As I’m driving up Lookout Mountain with my “buddies” this morning, I’m awe struck by how beautiful my lengthy mountain driveway is; how “privileged” I am to live up here; and how I’m reminded of the many folks among me who never experience such a beautiful serene setting as they go home after a hard long days work.

Though I have truly come to understand some folks socioeconomic fears of what others might think or portray of them if they were to move to Lookout Mountain.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Im not special; I’m just saying its a gorgeous place to live, regardless of whether I live up here or not.

It’s funny how sometimes I decline to tell certain folks that I live on lookout mountain, rather I tell them Chattanooga instead; or sometimes I’ll say it “apologetically”; I’ve even been known a time or two to “bolster” the fact that I live up here, as though somehow my geographical location determines the credibility of my character.

I’m not sure about others up here on the mountain but I have definitely experienced an almost unapologetic rush to pre-judgement by non-mountain folk who might otherwise not give a hill of pimentos about my zip code. I’ve often guessed some folks might think me on the lesser “blue” side of the collar when I tell them I live on Lookout Mountain.

I guess I too once fell under that same category of imbecile when I first discovered Lookout Mountain over two decades ago. I always thought all the folks who lived up here were trust babies.

Funny, I’ve never found who up here has trust and who doesn’t, but what I sure can tell you, my mountain has the best sweet smell of honeysuckle mixed with Carolina jasmine I’ve ever smelled.

Now I’m not going to lie to you, my facehookers, on this twenty-first day of July in the year 2013, about midway up my mountain driveway this morning, somewhere along the Ochs extension, at the first waterfall you come to, Jr, my “team buddy” member number “two”,  starts coughing louder than a sixty-three year old cigarette smoker in the Atlanta airport “smoking section”, whose oxygen tank umbilical  cord just got stepped on by a tiny smoking frenchman waiting for his Air France Tarmac to open up,

“What in the hell buddy?”, I say loudly as we approach my first extended driveway waterfall, as JR ruins my Otis Redding song (“I’ve got dreams to remember”) with his coughing fit,

“Buddy, what is that smell?!”, JR says back to me as he quietly pulls his sweat-laced, probably hasn’t been washed in a few days, one and only hard-working man’s suckerfied Hollister t-shirt over his nose.

Now for a few years I’ve been hitting this same part of my mountain driveway and reacting the same way, but today seems to be different, today seems to be the day where I’m not noticing it as bad as my young, nineteen year old black buddy and I’m irritated that he’s overreacting and ruining my song.

You see my facehooker, there’s the most god awful sewer, mixed with rotting caucuses smell you can ever imagine about halfway up my extended mountain public driveway and for the likes of me I can’t figure out which one of these “trust” babies is to blame for not fixing it.

I mean to tell you, just as soon as I hit the first waterfall on my extension home,  it’s as if the stench comes looking for me and I’ve done something wrong today.

Ive long suspected many among me must have the same inquisitive frown as I do, yet nothing ever seems to get fixed. I guarantee, if you smelled it once, you’d think three things:

1. what in the hell is that god-awful smell;

2. who in the hell is going to get busy and fix this problem and clean-up this mess;

3.  And a four horn buck on crutches would trade places with a three toe pig in Squalorville USA, all by bullshitting his way through the pen, just to get away from this smell.  

But a really weird thing about “my waterfall stench”; the folks who live above this god-awful smell spent like some absolutely ungodly amount of money, I think over a million bucks or so, on four hundred or so Magnolia and Holly trees several years back; and several years later on my way around my waterfall curb, where the stench flows, I think the same folks who planted the magnolias and hollies later planted mountain laurel along the banks of my mountain waterfall.

I guess the waterfall alone just wasn’t good enough for them or they had just decided to try to cover up the horrid stench below them.

Now I don’t know about these folks but I have to hope if I spent over a million bucks on the most beautiful landscape plan since the planting of Versailles, I might find myself a little bit unnerved by the rising stench from below me and wanna do something about it.

But too date, and for what seems like at least five years, the rising stench has not yet been repelled. So as of my Monday morning, I think I’m going to take a stab at figuring out where the hell this stench is coming from, what’s it going to take to fix it and see if I might be helpful to defuse “it” along the way, even if I have to pay more in property taxes to do so.

“Buddy, listen since you ruined my Otis song with you’re unnervingly bad coughing fit, I might as well tell you what I’ve found out about this Illumanti business”,  I say back to JR as I pass my second extension waterfall today.