A Helluva Long Time Ago Time / August and Everything After

Photo by me, August 2026.

These are random summer thoughts between estate sales, walks, morning intravenous coffee drips, mowing grass, climbing trees with a chainsaw, reading restaurant reviews, making earnest comments on Reddit in the GenX sub, texting with an ex as he read every single one of my books in real time and reading expiration dates on the yogurt at the Trader Joes in Athens since it is really the only place I feel comfortable in my Birkenstocks sans socks or Doc Martens. They are the kind of thoughts that could have been a scrambled social media posts. Here, they are assembled into something like the opening guitar on Blister In The Sun until the drum hits. The hip might call it a "banger."

Filed under tear down this wall: What is like to live your entire life in the place you were born and to watch everything change around you? Do you change? Do you see two realities in which one eye sees the present and the other sees the past and it blurs together? Are you comparing what you knew with what it became? I found myself asking these questions after I looked up someone I knew long ago and noticed all they did was post Facebook comments on news articles about the past. They were not a historian or a researcher or even a history buff, they were just a crank complaining. Ice cream shops in shopping centers were not meant to last forever, no matter how significant it was for you to get sprinkles on your ice cream with mommy at Allen's in the eighties. No monuments will be erected other than in your mind.

The key party scene in the 1997 movie The Ice Storm.

Filed under a song that sounds like a 1970s key party during an ice storm (nod to Rick Moody's novel The Ice Storm sitting somewhere on one of my shelves): At fifty-three I find myself struggling with the occasional urge to become an old person with old thoughts. It could be the adjustment to wearing bifocals or maybe that rash on my forearm is an allergic reaction to the use of Autotune in modern music. It would be easy and boring to complain about change, politics and lean into yelling at the cumulus. Yet, if you wish to raise a fist at the stratus then I suppose it is your right to do so. Lowered fist at my waist, I care more about my mind more than I do my face. Of course, we were all cute, pretty, handsome or beautiful as teenagers in that helluva long time ago time when the light of youth fell perfectly on our hair. Either way, I am rebelling against old people thoughts in the spirit of Generation X who really did drink from the water hose as children. If there is a fountain of youth then it might be found in the backyard attached to the house, but I am not going to test it.

The other day, sensing I was living out a Radiohead song, not the key party one, I put on a shirt from Brooks Brothers, looked in the mirror and nodded in satisfaction. It was not act of concession to time, but an act of acceptance. I keep reminding myself to drink more water, not from a hose, and try not to get bothered by the overuse of “liminal” and the misuse of “myself” on the internet and when I hear young people speak. So I open another bottle of Trader Joe's Natural Spring Water, shrug off the old age aches and stare through my bifocals at the growing number of polo shirts in my closet. I do not wonder where the time went, but where it will go.

Filed under reality bites: A couple of weeks ago, 99X fired everyone except Will Pendarvis. I figure his days are numbered too on Johnson Ferry Road, but I hope not. The modern day oldies station may soon be a memory and everyone can lift at lighter into the air one final time as Pearl Jam's Black fades out. In the 1990s, on my twenty-first birthday, I watched a stripper in a Fulton Industrial Boulevard club disrobe to that song. I still get chills thinking about it. Vedder's voice smoldered in the dark smoky club and the dollar bills were flung far and wide. I find it hard to imagine that Vedder used jiggling naked flesh as inspiration in writing Black, but then again.

From the documentary about the Toynbee tiles.

Filed under “resurrect dead” from the Toynbee tiler: I recently heard an AI version of You Oughta Know as sung by AI Kurt Cobain. The world can implode now.

Filed under far fetched: Hotel booked and I turned off the third episode of The Shards after ten minutes. The cables suspending my disbelief reached their maximum load. No one lived like those high school kids in the eighties and the actors all looked thirty. The soundtrack was the real winner.

Filed under I like odd people and dancing in torn sheets in the rain: I have known only one other person who knew and liked Leona Naess (Charm Attack rocks). He was an art school drop out from UGA who wanted to be a professional photographer. He was also the only person I ever knew to get a black eye at Boneshakers in Athens. He was an Augusta boy, the son of a doctor, who turned up in Midtown Atlanta for a few years before realizing he was too weird for it. You could be pretty weird in Midtown, but not that weird and certainly not with any intellectual bent. He took off to New York. He might not have been weird enough for there, but he was an southerner and that made him exotic, at least he had that going for him. Last I knew, he was living in Bushwick with roommates and working at a noodle shop and an art gallery. The last time I thought of him before writing this I was walking in the Hollywood Hills with my mind skittering like a tennis ball between time zones.

Filed under jealousy: I spent a week reading too many David Foster Wallace essays and that was a good time. The criticisms of him have grown since he killed himself in 2008. I suppose it is easier to take a wrecking ball to the brilliant when they are dead like a burned out cathedral.

 

MTV The Real World

Filed under the most overused song in the MTV show The Real World in the late 1990s: Last week, I stepped on the patio and that was not significant in and of itself. The early morning storms had passed and coffee was making. A rain cooled wind swirled across my bare arms. I smiled. A weed of a memory sprouted and I was in the parking lot of an off-campus apartment twenty-something Augusts ago in Auburn. The air was buoyant and water dripped from the tall pin oaks. I was in between bands of a tropical storm spiraling poleward out of the Gulf of Mexico. My friend Ben, an engineering grad student, waited inside his War Eagle apartment in another storm. The water logged tree branches hung low in the orange sodium lights creating a net of molasses shadows that trapped the beaded water on the trunk of my car. I smelled the ocean, it was as if Destin was a fragrance that had been doused over everything, I thought of how confused Ben appeared without his glasses and how I hated the cheap highway motel smell of his apartment. I put my phone away, climbing the stairs without gripping the wet railing. I was moving through a good time in life that I would not fully understand until I was older and had grabbed that wet railing. In a couple of years Ben would join a Southern California cult. He tried to recruit me not understanding that I was never one for groups. In frustration I had yelled at him over the phone in one final life preserver rescue attempt. The line disconnected and he went deeper into the cult in Oregon. The coffee maker chimed. Memory over.

Filed under Season In Hell with Rimbaud: I have been holding back over the summer, internet hibernating and if I am honest (I could lie if you desire), I hate summer humidity. Seventeen Augusts ago I was section hiking the Appalachian Trail. After several hours and miles I decided it was time for a break on a rock outcrop before a steep ascent. A spring flowed nearby and the ferns, moss and mushrooms were happy on a southeastern facing slope. Not being a fern or a mushroom or moss, I hated the humidity. I do not believe there is a hell, but if there was a hell it would be designed after August in the Southern Appalachians and it would be a wet heat. Humidity was marked on my list of dislikes forever. I humped twenty-one miles that day.

Well, as I have learned, it is okay to hate things, live in other places outside the city limits of the past, not to hike mountains in August, like David Foster Wallace, make lists, smell like Destin, not be sentimental, be weird in Augusta or Athens or New York but not Atlanta, avoid cults, go without glasses, hate AI and wear polo shirts in your fifties. Drink your water. Ready the lighters for 99X. Please learn to use “myself” correctly and for the love of my sanity stop using “liminal.”