Et Tu Harkie?

Three episodes of The Sopranos and six Coronas made August Brown realize that he too should be a warrior poet, so he rode over to the Jiffy mart and bought the winning lottery ticket and built his very own Versailles on the Tellico River. It was a striking modular home made from the finest Penteli marble that Greece could offer. The golden chain-link dog pen was a photo fave of the pale-faced touists that seemed to be the common denominator of modern Talikwa culture. August was a man of few words and that suited his neighbors just fine. He spent many evenings feeding the mosquitoes by the river and revelling in his new found fame, fortune, and free cable.

Things were going great for August until June 10, 2007, when a triumvirate of events crushed his aspirations to become a true river baron. First, the revered Tony Soprano ended their mano a mano dialogue that HBO had so cleverly disguised as a cable drama series. Secondly, a local chapter of that grand old fraternity, the kappa kappa kappas, was miffed at August for trying to build a Charles Bronson museum in town square, when everyone knew that that actor's parents were ferriners from Russia or some Red place like that. The last straw came when the local paper dropped Brown' s "Football Limericks" column in favor of namby pamby self-help articles.

The fall of August was so notorious that it has easily outlived his poetry. Faced with the loss of his own Mentor Emeritus Tony Soprano, the failure of his Bronson Museum project to gain a foothold in his fledgling community that was still bitterly aching fom alpine rejction, and the ultimate slap across the face for any man of letters-being dropped by the free paper, August was left with only one recourse; after leaving instructions with a New York lawyer for the conversion of Versailles into a Huddle House, he left his river home at ten past midnight, without a word to anyone, and moved south, where people knew what a good football limerick really was-Florida.