When the Vietnam War ended I was two
years old and for most of my life there has been a continuous stream
of Hollywood movies, documentaries, video games and books produced
about that war. Though, it does seem that in recent years the United
States media fascination, appetite and hangover from that war has
waned as my parent's generation dies off. My generation, Generation
X, was too young to be drafted into the war or remember much about it
from first hand experience and many members of my generation were not
even born, instead we experienced it vicariously through
entertainment, school education and personal family histories.
The U.S. failure in Vietnam seemed to
be the war that was always in the background somewhere at the edge of
the dinner table or always on the screen through the eighties,
nineties and 2000s haunting the American conscious. With that much saturation and consumption of a
war I thought I had heard, read or seen every angle on Vietnam
possible.
I was scrolling through documentaries
one evening last week and decided to take a chance on an unfamiliar
title. It was a quiet documentary reminiscent of the type that aired
on the PBS Independent Lens series in the early 1990s. It was not
flashy, punctuated with dramatic music at every turn of the plot or
littered with quick jump cuts or drone shots that pollute modern
documentaries with worn out style over substance. With my attention
captured, I realized I had not heard every story out of Vietnam. I am
not certain there is another unique story that has been told like the
one laid out in the 2022 documentary, Jimmy in Saigon.
Filmmaker Peter McDowell returns to the
late 1960s and early 70s to tell the story and delve into the mystery
of his eldest brother, Jimmy, who he only knew in death and family
silence.
Jimmy dropped out of college after his
junior year, was drafted and survived his tour of duty in Vietnam. He
made it back home, something sixty-thousand American soldiers did
not. It was during his time in Vietnam that Jimmy changed and
possibly accepted or discovered who he was. He returned to the United
States, but instead of staying, a man who was lost returned to Saigon
not as a soldier, but as a civilian. A man full of youthful idealism
shed his suburban, upper middle class family in Champaign, Illinois
to live immersed in South Vietnamese society.
But why?
He could have easily been a ghost at
the edge of the dinner table or staring back at us from a war zone on
a screen, but he is not. Through the process of storytelling we view
Jimmy's early life through family home movies. We see his family
snapshots too and ones he took during his life in Vietnam. He is very
much alive in the film visually and through a voice actor reading his
letters to friends and family. I got the impression that one day,
Jimmy was going to write a sprawling novel based on his life and if
not, then he was going to have some fun stories to tell.
Still from the film Jimmy In Saigon.
Though impossible to get the full
picture of the person Jimmy was or may have become, the film fits
together enough pieces to form a portrait of why this story and man
is so unique and compelling. Through decades of passed time, a war,
differing cultures, changing attitudes, some lingering prejudices and
fragments of recollections by those who knew the young man in Saigon
we understand what happened and who Jimmy was.
To answer the 'but why' it took opening old wounds of a
delicate family history which reveals an even more delicate secret. Halfway through the film comes the big reveal and when it
comes I give immense credit to the filmmaker for his honesty. His
mother at one point says, “but to have all that come out now, um
well, I don't know what I can do. I can't do anything. I do think,
I'll probably die.”
This is a film not only about
what we hide from others, but from ourselves.
This week I watched the first two
episodes of the HBO docuseries Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult. I
am eager to see how they conclude the series in the third episode and
what is left out as plenty has been left out in the first two
episodes which have focused a little too much on the former model
John Hoyt, a.k.a. Hoyt Richards, and his perspective on the cult
Eternal Values run by Frederick von Mierers, a.k.a. Freddy Meyers
from Brooklyn.
Mierers was a social climbing fraud who
died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of forty-three in Manhattan. After
plastic surgery and illness, he looked to have been much older like
an orange candle that had been lit, allowed to melt for a time and
blown out before becoming a puddle of wax. His cult combined aliens, healing gemstones, tanning beds, poor interior decorating choices, fraud, a
god, astrology and sex, which all cults eventually devolve into,
including Times Square hookers and dildos on Fifth Avenue. There was
also a lake house on Lake Lure in the mountains of western North
Carolina, which too, seemed to have been designed by unicorns on acid.
There is much poor taste and poor decision making on display in 1980s New York in this series than you would find in a small town gay bar in Kansas.
Frederick preyed on the gullible, young and allegedly intelligent people who graduated from Ivy League schools, came from posh families and a few
models of both sexes. They were preppy clones and undoubtedly each had copies of The Official Preppy Handbook from 1980 under their pillow. Frederick used the models and their connections to
further recruit more members to worship his messages spread from
piles of teal and pink throw pillows in the 1970s and 80s. The goal
was money and power for himself, of course. And trips to Studio 54
too.
Given the time period, the social
climbing, Manhattan and the connection to Studio 54, I said to myself
that Andy Warhol must have been connected to Frederick von Mierers in
some way. As much as a star fucker and as connected as Warhol was to
anyone with money, glamour and some sleazy people too, he had to have
known Frederick in some capacity. I grabbed my copy of The Andy
Warhol Diaries and began to search.
My copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries. June 2026.
It did not take long.
Wednesday, May 9, 1979
The Du Point twins came in and Brigid
told them that Freddy von Mierers had called and put out of the word
that he was going to send the police after them if they didn't return
his two sweaters. They turned bright red, and she told them not to
come around anymore since they steal. Dropped Rupert (cab $4).
It is interesting that he referred to
him as "Freddy" and not Frederick. Freddy was his real name. Warhol was
not dumb and I wonder if he knew all or part of Freddy's less than
aristocratic background from Brooklyn? It is also possible that
Warhol was friendly and familiar enough with him to call him Freddy
and not by the more proper Frederick. Freddy was also knowledgeable enough to check Warhol's Factory in his search for the Du Pont twins
who were socially connected to Warhol.
That was the only mention in Andy's
diaries. He loved to gossip in them and to find only one mention of
Frederick von Mierers would suggest that he was not close to him or
was around him briefly. Warhol as odd as he may have been was not one
to join a cult, but he did get into healing crystals in the mid
1980s. He mentioned them several times and referred to them as
“Harmonics.”
On Tuesday, December 18, 1984 there was
this one funny entry:
Ran into one of those kids from Harvard
in the sixties, one of Edie's friends, I can't remember his name. And
I showed him my crystals and told him about crystal power and he was
just standing there with his mouth open. He said he couldn't believe
that someone as smart as me would start believing in crystals after I
made it all through the sixties and everything and laughed at all the
hippie stuff and that this is just the recycle of it. But really it's
not the same, and you do have to be positive, not negative.
Warhol did a lot of rationalizing and had peculiar habits, but at least he was not a cult leader in the 1980s.
Cult leader Frederick von Mierers on Hard Copy.
For more on the Eternal Values cult you can watch the original early 1990s Hard Copy tabloid show report which is partially used in the HBO docuseries. Back at the time, everyone considered Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Inside Edition and all those other syndicated afternoon tabloid shows to have low journalistic standards. In retrospect, they produced hard-hitting reporting when compared to what passes for news today at the local and network level.
The March 1990 story on the cult in Vanity Fair.
And you can read the original Vanity Fair story,East Side Alien, from March 1990 that was the first to expose the cult.
Listening to the 1983 synth-pop album
Red and Blue by Cee Farrow I feel like I am sitting with a cosmopolitan or martini in
one of my old Atlanta haunts, Red Chair a long, long time ago. Red
Chair is ancient history and I faded out of the nightlife scene ten
years ago this year. I had my fun, have no regrets and I am grateful for having my fun when bars and clubs were different.
Today, there does not seem to be a
sleek, stylish, moody and masculine decorated gay bar (not a club)
left in Atlanta that just plays music and pours drinks. A bar that is
fashionably slick, not trendy, and it feels like you are wearing
sunglasses indoors in the middle of a Human League or ABC music video.
Halo, in the basement of the Biltmore,
fit that mood many years ago, but the music tended to be more ambient
and trippy lounge (think Hotel Costes) which was cool too. Halo
became something very different in its last years before it was
finally put out of its misery.
One of those blurry nights at WETbar. Photo by me, August 2006.
Oh, there was the sleek and long bulldozed for student housing WETbar too. I
spent many a night making that short walk from 6th and W.
Peachtree to Spring and 8th. We had it pretty good in gay
Atlanta in the 2000s. Everything changes and they label it progress. Well...
Yeah, happy gay pride and all that this June 2026.
Cee Farrow.
Cee Farrow, real name Christian
Kruzinski, was a Frankfurt born model who emigrated to Los Angeles in
the early 80s and recorded one album. Red and Blue was a commercial
flop, but the single Should I Love You? reached number 82 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart. It did not help matters in terms of sales
and promotion that the record label, Rocshire Records, was seized by
the federal government in 1984 and shut down.
Commercial success is not an indicator of talent or lack thereof and I like the album for what it is and not what critics thought it should be. My favorite songs on the album are
Touched, Wildlife Romance, Should I Love You?, Paint It Blue,
Backwards, Lost and Memorized and Think of Me. These are all songs
that fit within the context of being played in my favorite type of
gay bar where one could sit alone, think and drink, mingle with
friends or pick up a stranger on the way out the door.
With his music and modeling career
over, Christian did what one does as a former singer and model if one
wished to continue a glamorous lifestyle and became involved in the
club scene. He was associated with The Apartment, Maxx and Arena in
L.A. up until 1990. He released a final single in 1991 called
Imagination and it too had no success.
Christian Kruzinski.
Cee Farrow, Christian Kruzinski, died
in 1993 of an AIDS related illness. He was only thirty-six years old.
He is one of the too many AIDS victims who should be remembered and
celebrated this June.
My first book on the shelves at Barnes & Noble in 2020.
In response to changes in the
publishing and bookseller marketplaces over the last year there has
been a strategic reorganization of my ties with certain book sellers.
This realignment is also about readers having the easiest access to
my books at the best price. Inflation has increased prices on the
backend of the industry with higher printing and distribution costs
eating away at author royalties over the past year. I have been
mindful that substantial price increases are unwelcome news to
readers and I have done my best to keep my books priced at a
reasonable value.
In May, I severed direct ties with
Barnes & Noble and Apple Books. My books may still be ordered
through Barnes & Noble or found in select store locations, but
they are distributed by Amazon to Barnes & Noble. With that in
mind, it is easiest to order direct from Amazon for the best price
and fastest shipping. The hedge fund owned Barnes & Noble has unfortunately taken a more adversarial approach to indie writers and publishers in the last year under its latest CEO. That same CEO has also said that he would be willing to sell AI generated books and that is a slap in the face to all writers who are committed to writing the best books they can for readers. He has since tried to backtrack on his statements, but the truth is out there.
My decision to end my publishing
relationship with Apple was after an assessment of their minuscule
share of the book retail market. Their limited reach was no longer
worth the effort and resources to maintain that relationship.
My
new arrangement with Amazon means that Ebook versions of all my books
are now exclusive to Amazon Kindle.
If you have enjoyed my books please
share them and tell people about them. Every writer, no matter how
great or small, writes to be read. Also, I ask readers to be kind
enough to submit authentic reviews and ratings on Amazon.
Thank you to my readers for your time
and understanding. I am hard at work on my next novel. I may also have a surprise for later this year.
On a recent road trip coming northward
out of Sarasota we detoured to Jacksonville. After the time in
Jacksonville we were in an awkward spot to get home to northern
Georgia. If only using the interstates to travel it would have meant
going out of the way westward on I-10 to I-75 or heading north on
I-95 to I-16 in Savannah and then getting on I-75 in Macon.
Logistically it made no sense. I decided the old fashioned way of
studying a map and choosing back roads was the better option and
would be more interesting. Off we went across the Okefenokee Swamp in
southern Georgia zigging and zagging through Waycross, Alma,
Hazelhurst and many other towns. It was a fun drive, with no traffic
and no stress. I would do it again and maybe change it a little to
see new towns unseen.
I am still attempting to visit every
one of the one hundred and fifty-nine counties in Georgia which is
the second most to Texas in the number of counties. I do not have
many left as I have visited well over a hundred of them. On this trip
I added Bacon, Appling, Jeff Davis and Dodge counties to my total. I
feel like I have been to more counties in this state than the
politicians that claim to represent it.
On the drive I kept thinking about
simpler and saner times. Country roads have a way of stripping away
the man-made artifices, modern technology and information overload
and the troubles of the world that really have no direct bearing on
my life. The roads passed through the endless pines, the green
fields, by the barns, over the creeks, rivers and swamps and by
houses large and small. I like to think of the countryside as reality
and cities as artificial bubbles.
The American flag at rest on Broad Street in Monroe, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.
When President Carter died in 2024 I
watched his funeral. Some of my motivation was a sense of obligation
since he was, like me, a son of Georgia, but mostly it was admiration
that made me watch. Carter's presidency has felt like the end of
simpler and saner times in part because it was the end of the 1970s
and also because of the person he was, the son of a South Georgia
farmer. His funeral was more than his own, it was the funeral of the
last vestiges of simpler and saner times in America and decency too. I would like to
think that one day this country will be sane again, but that would
require both sides reversing their charge to the extreme ends of
politics and returning to where some of us live in the middle.
I have no hope of it happening. I love this country, am proud of it,
but I think we are fucked by both sides who are too blinded by their smugness and self righteousness for the foreseeable future and perhaps the remainder of my life. It did not have to be this way.
"Nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time." - James Joyce writing about Dublin, Georgia on the opening page of Finnegans Wake.
Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.
Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.
Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.
I recently stopped in Dublin, Georgia
in Laurens County for the first time. I had a good dinner in their
pleasant downtown. The restaurant was busy, people were out on the
sidewalks in the evening and it was good to see another small Georgia
town's downtown thriving.
Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.
Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.
Later, before making the final leg home
we stopped in the square of Monticello. It is another small Georgia
town with a downtown that thrives. I have watched several sunsets in
the past few years from that square on my way back from other places.
The back roads seem to take me through there no matter from where I
was coming. There is something so peaceful and calming about that
square at sunset. The world feels okay there.
I have noticed this many times, but in
small towns life still feels sane and normal for the most part. There
is a great divide between small towns and the cities much like
American politics. It is in cities and large suburbs where people
ignore out of fear or complacency the crazy, the bad manners,
incompetent drivers, dangers and the growing incivility of American
life. Small towns are where the life and the country I knew growing
up still exists in large part. It is weird for me to feel this way as
it requires me to admit that I was wrong for decades of my life when
I thought cities were better.
I wish American cities were cleaner,
safer and more polite, but they are not and it should not be
tolerated or accepted and yet it is. Is it apathy by the citizens,
the local governments and police? Yes and it is up to them to take
responsibility and solve those problems. In bad neighborhoods people
say to look the other way and are told to mind their own business.
Looking the other way is cowardly and shreds any sense of community
which leads to bad neighborhoods. If taking care of one's community
is not minding one's own business and is not in one's own best
interest then nothing is.
Somewhere near Milledgeville, Georgia
John Cougar Mellencamp's Small Town played on the radio. I sang
along. I thought about my mother, she was a huge Mellencamp fan. The
world was okay on that back road and in that reality.
Me on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. April 2026.
With that written and after walking
miles around a lake on Monday, I am putting my long form blog, Notes from Rabbit Tobacco Field, on indefinite hiatus. I am deep into
writing my next novel and I do not have the spare mental capacity to
keep writing long form posts for a blog. I have to concentrate on
novel writing.
Another reason, is that I do not desire
for my blog to become what I disliked about the men of the previous
generation who talked back to the television news and complained
about everything. I notice the men of my generation do it on Facebook
or other social media and I find it negative and annoying. I do not
want to contribute to that type of discourse on the internet nor
waste my time consuming it.
Also, I have been pulling back my time
from the internet in general. My use of the internet for any purpose
has declined significantly over the last year. I spend very little
time on the internet surfing or browsing as if I have seen the end of
the web and it is suffocated with bots and AI. The web I started with
in the mid 1990s that was human, cool, interesting, filled with
originality, was mostly friendly and not so commercial is dead and
has been for a long time. The greatest invention for the average
person in my fifty plus years of living was ruined. It did not have
to be this way. The internet became the ultimate bad neighborhood.
Finally, I like my privacy more than this blog. The internet's influence on society and the current
politics are enough to make a person become a misanthrope and to be
thankful for the gates that we have control over.
This website is not dying, but changing
and will still serve as my primary outlet for my books. I will keep
posting periodic updates about my next novel.
A church in Greensboro, Georgia. Photo by me, March 2026.
Above is the handsome 19th
century Presbyterian church on Main Street in downtown Greensboro,
Georgia. Last week I admired it from the curb. The proportions of it
were perfect and I could not stop looking at it. It is inevitable
with me when I admire an old building I think of the quality of the
construction and architecture. I wonder why construction and
architecture became lazy and cheap and we stopped building quality
buildings. I am not alone in this thinking, nor is it novel, plenty
of others agree with me. Even churches, which should be
inspirational, are today mostly built like aluminum metal shacks,
more interested in quantity of square footage and parking spaces over
quality. It is not as though constructing a building was any easier
in the 1800s than compared to today. I suspect one of the reasons for
this degradation in architecture is speed and the desire to have
everything faster despite it not being better. Clothing and music are
the same too.
Back to my moment in the sun on a
weekday afternoon in the grass in Greensboro. What I remember most
about that moment was the peacefulness. It was not quiet as
Greensboro hummed along beside me on the street, but it was the
absence of loud intrusive noise. There were no explosive car
mufflers, thumping bass stereos pumping out aural garbage (I am still
waiting for a car to pass blasting Mozart or Bach at extreme levels)
and there was no cell phone conversation pollution. The streets were
not empty, it was a nice day and pedestrians walked and cars and
trucks rolled by, but all of the ugly, antisocial modern noise was absent. It
was so absent that I noticed it.
Perhaps it was a rare moment and
Greensboro, founded in the 1780s, is plagued like every other place
with rude noises, but as someone sensitive to noise, it was like time
travel to more quiet and civil times. My age is showing, I suppose, I
had the same feeling about the absence of noise standing on a dirt
road in Oglethorpe County near Smithonia several weeks ago. In that
moment on the dirt road, all I heard was the wind in the trees and
that has been my favorite moment of this year so far.
...................................
Yesterday there were snow flurries at
home. It has been awhile to see flurries flying in March, the
transitional month of winter to spring prone to wild and
temperamental swings. It was nice.
...................................
The cast of the Czech movie Waves.
I watched the 2024 Czech movie Waves
last night. It was stylish, smart and entertaining and in stark contrast to
most every movie nominated at last weekend's Oscars. Modern American
movies are not appealing. They are as degraded by speed, laziness and ugly noise as architecture, music and
clothing. This is the era of the absence of taste and civility. I realize I am missing an American culture that no longer exists or it does and I do not see it represented. The more a culture becomes cheap, loud and emotional then, the more unstable and less intellectual it becomes.
I would be lying if I did not admit
that I had a good laugh as a gay man when I entered the town of
Gay, Georgia. You cannot go through life without a sense of humor and
if one does not possess one then it must be a miserable existence. On
a mild winter day driving south on Georgia Highway 85 through
Meriwether County I laughed a few times passing through Gay. It does
not take long, maybe five minutes if you get stopped by the town's
single traffic light, to pass through the town of Gay but I was born
into a lifetime of gay life and happily so. As a Georgia native and a
minor geography/history nut, I had known about Gay most of my life,
but I had never had the opportunity to pay my respects.
Main Street Gay USA. Photo by me, February 2026.
On seeing the town, I realized Gay was
bigger than I expected. I was expecting a tiny community with one or
two buildings, but instead it had a small strip of commercial
buildings on its main street. It would appear that Gay was long ago
a vibrant little town. Its highest population was according to the 1920 census
when it had 290 residents. Since that height it has lost roughly
two-thirds of its population.
The single Gay traffic light. Photo by me, February 2026.
Might make for a good YMCA and make my dream from when I was a little boy in the late 1970s of being welcomed by The Village People come true. Photo by me, February 2026.
Gay has not dried up and blown away in
the last one hundred and six years despite the population loss. Though on a
nice Thursday in the middle of the afternoon it was dead with no one
around except the occasional car passing through.
Today, Gay has two gas stations, a post
office, brewery, an antique shop, city hall, fire station and a fancy ass restaurant/farm/accommodation run by a Michelin starred chef. Perhaps due to the name of the town it has been seen in the Netflix
version of Queer Eye, season three of another show I have
never seen on Netflix called Barbecue Showdown and some of the 2022 film, that I also have never seen,
called Till was shot there. For a town of 110 people according to the 2020
census that seems like a lot. Also, twice yearly is the Cotton
Pickin' Fair, which for Meriwether County seems like an odd fit since
very little cotton is grown there as the county ranks eighty-six
among the ninety-two counties in Georgia that grow cotton.
Imagine a rainbow mural by the doorway. Photo by me, February 2026.
Not all roads lead to Gay, but some do. Photo by me, February 2026.
That is Gay, Georgia, a small place
with a happy name along the back roads of the American south. Taking the road less traveled does make all the difference.
Sometimes the world is so flat it feels like you could slip free of Earth's gravity and slide off. Early February on the road. Photo by me, 2026.
The tail end of January and the
beginning of February was two weeks on the road, sometimes dirt
roads, of the south. It was the winter thaw for the mind collecting
new sights, sounds, scents, tastes and discarding the mental plaque
of the previous year. I wore my accent when needed, gave nods of
indifference to strange politics of strangers and found myself
shooting the shit in the middle of the road with locals. I wandered
for hours through another history museum, watched water flow and
listened to the birds in the trees. There was lots of bad coffee in
gas station travel cups too. Some of the experience might end up in a
book or maybe in a blog post. I thought a lot about the death of an
old best friend between the mile markers and the hash marks on the
speedometer. I wanted one more stupid teenage argument with him for
the fun of it. This is how life and death go as the inseparable pair that they are.
Columbus, Georgia. Photo by me, February 2026.
I came home to bulbs waking up from winter and sat behind my desk. It was time to get back into the rhythm of writing my next novel.
Golly gee. Tell me about them lyrics son. You are one pontificating rascal, that's what you are.
Somewhere I was in a bookstore and
noticed in the prominent displays by the door a stack of poetry books
with the bedraggled face of the hammy actor Matthew McConaughey. He is the actor/renaissance man who straight guys of my generation have crushes on and secretly wish they were. As
you can tell by the sepia toned cover photo Matthew is a man with
deep thoughts with his half open shirt and is surely in the running
for a Pulitzer. Poems & Prayers is exactly the book that the world
does not need, but it is what it gets. Traditional publishing is on a mission to destroy and humiliate itself in the most shameless ways. I hope he
publishes a cook book next. Maybe something called Corn &
Coca-Cola.
I read this Atlantic piece on Rod
Dreher. It was interesting as the writer attempted to portray Dreher
as some noble romantic fighting to save the soul of Western culture
from Budapest, but instead he seemed miserable in a fantasy world of
his own making. I have only read a few pieces by him over the years,
though I have known about him for a long time, and Dreher is a
peculiar one. The slipping in of the line by the brilliant and highly regarded atheist Richard Dawkins about him being a “cultural christian”, which I am
familiar with, is intellectually dishonest with the usage of
“declared” as if it were some major proclamation from on high (it
wasn't) and it is very troubling for the use of “ally” (it is
laughable to suggest he is, since Dreher is anti-science) and there is
zero context given. I remember Dawkins saying that remark either in a debate or interview and it was not a grand gesture as it was a
reference to how he was raised during his childhood without a choice
on the matter. I respect and agree with Dawkins more than I ever
could with Dreher. The tone of the article seemed to be a weird
attempt to launder the ideas of Dreher and position him for future
shadowy political influence in the United States.
Most of Carlton, Georgia. All five of these storefronts are occupied by this one antique store. Photo by me, February 2026.
One day well east of Athens in Madison County near the Elbert County line we stopped in the tiny community of Carlton clinging to life next to the train tracks. It is the kind of place you have to pull off the main road and intentionally seek out or you would never have a reason to pass through. Few people do as evidenced by the population change from 1900 to 2020 that was a loss of fourteen people in one hundred and twenty years down to two hundred and sixty-three. I find it charming that communities like this have managed to survive safe from Atlanta's sprawl. I remember when places like this were the norm in North Georgia outside of metro Atlanta in the 1980s.
Photo by me, February 2026.
This is the kind of place you have to dig, maybe get a little dusty and you will be rewarded. Two buildings down to the left next to the post office is a local branch of the Hell's Angels. I suppose they will not bother you if you do not bother them.
Photo by me, February 2026.
You do not know the smile and warm feeling I had when this jukebox played Don't Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle. I skipped by like the small child I was in 1977 when my mother would play this record on our living room stereo which was near the same size as this jukebox.
Photo by me, February 2026.
A cat strolled through on its rounds as I flipped through a copy of the photo book Warhol and Friends.
Photo by me, February 2026.
It was digging paradise where prices are rough ideas.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Another day I attended a festival in downtown Athens and tried to shake loose a ghost. That old best friend of mine who recently died lived there in the early 1990s while he attended UGA. He went off to New York afterward to work in historic preservation. Athens of the '90s was a different place from the Athens of today, kind of like most of the state. It was one of the hot music scenes at the time like Seattle.
This is REM performing live in their hometown at the 40 Watt (pictured above) in 1992.
And so it goes...
Me. February 2026.
on the road with an accent in my pocket chasing those sunny days.
Christ Episcopal Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia. It is the most peaceful place in the state. Photo by me, April 2015.
Oscar Wilde wrote an essay in 1889
about art and life and their relationship to each other. He wrote,
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
I am sorry to say that Wilde may have been correct.
This week I went back through my notes
for earlier this month. I wanted to see what I was doing on a
particular day. I was motivated by the recent death of a childhood
best friend. I try my best to be rational in an irrational world.
Coincidences, like their cousin conspiracies, are random connections
of patterns the human mind uses to attempt to explain what we do not
understand, or so, I would like to believe. Coincidences are easy
filler for gaps in our knowledge, or are they?
Believe is an important word.
Merriam-Webster defines it as, “to consider to be true or honest.”
It is the kind of word that the foundation of our daily life sits
upon. Humans believe in all kinds of things, such as that the sun
will come out tomorrow or that when I turn this door knob and pull
the door it will open.
Coincidences like “signs” are
something I can go along with more than full-blown conspiracies, but
I am a skeptic in my heart. I am the type of person who believes in himself more than anything that exists outside of me. I have been this way since I was a little boy running through the New Hope woods in the 1970s. Then the last week happened.
When I was told my old best friend had
died two weeks after his birthday, I knew instantly something else was awry. It worried me. Days later and I cannot shake this feeling. It has me spooked. It is like like living in an episode of In Search Of.
For the last year I have been writing a
book that is one hundred percent fiction. I began
writing this book in January 2025 and the idea originated in the fall
of 2024. One of the primary plot
lines in this book is the death of the main character's childhood best friend just after his birthday and
the aftermath. That plot line drives everything in the book and it serves as the scaffolding from which it rises.
Those were the first coincidences.
Like every writer or artist, I draw
upon experiences from my life, either consciously or subconsciously.
Something I spend a lot of thought on is character names. Sometimes
the names have a hidden meaning, but more importantly I want the names to match the
images I have in my head. The names for this book were easy to pluck
as I had strong images formed in my mind of what they looked like and
their personalities.
One of the main characters is named
Evan and the book is written from his perspective. The name was also
the middle name of that old childhood best friend of mine, the one who had
just died. I recognized the connection when I named that character
and it gave me pause at the time in 2025, but the character was not
intentionally named after him. I liked the name. I saw the character looking like a
young Andrew McCarthy in Mannequin and my old friend did not
look like that.
The name Evan was an old piece of
information stuck in my head. Since he was someone I was close with,
I knew his middle name. He knew mine too. It may sound strange that
two teenage boys would have conversations about middle names but we
did. I told him my first and middle names came from a television
commercial. I did not care much for my middle name as I thought it
was too common in my age group. On the contrary, he was proud of his.
He thought it was uncommon like his first name and he was all about
being uncommon in a common world. He was an only child and a small part of
his natural disposition was his belief that he was exceptional.
That was the next coincidence.
In my notes I found that on January 14th,
I worked on two scenes in two chapters. Both scenes were emotionally
heavy and I relied on an old trick of mine that I have mentioned before. In order to manipulate
myself to write these emotional types of scenes, I listen to music
that suits that mood. This is a trick I use on myself to get into the
needed emotional frame of mind. I listen to the music before I write
as I cannot write to music with lyrics because I am afraid I will
steal lines without knowing it. A song popped into my head that morning that
worked for me and I put it on repeat. I probably listened to it fifty
or sixty times until I was down to where I needed to be. I had not
heard or listened to the song since the early nineties, when that
band and style of music went out of fashion.
I wrote a scene that I had been putting
off. It was a funeral scene on St. Simons Island in which the
childhood best friend has died. I also rewrote a scene in which two
characters discuss faith in society as Evan is going through an
existential crisis. The other character asks if Evan is going on "some
weird spiritual journey." It is intended to be humorous. Evan mentions
a song (the same song I had listened to before I began writing that
morning) and uses it as an example of something from the past he kept
hidden. He explains that he believed his childhood best friend would have made fun of
him and how he saw the meaning of the song differently in his early fifties. He
recognizes the absurdity of what he is saying, but he is not
convinced if it really is absurd. As I was writing that scene, I did
have my old best friend in my head and was using his mocking
reactions to some of the music I liked as a teenager as inspiration.
After I worked on those two chapters, I
set them aside and have not touched them since.
Nine days later, I was told my old
childhood best friend with the middle name of Evan had died. I read
his obituary. He died January 14.
I have lost track of the amount of coincidences in what I wrote and what happened.
After weeks of thought I have decided
to change the name of the main character of my next novel. At this late stage,
two-thirds of the way through the first draft, I do not like the idea
but it is necessary. I do not want that character which was not based
on him or named after him to share a name. One reason is that there are too many
negative memories associated with that name. The second reason is that it does not feel
appropriate. My other reasons are not for this forum.
He would have made fun of me for this with a sardonic grin slashing his face. The quip would have been witty and mostly meant in good fun. He would have said
that I could do this better than I am. That is okay, I would have deserved it.
I would have called him a pretentious snob and he was
sometimes. In a moment we would have argued about which Japanese car
was the best. He always said it was Mazda, he had one of those before
the Mustang. The Mustang that stomped me racing down Marietta Highway. I would have defended my Datsun Z, it was prettier, sleeker and it was mine. Teenage pride and stupidity in a double helix. We thought we knew it all and we knew nothing.
Saturday morning, I put the peanut
butter jar in the kitchen sink instead of the pantry. I made coffee
without water. It was that kind of shock that cracks up the icebergs of sleep and messes with the timeline of waking life. Who cares about a winter storm on the way or whether your socks match?
He went on to a great life and it is
terrible for his family to lose him. His life and happiness were too short and that is not
okay. What do you say? The longer you live, the shorter your time seems to
become?
This feels like an epilogue at the end of a book and
it sort of is. He was half the character of Elliot in my books. He was also a real whole person in my life and many others.
The
last time we spoke was too long ago, when he was in New York and it
went poorly. Our problem was irreconcilable. I should have left the
last memory of him at graduation on the football field, not that that
was great either, when I turned and walked away after that
conversation. That is okay too, it has to be.
I cannot be selfish or possessive of an old friend. This is not about me. What thoughts I have are the equivalent of memories shared in the dim passages of a funeral home with neutral wallpaper. Have a seat on the imitation Victorian sofa next to the dusty fake flowers, it might comfort you. A man in a suit with a carnation pinned to his lapel will fetch you a paper cup of water. It was his life that was lost. I just picked up the echoes. It mattered, his life and death, it mattered a helluva lot. I could say more,
but most of the important words have already been written and were
hung in the warm air of a June night on a Paulding County football
field. There are no regrets. I remember those stupid times, those great times. I remember
him as the best friend I did not deserve, but he was lost long ago between the couch cushions of time.
"Chris, don't be as maudlin as an NBC after-school special," he might have said while opening his trombone spit valve on my shoe. "Now, can I borrow a dollar for the concession stand?"
He died on a Wednesday.
He was 53. That is not okay and that is the whole of it.
Naughty and nice are not mutually exclusive. Photo by me, Greensboro, Georgia.
More people I have known died in 2025.
Is that too blunt or too obvious? It is not a mystery that the older
I become, the more it happens and that is the logical and detached
way to approach it. The longer life lasts the more it resembles a classic BMW in need of repairs
beyond the routine maintenance, but the backfire of death is no less
of a surprise each time it is heard. Preppies in the snow put their hands up to cover their ears and wait.
Too many people have died too
young. Dear Generation X, what are you doing ?
I read the obituaries and tried to reconcile the adult to the
kid I knew. I am often surprised to read the twists and turns of what
people became. People do change, or maybe I never knew some of them
that well past the superficial observations in a red brick school in
a country town. A boy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose,
twirled his number two pencil and did multiplication on his fingers.
A teenage girl leaned back in a rocking chair and laughed too hard on
the wrong beat as she tried to grasp the conversation of adults. What
did we learn?
Funerals are the wrinkles on the face
of a life. Gray hairs in the mirror are the honest rebels stealing
from the self-image that mistakenly thinks you could still pass for
thirty. Forty? Not even. Whatever the kids are listening to and
whatever slang they are inventing is whatever the kids are listening
to and saying. Translators are not made for that duty. You still think 2006 was a week ago as you tune into
99X or River 97 and drum your fingers on the steering wheel to
Everytime You Go Away by Paul Young. You squint at the red light that
is poorly timed and notice that the restaurant that was there on the
corner your entire life is now a vape shop and tattoo parlor serving
burritos without a permit and when did they build that Dollar
General? Only yesterday your child was six and you were late for
soccer practice.
The end of a year always makes us consider time and where it went. The mind has difficulty with time's salamander slick and slippery nature.
Andrew McCarthy in 1987's Mannequin.
Damn the changes, damn the politics,
damn the numbing disease of cheap nostalgia and damn it all to hell,
but I am thankful that my waist size is still a thirty. Now the light
is green, the radio plays Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us and you
want to believe it. You are convinced. Traffic flows like it did
before millions moved here to ruin paradise and Andrew McCarthy sure
was pretty in Mannequin. You strain your voice singing, “We
can build this dream together.” You swear you did not once tell
that minor piece of trivia in a Thomas Drive bar in Panama City that
the lead singer, Mickey Thomas, was from Cairo, Georgia. That is Cairo
pronounced like the syrup and not the city in Egypt.
My 2025 was like sitting down to eat at a
favorite restaurant, eating my favorite foods and leaving full but
not satisfied. I do not know what it was about this year, but it
lacked novelty. There were new sights, sounds, places and aches in
the joints. I was not bored; that seems to be a condition I never
experience, but perhaps I became immune to the news, the messed-up
weather, confused flowers and the next batch of woods toppled for
luxury apartments over a Panda Express. Gas was cheaper and I spent
an hour looking for the ear hair trimmer. The year was over before I knew it.
At fifty-two, I noticed my age like a
phone notification that I could not swipe away. I felt a little
slower, less nimble and it took me longer to recharge. It now took me
two cups of coffee and a handful of Costco supplements before my
brain began to percolate in my skull. Silence for the first hour of a day was a requirement or I became the grumpy old man who I never wanted to imitate.
Home Away From Home in Fort Lauderdale. Photo by me.
The secret “home away from home” in
Fort Lauderdale was sold this year. It was a unique and special place
for sixteen years. I will miss talking to the lizards on the patio, curious stray cats and morning coffee walks to Sebastian Street Beach. I doubt we will find another place like it.
Novel 4 (it really does have a title)
came along nicely from January to December. It is something new,
something current and has nothing to do with me. There are always so
many miles in my year, on foot and by car and do not think that has
not been an influence on me. Novel 4 is the first book I did not
begin writing in Fort Lauderdale. I had a notebook of ripe ideas and
then sentences formed in my head on a cold day on the square in
Gainesville in January with a stomach full of barbecue. The
characters Adam, Hastings and Evan were born without the need for
painkillers.
Weirdest moment:
Standing on the shady side of a street in
Warner Robins outside a restaurant. That middle Georgia heat and
humidity had stolen the birdsong and my patience. A car creeped up to
me and with the sun reflected on the windows and I could not see
inside. A scratchy voice called, “Hey white boy.” I looked
without looking and gripped my phone a little tighter. The voice
called out again, “Hey white boy,” and again I ignored it. My
eyes moved behind my sunglasses and I widened my stance. I was not a
boy except for maybe in the way some southerners mean it. Three more
times the voice called with the same words. Trouble and I was no
fool. The car went into reverse and backed away with the possible intention of hiding the tag.
Favorite moment:
Watching the fog in Normaltown in
February. Yes, it is more than just a lyric in the B52's Deadbeat Club. 2025 was still goo, shapeless, untethered and iridescent. I
could have been in any moment in my life when winter was spooling off
into a gray pile of yarn. Maybe I was drifting in the early 90s with
a hole in the sleeve of my sweater and wearing a barn jacket and
boots. There was a whiff of Polo from the green bottle in the air. A
water tower was the appearing and disappearing UFO down the street. I was happy.
Worst moment: Sitting in a Johns Creek Hospital room and waiting with
my grip on the arms of a plastic chair. Helplessness bred in
hospitals is the worst.
Best Festival:
Flannery O'Connor's grave. Photo by me, October 2025.
I went to too many. It was a tie between Athfest and that one down in Milledgeville where I hunted down the grave of Flannery O'Connor. Death was on my mind at every turn this year or so it seemed.
My favorite movie:
Eddington. It satirized the times
better than any other movie that tried. It was smart and the only
movie that made me laugh out loud.
My favorite new to me music:
The White Birch album by Codeine. It
may have come out in 1994, but I had not listened to it until this year. I found it by way of Slint and Shipping News.
Cheap nostalgia at $20. My actual Bon Jovi ticket from 1989.
There is no singular defining moment to
a year, the same as there is no precise moment that defines a life.
To follow a path in the woods, return a smile, accept an invitation,
or jump from a window and roll to the ground, life equalizes the
regrets and the joys. News readers, nervous funeral orators,
biographers, politicians, historians, TikTok influencers and
novelists will lie to you. Maybe, if I am going to lie, then it was
the Bon Jovi concert at Lakewood in 1989 when I held a flickering
lighter in the air like a torch held in my sixteen-year-old hand to
I'll Be There For You, but I am drowsy from the decades of
remembering those tight jeans and how he was not. A previous lesson learned and only reinforced. All of life goes
into the dryer the same as all of it went into the washer. Moments
are agitated, churned and rinsed in the same spins until it is a soup
of consciousness. They lived, they died and some of it was good,
better than it should have been and what more can anyone want besides
more time?
What do you do with a used-up and
expired year? Nothing really. You go to bed, wake up and open the
next year. The Christmas tree comes down slower than it went up and
goes back into the attic. The mind and the hand learn to write a
different number. In a year, the preppies in the snow will come inside and gather around the fireplace again cradling whatever is the trendy drink.
Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, September 2025.
2025 is the sunset on the hood of a car
speeding faster than it used to; you cannot have it again. 2026 is a
missed call from an unknown number.
Jump scare. Yours truly. I keep Rabbit Tobacco Field dim to avoid scaring myself. Mood lighting is your friend. December 2025.
Merry Christmas, happy holidays and
have the best 2026 that you can.
And finally it is Preppies In The Snow. Ralph Lauren and Vidal Sassoon would be proud. Last Christmas by WHAM!
Addendum
All dressed in black, he won't be
coming back Save your tears, you've got years and years The
pains of seventeen's Unreal they're only dreams...
As I was putting this post to bed and
proofreading I learned Chris Rea had died. He was not a household
name, but there are not many of them in the days of niche
entertainment and the absence of a shared cultural reality. If you
are a Gen X kid/fortunate 70s child you would have heard Fool If You
Think It's Over in the summer of 1978 on Top 40 Radio. I first heard
it on Atlanta's Z-93 in my mother's Camaro and sliding around on the cold leather backseat of my father's Cadillac through the eighties on
B98.5. We had a copy of it in our music collection. I filed the song
away as a meaningful one of my childhood. I loved the song then and
still do.
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