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| Statham, Ga. Not the love shack, but a nod to the B-52s from nearby Athens. Photo by me, April 2025. |
The last weekend of April, the sun was
strong, almost summer strong. It was Sunday and we loafed into the
town of Statham, Georgia, fifteen miles outside of Athens on the old Atlanta
Highway. Father John Misty played on Bulldog 93, the local
alternative station. In my mind thoughts turned over about
an interview with the late writer David Foster Wallace in which he
stated that what great artists do is “fracture reality.” I am not a
Foster Wallace fan or disciple. I am of the mind that if one dared look, reality is fractured plenty and it is the job of the writer to
make something of that chaos. The uncomfortably smart Foster Wallace
was by his own admission and by contrast an anti-realist writer who
thought of himself as avant-garde and postmodern. Yet, I did like his
phrase, fracture reality.
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| A funky little shack. Statham, Ga. Photo by me, April 2025. |
We had passed through Statham a few times and never stopped, but this day it was our destination to browse through an antique store with creaky floors and that old building smell of spiced, slow decay that I enjoy.
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| Photo by me, April 2025. |
Statham, founded in the late 1800s in Barrow County, was once a railroad stop and cotton town with a hotel. The trains stopped stopping and the town is now mostly known as a speed trap. Those shiny police cruisers do not pay for themselves after all and if they could find a way to ticket the freight trains, they might. I saw more cops than citizens that Sunday as I stood on the treeless sidewalk wanting for shade. I looked around and decided this town waited for a reason to still exist other than for writing tickets to people going to Athens from Winder and vice versa.
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| "Sometimes even now, when I'm feeling lonely and beat, I drift back in time and find my feet down on Main Street," Bob Seger in the 1977 song Mainstreet. Photo by me, April 2025. |
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| Photo by me, April 2025. |
The antique store, as it turned out, was like most antique stores with few antiques and old discarded stuff piled up that was better suited for a flea market. Such is the story of modern antique stores that are anything but. The business model of these places is dependent on nostalgia which they hope will bite you in the ass like a hungry chigger and make you buy something you do not need. Maybe it is that old Hess truck you had as a boy that you left outside in the rain and mud and forgot about by the time you turned nine years old? Or maybe there is a dish your mother or grandmother had and cooked some Betty Crocker casserole in the late seventies or eighties? As if buying that Corningware with the pale blue flowers will satisfy an inner hole that cannot be filled. Are you craving that beef stroganoff over noodles yet? Antique stores in old railroad towns and the vintage shops in the city prey on that weakness. Whether it is a good deal or has any value depends on how deep that sentimental hole is inside you. But let's not lie to ourselves and call these items antiques and I will never not feel silly calling this stuff "vintage," as if I were brainwashed by a lazy, idioctic social media influencer recycling "content."
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| The Statham train station. Photo by me, April 2025. |
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| "Going back to a simpler place and time," Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips 1973. Photo by me, April 2025. |
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| Looking in the direction of Athens. Photo by me, April 2025. |
In 1991, when I was eighteen, I bought Stephen King's Needful Things, in hardback no less, and now I was reminded of it. This was not Castle Rock, Maine, but Statham, Georgia and maybe there were similarities that Sunday afternoon. I would reread the book if I had not lost my copy in a flood from a tropical storm twenty years ago. As a teenager I read everything by King and put him on my bookcase alongside Dickens, who was my favorite writer. One day I sense that I will walk into an antique/vintage store and find another copy of Needful Things on a dusty shelf and I will fight against the urge to buy it. Thirty-two years have passed since that book was published, so that must make it an antique?
People my age, in their 50s, are likely
missing the design aesthetic of American Colonial Revival that was
all the rage around the Bicentennial in the 1970s. Hell, I live in an
American Colonial Revival house. You know you want a faux wood eagle
with spread wings on the wall, a sailing ship on the center of your
mantle and a wood cabinet stereo that is big enough to double as a
coffin. This was when Americans were proud to be Americans; we loved
our fireworks, disco and short shorts and it was before colonial and all of its variants
became dirty words. It was also before that pandering, awful Lee Greenwood song had
ever been thought.
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| The center of Statham and the center of a moment of my nostalgia. Photo by me, April 2025. |
America was great, I thought as I stood
at the “very center” of Statham and I did not need a politician or a patriotic country song to remind me. Here is a wild thought: maybe it was better in the 1970s? In some ways it was and others not.
People must come from all over
Barrow County just to see this monument and rub their finger across
it in awe as I did. Statham must surely have a reason to exist and maybe one
day people will line up for selfies in this very spot like they do at
that deodorant stick looking monument in Key West. Until then, this is the fractured reality.
Elton John - Philadelphia Freedom
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