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.
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.
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.
Udo Kier in Madonna's Erotica music video in 1992.
It is worth mentioning the death of actor Udo Kier this past Sunday. He was a pleasure to watch in anything from Andy Warhol's Dracula to My Own Private Idaho to Madonna's Erotica music video. His performances and roles were outlandish, unexpected, subversive and original. His face and eyes made anything he appeared in so much more delightful and campy. There are not enough actors and roles today for people like him. The world just became a little less interesting.
One of Kier's scenes with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.
********
After the Hunt
Last night, I finally watched After the Hunt. I liked it with a few reservations and Julia Roberts' acting exceeded my low expectations of her. If I were rating the film on a scale of one to ten, then I would give it a six and a half. Luca Guadagnino's film is not a background movie or even a good time and sometimes that is what is needed. With time I suspect opinions may shift more favorably toward it.
I am in the minority in liking this film as critics and audiences have disliked everything about it. Some probably dislike it without having seen it just for the premise alone. For those who did watch it and hated it, perhaps it made them realize how ridiculous and juvenile the moralistic and self-serving lip service that drives the current
culture and its attempts to redefine, not just re-frame, the past is.
Audiences do not like to have their cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy mirrored back at them using their own rhetoric. It still stuns me how intellectually dishonest and fearful much of the cultural discourse has been for the last several years and the stranglehold it has over so many. Such is the case in public, but in private I have found there is much more sanity and this is also one of the points made in After the Hunt.
The reservations I had were that the film needed crisper
editing, better casting in the role of the student and a less ambiguous perspective. The ending scene in the diner was unnecessary as it reveals nothing of importance in a film that runs two hours and eighteen minutes. Also, the role of Maggie, the student accuser, was a miscast. It was utterly implausible that
the
accused professor would have been attracted to someone as psychotic
and completely unattractive as the student character. In terms of perspective, nuance is fine but stronger clarity was needed in the plot.
The film has strong supporting performances by Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny. In one of the more humorous scenes, the character played by Stuhlbarg gets up from dinner without a word during a conversation with student Maggie, closes the door and begins to play loud music in another room. He had had enough of her gibberish nonsense and decided for the sake of his own sanity it was best to no longer engage and encourage her.
I rather liked the
soundtrack that many have complained about. The Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross compositions reminded me of the avant-garde work of
Morton Feldman, though Feldman was on another level.
If the 2022 film Tar with Cate Blanchett appealed
to you, as it did me, then you might like this. Between the two, Tar is the better, sharper and deeper film. I am glad that art, at least in film, is challenging people to reconsider what certain segments of western society are shaming others into believing is the truth without examination. May the spell be broken.
A storm approached, diving south from the Great Lakes, on Sunday at sunset.
Winter howled and then bit early on
Monday with afternoon highs in the upper thirties and wind of forty
miles per hour. Occasional snow flurries fell through the afternoon
on the strong northwest wind and I watched from the windows like an
excited child. It was one of the earliest times I can remember snow
this far south outside of the Georgia mountains. In the early 1990s
there was a Thanksgiving with snow showers the entire day that left a
dusting, but snow on November 10th is quite exceptional in
the Piedmont region. More significant and accumulating snow was
common in the mountains including Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet which
had a Tuesday morning low of eleven degrees and a high for the second
day in a row in the upper 20s. It was not quite so cold here at 1,000
feet with a morning low of twenty-six degrees. The first frost was at
the beginning of the month and now the first freeze is out of the way
too.
It was cold enough for quilt weather. I pulled out a quilt made by my grandmother in the early 1970s. I think of my grandparent's 1800's Victorian house and I remember how cold it was in winter in that bedroom I sometimes slept in during the 1970s. The disorder of the quilt is comforting to me.
******
Rimbaud as a man and boy.
Yesterday was the also the anniversary
of the death of gay poet and miscreant Arthur Rimbaud. He died of
bone cancer in Marseilles one hundred and thirty-four years ago at
the age of thirty-seven. I did not remember the occasion, but he had
crossed my mind while retrieving the Christmas tree from storage in
the garage. Unbeknownst to me it was the day he died. Sometimes life
is strange that way.
I do not fully understand Rimbaud
leaving Europe and never writing again for a life in exile in Yemen
at twenty-six when he had such a gift. He was part poet, lover and
explorer. It sounds romantic, but his life was not easy and his death
was a miserable one. I suspect there was some self hatred, plenty of
disenchantment and perhaps he was a misanthrope, but who is to know
for sure? There are likely abundant numbers of modern mind readers
who would like to pathologize him instead of simply enjoying his art.
I am content with not knowing everything in his heart and letting his exile
be a mystery.
“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible
landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and
poetry were laughable.
What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage
sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints;
old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of
misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales,
little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave
rhythms of country rimes.
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard
of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out,
revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to
believe in every kind of magic.”
Season In Hell, Delirum II, Alchemy of the Word - Arthur Rimbaud
Or I do understand him.
Alchemy of the Word (Altered Video Version) (video, 16 min, color, sound, 1987)
This video above reminds me of something that would have been shown on Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes MTV show during the same period in the 1980s.
I would love to see the original version of this film from 1975.
Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon
Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia
en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the
mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I
craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for
the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were
banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not
to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was
not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show,
much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves
were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.
I was digging my head out of reading
David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments
about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his
personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor.
People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have
done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are
complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one
hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early
sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved.
Standard time should be permanent time.
Radiohead has been one of my favorite
bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first
saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking
oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never
tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my
attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has
not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply
to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I
never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.
Photo by me, November 2025.
The countryside unfurled on the twisty
Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the
Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the
windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years
ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked
outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was
pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a
restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than
only three years ago.
Photo by me, November 2025.
Clouds rolled over the mountains. We
passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the
weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds
atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time
is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on
the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the
human mind is nonlinear.
We stopped at the first apple place we
saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic
in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather
and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican
made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag
theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back
closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft
beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular
place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of
apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between
us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would
buy them down the road.
Photo by me, November 2025.
The sky sagged. It was loaded with
rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were
adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a
hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of
warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The
Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone
told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not
know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and
what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not
to believe everything too.
When will the next Radiohead album be
released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans
will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that
they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to
hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me,
sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.
They are the only rock band that I do
not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their
older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on
stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in,
nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the
sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to
stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of
everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.
Internet rumors are out there that a
new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is
beginning a limited European tour this month going into December.
The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is
possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine
years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last
album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in
Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the
mountains.
Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in
the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and
warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain
darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when
it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often
the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper”
or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.”
My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down. My mother was funny, easy to be around and I
missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the
same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling
leaves.
A painting by gay painter Glyn Philpot of his friend and sometimes model Jan Erland in 1933. This painting fits my autumnal mood as it drizzles outside and I am tucked away upstairs in my office with lamps glowing on the corners of my desk. I enjoy Jan's serious gaze, the hand gripping the barrel of the rifle and the dangling booted foot of the crossed leg. The model is obviously gay too, but there is plenty of dangerous masculine potential like the rifle.
On Monday I pulled out an umbrella and
walked to the end of the driveway to the mailbox. Oak leaves were
scattered on the grass and I had to get out in the rain instead of only watching it through the windows. We have had so little rain since August. During my short walk under the tapping raindrops with
temperatures in the forties I turned over in my mind a topic I have
been thinking of for the last couple of months. I have been thinking
about camping and it resurfaced when I was in the mountains of Rabun
County last weekend.
The teacher who founded Foxfire. Image from a 1974 documentary produced by McGraw-Hill.
I passed by Foxfire on Black Rock Mountain too and it reminded me of what happened to its founder at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School and the scandal in the early 1990s that time has forgot, but that is a story for another day.
My camping gear has sat stowed away on
a shelf in the garage for the last four years without being used. I
have been too busy with the house, I have been too busy writing, I
have been traveling, I have allowed life to get in the way. It hit
me, it is very likely I will not go camping again in my lifetime. For
most people that would be okay, but it made me sad. It was part of a more significant realization too.
My brother, my grandfather and me at Lake Allatoona in the late 1970s.
I camped as a child in the seventies at
Lake Allatoona, then camped in my tree house at home and camped in a tent
in the woods behind my house in the eighties. I camped as an adult in
various places in the mountains. I loved sleeping outdoors to the
sounds of nature and a crackling fire and that smoky, rustic scent
that only a campfire emits. Now getting older or more seasoned by time, I realize that my body
would be less enthusiastic and agreeable about sleeping on the ground
or a cot. I could still do it, but I would probably not enjoy it. I
realize my limitations that have begun to settle in over the last
year. With aging, I am in my early fifties; it is natural that there
are activities and places that you will never do or see again. It is
not from a lack of desire but more of a result of practicality.
Aging has not bothered me too much, but never going camping again
bothers me.
I do not want to camp in an RV, that is
not camping but driving an ugly, gas guzzling motel room on wheels.
True camping involves a tent or a tarp or just a sleeping bag. It
means not sliding between Egyptian cotton sheets and not using
electricity to keep yourself from becoming bored or to make a pot of
coffee. It means using a fire to cook meals, heat water, to see after
nightfall and to keep warm. Camping means putting the modern noise
away and to stop existing as an overstimulated human zombie.
My tent and one of my bikes when camping in the Bankhead National Forest in Alabama. Photo by me, 2010.
Also I consider the decline of society
as civil norms breakdown and I read of horror stories of how camping
has changed. Consideration and respect for others in public has been
stomped out under heel like a dying fire and unfortunately that is not exclusive to camping. The experience of camping is not the
same with people using camping as an excuse to get drunk and party,
bring loud untrained pets, drag along loud electrical generators and
impinge on the solitude and peacefulness of nature. What's the point
of going into the woods if it is louder and more disturbing sleeping
near rude and messy strangers than staying at home?
The only viable option I could see is hiking in for miles and doing back country camping. The likelihood
of that also remains low. My camping gear will stare at me in my
garage tempting me for some time longer and for as long as I can I
will continue day hiking and sleeping at home.
Gay Pride marchers on Peachtree Street in the Atlanta Gay Pride parade in 2013. Photo by me, October 2013.
Little did I know that Atlanta Gay
Pride was this weekend. I knew it was coming up this month, but it
sneaked up on me. Every year since the 90s the question has been,
will I go or not? Since the festivities were moved to October, from
the traditional June several years ago, I have attended the festival
and parade fewer times.
The last time I went to Pride other
than to celebrate in a club or bar was twelve years ago. Not since
2013 have I stood at the corner of Tenth and Peachtree Streets, my
once usual spot, and watched the parade of rainbow flags, corporate
floats and “the community” make the turn. I have not even done
the bar celebration tour since 2016.
Aging out of the scene at forty-three
years old, combined with everyone I regularly hung out with having
moved to the far corners of the world, seemed like the perfect time
to exit. Hangovers and squeezing into Heretic and Blake's until three
in the morning are not indulgences to be proud of at fifty-two. Let
others have it and have their fun.
A gay pride logo or the Today Show?
This year's slogan, according to the
official organizers, is “Rooted In Resistance.” The companion
logo is another raised fist again this year and it has the added
bonus of what appears to be long green fingernails overlaying a
rising sun or the NBC Today Show logo. What would Bryant Gumble, Jane
Pauley and Willard Scott say about that? Oh sorry, wrong decade.
I cannot identify with the slogan or
the logo that is stamped on a community event by the official
organization. The messaging and image has a violence to it that does
not resonate with me. Where is the rainbow? Pride seems to no longer
officially represent me as being part of the community. So many
letters have been added to the community that the G for gay has gone
from being shoved to the side to being shoved over the cliff.
A truly terrible photo of me at Atlanta Gay Pride in Piedmont Park in 1998 when it meant something to me. One of too many film photos in my lifetime with my eyes closed.
If Gay Pride was born in anything, it
was in being proud of who we were, who we loved and not being ashamed
of it. “Rooted” and “resistance” are meaningless words of the
modern activist lexicon that leaves this red-blooded, rainbow-beating
gay heart cold. Gay Pride needs to bring back the G, the original rainbow flag and the celebration of love in a world sorely needing it.
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