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 periodic updates about my next novel.

Thank you for reading,

Chris M. Vise

 

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.