Flowerland on Price Avenue in the Cobbham neighborhood of Athens known for its interesting sign messages. Photo by me, September 2026.
The early 1990s are so still so
prevalent in this year's fall fashion once again and I am not opposed
to that except for pleats and boxy pants. The colors are something I
am glad to see and most of the styles too. I picked up a new pink
flannel shirt at J. Crew in the clearance section over the weekend. I
am ready for flannel, sweater and barn jacket weather. Now if I could only feel as young as I did at eighteen in 1991.
Loafing in Athens over the weekend, a
common occurrence, I thought about my work in progress novel and
changes and inspiration. I have taken a writing break during the
month of September to think and I have been out of state a lot and
that made writing anything more than notes impossible.
The beautiful Seney-Stovall Chapel built in 1885 in Athens on Milledge Avenue. If you have ever seen the 1986 documentary Athens Inside/Out then you have seen this building when it was in a great state of disrepair. It was featured prominently in the documentary and R.E.M. performed inside it for the film. Photo by me, September 2026.
Stopped in Mother Lode on Baxter for
the first time in a year or so, not my favorite store, and browsed.
It is one of those “vintage” places where most of the merchandise
is okay if you are a UGA student looking for an ironic Halloween
costume or believe early 1970s interior design was the height of home
decor – something I do not believe. I fondly remember the seventies, but not for most of the decor. When I hear someone say "vintage", I gag the same as I do when I hear "curated" or "bespoke." All of it is one long miserable smug pose.
Cutthroat from Shame
The soundtrack for the weekend was the
album Cutthroat from one of my favorite bands, Shame. They are a
South London post-punk band who have been around since 2014. Their
third album, Food for Worms released in 2023, is my favorite from the
band. Cutthroat came out a year ago this month and I am only recently
getting around to listening to it. Shame on me.
It is an odd album drawing
references from Blur, early Depeche Mode, Slint, Nirvana and of course Gang of Four. The chorus of the song Plaster reminded me of Weezer, who were good for an album
or two in the 1990s. There is still plenty of scorching pleasure and fun in
the album, but I cannot say I am enjoying the glossy and sometimes auto tuned production. The album is all over the place and is less
cohesive compared to earlier albums. Some will argue that is growth,
the band is maturing and blah blah blah, but it reminds me of
Interpol who lost their way with their fourth album. I still love the band and look forward
to hearing what turns up next from them.
The songs I like are Packshot, Spartak,
Quiet Life, Axis of Evil, Plaster and Cutthroat. Lampiao is so terrible that I
never want to hear that song again. I like six out of twelve songs
and the rest are forgettable.
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.
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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