Notes from a confused man.

First, I don’t get this ongoing business of saying the Mega-Site is in Ellabell.

It isn’t. Look at it from my perspective. Blitchton is over there on that side of I-16. Black Creek is over here on this side of I-16, and the Black Creek Post Office is further down Highway 280 (if you’re headed this way). In fact,the entrance to the thousands of acres where Hyundai is setting up shop with the LARGEST ECONOMIC INVESTMENT PROJECT IN STATE HISTORY (in case you forgot) is between I-16 and Black Creek.

Disclaimer: Unless, of course, you’re on that side of I-16. Then you should cross over I-16 to this side and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Disclaimer No. 2: It appears some folks think the whole Mega-Site thing is really in Savannah. Maybe it is and we just don’t know it yet.

Also, about the only way I can figure the Mega-Site might be in Ellabell is that it’s so big if you run up Highway 204 and go sneak up the back way somehow off Black Creek Church Road onto some dirt roads somewhere you might bump into a half acre or so of it, and even then I suspect you’ll find you’re still in Black Creek no matter what postal officials might say.

Besides, from what I understand from someone smart enough to know, the actual Mega-Site property is boundaried in that direction by Black Creek. The actual creek itself, not the community.

So to sum up this brilliant argument, which will probably get shot to pieces in short order if anyone bothers to read it, the Mega-Site is where it is and it ain’t Ellabell.

It’s in Black Creek. Or, as I like to call that particular industrial corridor where I-16 meets Highway 280, Goat Rope City.

That’s not a knock on Blitchton or Black Creek or any other community in that neck of the woods. Or the people who live in there. I know some good folks out that way.

It’s not even a shot at the various multitudes of well-groomed suits and $30 haircuts who decided it would be the best thing since sliced bread to put some industry up there in the country so truck drivers from the port could pass by it on their way around the weigh station on I-16.

But as is bound to happen, one thing led to another – and another, like freeport tax exemptions. Said measures, as I understand it, exempt up to 100 percent of certain taxes on certain goods stored in warehouses.

While I’m not smart enough to understand all the red tape and legal-ese, such voter-approved exemptions evidently draw warehouses to counties like flies to honey or hack weekly newspaper editors to free beer.

I suspect those exemptions had as much to do with this ongoing bonanza of gigantic storage sheds as did the usual suspects we hear about, like wonderful schools and a work force that just can’t wait to start driving forklifts for $15 an hour.

Naturally, as usually happens in this sort of transaction, some benefit greatly. Others not so much. And many of us – me included – just have to learn to live with it or win the lottery and go fuss about something else somewhere else.

But this part of the South is running out of somewhere else, as the world keeps coming this way looking for a slower pace of life and speeding things up down here in the process.

Still, there’s bright side or two to all this as we head full tilt toward wherever it is we’re all headed.

Ah well. As my much missed Dad used to say whenever I got too whiny, “look at it this way. They can kill you but they can’t eat you.”

One thing to look forward to is that a couple decades or so from now, during a rush hour as we sit in traffic backed up on Highway 280 and Highway 80 all the way from Savannah to Statesboro to Claxton and beyond because some poor semi wound up catching fire and blocks all 16 lanes of I-16, thus turning all four counties in the Savannah Harbor- I-16 Joint Development Authority into one molten pile of gridlock, some of those cars and SUVs not going anywhere anytime soon will probably be electric and made right up the road, or down the road, if you’re over there instead of here.

They’ll help save the planet, if there’s any actual planet left to save.

To quote the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” a 1980s lament that strikes me as being about development: “They called it paradise, I don’t know why. You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.: Here’s another bright side, for some. By then Bryan County will have a Chic-Fil-A, maybe even two. So pass some wiffle fries.