not limited to just Mardi Gras time. We traveled west from the Florida Panhandle through Alabama to south Mississippi and Louisiana, a change which one can feel from the bounce of the roads, as Mississippi and Louisiana have long been vying for a lousiest roads title, it seems, and even after all these years it is still a dead tie. We traveled to New Orleans to catch the train called The City of New Orleans bound north to Chicago.

New Orleans was a weekend place for Mobile teens looking for mischief, mayhem and booze. Considering it was not a gleaming metropolis back in the 90s, the ghostly city of New Orleans, particularly its east side, now reaches higher notes of dilapidation and despair than it used to, exhibited in still empty buildings, probable havens from the homeless, within spitting distance from I-10. One abandoned hotel with gaping open hotel room doors and rusting railings jutted up like an oversized above ground grave and could have had as its epitaph, “Here lies this city’s best days.” An internet search discovered that this hotel, called Grand Palace Hotel, is set for implosion in July after much legal wrangling by the property owner, according to a Times-Picayune story from 2011.

A graph from the story details the eyesore’s shady history:

“The building has passed through multiple owners and operated under several business models over six decades. It was initially introduced as a modern marvel of urban lifestyle, with apartments, offices and street-level retail and dining. Then it became a series of hotels — a Sheraton property, a Ramada franchise, the Pallas Hotel, the Crescent on Canal — few if any of them a success.”

BestofNewOrleans.com provided background of how tourists were misled into thinking the hotel provided quality, affordable rooms, as one glowing review on a jazz website attested. What greeted tourists, in review after review, was a rat-infested, poorly maintained mess that even inebriation couldn’t make less appalling. Reviews for this closed hotel are still live on Yahoo!Travel. One proclaims: “If anyone has ever seen the beginning of Terminator where the cyborgs have demolished Earth - this is what the New Orleans Grand Palace looks like.” Despite the Times-Picayune article noting that the hotel was closed since Katrina, there are reviews from as recently at 2011.

Unlike me, my mother’s home garden in the Florida Panhandle is fruitful. And vegetable-full. The tomato plants grew so big that it bent the wire holder it was on. Besides tomatoes, the small garden has blueberries and yellow.

The secret: Put ‘em in the ground, my mother said. Her master gardener friend doesn’t recommend a container garden in Deep South, because the extreme summer heat dried out the root system too fast. As busy as she is, it takes no special effort or human sacrifices to make her garden grow, beyond the first planting, and that’s the way it should be.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping the two tomato plants I planted in front of my house hasn’t died in the time I’ve been gone…

One jalapeno on my jalapeno plant. Meanwhile, I kill embryonic sunflowers like nobody’s business. And meanmeanwhile, my mother’s fledgling garden has generated a goodly amount of tiny tomatoes already. 

I no longer have the internet in my home. This has been a good thing, as it helps keep me focused and centered, all those foundational things. It also means I’ll have less opportunity to blog, but that is not altogether bad, considering how little I do it.

I spent much of the weekend on the back porch, getting some much-needed Vitamin D, looking at the blooms on my jalapeno plant, reading Carson McCullers and writing Not!poetry during National Poetry Month. Why must I be so difficult?

I learned this weekend to dread the sun reaching the upper branches of the tall tree in the back yard of the home two houses to the west, as it signaled the beginning of the end of my outdoors day.

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