Aging punks too lazy/cheap to dye their gray/white hair descend on Folly Beach
I fear that Trump’s propensity to amp up his descriptions past hyperbole’s red line might be politically contagious.
A sampling of blaring Trump[eted] overstatements from the last debate before the election:
Our energy policies are a disaster.
Your regulations are a disaster, and you’re going to increase regulations all over the place.
We invested in a solar company, our country. That was a disaster.*
Not surprisingly, these “disasters” have transformed our once great nation into a hellscape where billionaires have to scarp over a higher percentage of their wealth than they did before Obama to fund health insurance for the poor.
Carnage!
Kiawah Island, the barrier island just south of Folly.
[cue impatient cough]
Okay, okay, okay, back to my main point concerning contagion. Folly Beach’s mayor, whom I like just fine and would vote for tomorrow, has declared last weekend’s city-sanctioned Carnival street party known as Folly Gras “a disaster.”
You can see footage of the festivities here (with the extra attraction of hearing a soundtrack featuring the Wild Tchoupitoulas).
Trigger warning. If inconveniences and non-lethal foolish human behavior drive you to despair, you probably don’t want to read the following list of off-putting occurrences that when totaled = disaster.
The Post and Courier reports that Department of Public Safety Director Andrew Gilreath cited numerous problems with the festival, where his officers arrested 21 people and wrote 29 citations for “[l]itter, extreme drunkenness, disorderly conduct, underage drinking, public urination, narcotic use, indecent exposure, drunk driving, etc.,” [. . .]. “We could have arrested 100 people and not made a dent, and that was just within the confines of Center Street.”**
C’mon, Tim. Remember Hugo? That was a disaster. The Japanese earthquake that destroyed the nuke plant was a disaster.
Words matter. What we had last weekend on Folly was merely a shitshow – or in the words of the Public Safety Director — “a perfect storm that happened because of the combination of sunny skies, unseasonably warm 80-degree weather and the popularity of the festival.”
Folly after Hurricane Hugo
*Writing tip for today: “Disastrous” can be a handy, economical adjective for writers wanting to liposuction flaccid phrase-fettered verbs-of-being like “are and “was.”
** No telling what those aging hippies on the dirt road section of Huron were up to!
You Do Hoodoo 
I hate the way they use buzz words to talk to each other like Liberals don’t watch the news and hear the same speeches Republicans do. Mayors of all people shouldn’t have a vocabulary deficiency. On a later note… Good GOD! I’d forgotten how bad that hurricane was. I remember as a kid watching my parents send dry ice trying to help after a tree went through the house my paternal grandparents’ house, but the pictures are IN-SANE!!!
Yeah, Rodney, Hugo was a bone fide disaster. And Folly was much less mauled than the Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island.
Did you see Center Street on Sunday morning? The cleaning trucks Saturday night broke down, there was so much crap, and a whole lot of it was left for Sunday. We’re back to 18-year-old binge drinkers plunking down cases of beer and getting staggeringly drunk. We’ve been there, done that. Unless we figure out how to stop it (banning drinking on the street would be a good start), everything we gained from banning alcohol on the beach will be wiped out. It may be a teeny weeny disaster, but it is a disaster – or perhaps a big challenge.
Hi, Susan. I agree it’s a mess — a big challenge.
Sounded like it was a hoot!
Sorry I missed it.
Hope there’s a next year. Thanks, Austin.
Tell ’em to check out Las Ramblas in Barcelona on any given night…