The Internet Is A Bad Neighborhood

 

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 short update posts on The Road and The Trail and periodic updates about my next novel.

Thank you for reading,

Chris M. Vise

 

The Absence

 

A church in Greensboro, Georgia. Photo by me, March 2026.

Above is the handsome 19^th 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.

Welcome To Gay, Georgia

 

A homecoming of sorts for me. Photo by me, February 2026.

I may have never been to me (hat tip to Charlene and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert), but I can now say that I have been to Gay.

  

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.

Dispatch: Accent In My Pocket

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.

Uncommon In A Common World

 

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.

This was the song.

There was also what I wrote on December 23, 2025 and it now has an extra level of meaning.

 

Update March 5, 2026

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.

  

The Half and The Whole

The 1980s. Photos by my mother.

 

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.

 

Painted Walls: Good Trouble

 

Photo by me, January 2026.

A mural of the late John Lewis, U.S. congressman from Georgia and civil rights activist, seen in Warner Robins yesterday.

The words read: 

"The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is this most powerful non-violent tool we have in democracy."

"Good trouble" was a phrase that he was well known by during his time in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 

The mural is located on U.S. Highway 129.

 

2025 Review: Preppies In The Snow

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.

When I was writing Dweller On The Boundary it was one of the primary songs I used to manipulate myself into the emotional headspace needed to go there. My books always have a soundtrack. I listened to it on repeat along with Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes (for the worst memories), Bread's If, Boz Scaggs' We're All Alone (probably one of the songs for my funeral - just sayin'), The Greatest Love of All by George Benson (the best version and it will make you cry), Sailing by Christopher Cross, King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger from The Police, Steal Away by Robbie Dupree, Supertramp's The Logical Song, Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind and others before writing and during breaks. I abused the hell out of myself to write that book.

Thank you for the music and memories. Chris Rea was 74.

Saturday in the Fall at the High

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Photo by me, November 2025.

 

The city was alive on a fall day on the first of November. There was a crispness in the air and spots of color in the trees except the ginkgos which awaited their seasonal cue to turn a brilliant yellow. People were on the sidewalk and there was traffic on the northern end of Midtown above 14^th street. I arrived at the High Museum to a large wedding taking place next door at the fine stone First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta built in 1919 with stained glass windows by Tiffany and Nicola D'Ascenzo. An event was taking place in front of the Woodruff and it was bustling in the plaza outside the doors of the High. Atlanta was its better self and not shooting itself in the foot for a change.

I have been coming to the High since I was a child in the mid 1980s only a year after the gleaming white, curving Richard Meier designed building opened in 1983. Forty-two years later, I still like to admire the building and imagine it filled with exciting treasures from around the world. It has not lived up to those dreams, but I have seen some interesting touring or special exhibitions in my lifetime. The permanent collection outside of the modern and folk art has never inspired me. The architecture of the building rises higher than the art contained within. 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The atrium and the ramps that spiral around it are my favorite part of the building. As a child it felt like something special waited at the top, but the reality is that is that it is mostly scowling, unfriendly and bored security guards. 

Photo by me, November 2025.

I do not think they want you to enjoy this art unless you bring a ladder with you.
 

Somber corner. Photo by me, November 2025.

In 2018 the galleries of the permanent collection were redesigned and that was unfortunate. The galleries went from open, airy, spacious and easy to move through to cramped, darker and more prone to bottlenecks around blind corners. Some of the placement of the art is odd too. I found a Rothko painting hanging in a small, dark corner like it was an unloved lost child while much lesser known and important artists were taking up better spaces. The curatorial choices were very curious. Do not even get me started on how the museum treats photography with its dungeon basement gallery with low ceilings and a feeling reminiscent on an eighties office park for telemarketers. 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

The folk art of Georgia artist Howard Finster is the highlight of the folk art gallery. Putting his religious messaging aside, I find undeniable happiness in his work. He makes me smile.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

In the modern art galleries I was disappointed to find a sculpture in front of the Alex Katz painting of the trees and the bench moved far away. I cannot remember a visit where I have not sat on that bench and gotten lost in the trees. It was a kind of ritual of mine. The sculpture is a distraction and does not relate to the trees. Also, while the ceiling is beautiful, the lighting is far too dim now.

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Cramped and dim like a hallway at Grady Hospital. Photo by me, November 2025.

After browsing the permanent collection I came to what brought me to the High, the special exhibition Viktor&Rolf Fashion Statements. The exhibition features the avant-garde fashion designs of the Dutch duo Viktor & Rolf and runs through early February 2026.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

From the No collection, Autumn/Winter 2008-2009.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

From the Bedtime Story collection, Autumn/Winter 2005-2006.

Photo by me, November 2025.

I have been to a number of fashion exhibits at the SCADfash museum, also in Atlanta, but this was my first at the High Museum. The museum did a phenomenal job with the presentation and it was fun.

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

From the The Fashion Statements collection, Spring 2019. The collection was inspired by social media. 

There have been numerous fashion exhibitions of Victor & Rolf since 1994 in Paris and around the globe. This marks the first one in Atlanta. Their work makes for good entertainment.

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

As much as one admires the craftsmanship and imagination, I enjoy the sense of humor present in these pieces.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

There is a debate, perhaps less common these days, in the art and fashion worlds about whether fashion should be considered art. Karl Lagerfeld thought they were separate worlds. I do not have a firm opinion on whether fashion should be considered art, but I do enjoy fashion exhibitions at museums. The debate reminds me of the 1970s and whether photography was art and whether it was worthy of being collected. Sam Wagstaff was an early collector of photography and was instrumental in getting photography accepted into the art world. Wagstaff was also a lover and patron to Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom would die of AIDS; Wagstaff in 1987 and Mapplethorpe two years later.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

There are also sketches and photographs included in the exhibition. I loved that wallpaper. If department stores put as much as effort into their displays as they once did then I could see using a wallpaper such as that.

Photo by me, November 2025.

From the Monsieur collection, Autumn/Winter 2003-2004. 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Though it looks like it would be very heavy to wear, I was taken by this design. It has a post industrial, Eastern Bloc chicness. 

Photo by me, November 2025.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

The space was wonderfully designed and lighted. The clothes popped from the background.

Exhibitions such as this one offer the viewer fantasy. There is some snobbery too, is there not always at an art museum, as this is not an exhibition featuring Abercrombie & Fitch clothes. Though I would certainly enjoy an exhibition of the fashion photography of A&F from the 90s too.