For the past couple of weeks I have
been writing on a side project that I have been calling Coffee,
Fudge & Guns. It is a true story about a kid I knew in the
1980s from school who was the son of a preacher and recently was
arrested for attempted murder in another state. I had some
interesting interactions with him as a kid that perhaps foretold what
would happen in his adult life. I am unsure how to end the story as I
may need to wait for further developments to finish.
The autumn weather has been fantastic with
overnight lows in the forties for the past few weeks. It has been
flannel shirt weather and good for long walks. Still no frost unfortunately. When I was growing up in Georgia in the 1970s and 80s we typically had our first frost around Halloween, but that was different climate from today. We do need rain though
and maybe that will come this weekend. I am optimistic and looking forward to the time falling backwards.
I watched The Sweet East and was
surprised at how good it was after the first eight minutes which were annoying. This film used dark humor that was critical of the
sleazy and narcissistic activist movements of the 2020s who want to
remake the United States in their own image and falsify its history.
The style is that of the period of independent film from the early to
middle 1990s and it was shot on 16mm film. It was one of those films
that slipped under my radar when it was released in 2023, the year
that the ghastly film Barbie was the top grossing film and
Super Mario Brothers was in second place – just dreadful stuff. At
least I loved Saltburn that year.
Simon Rex and Talia Ryder in The Sweet East.
The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder as a runaway teen who has a series of strange encounters with these self-obsessed east coast activists. One of those activists is played by former 1990s MTV VJ, Hilfiger model and former gay porn actor (NSFW link) Simon Rex. Rex is in a supporting role and turns in a fine performance as an Edgar Allan Poe obsessed academic with a bad dye job and a dark side. I wished his role was larger. Jacob Elordi, also in Saltburn as mentioned above, is in this film too in a supporting role.
Overall, it is a smart and interesting movie that dares to take on some touchy subjects and pisses off the humorless like 2025's Eddington did minus the big budget.
Beth Gibbons, Lives Outgrown.
It was the late autumn of 1999 when I was first introduced to Portishead and lead singer Beth Gibbons in the Castleberry Hill loft of a short-lived boyfriend. I became a fan of the band, not the boyfriend, and followed them up to their last album in 2008. Roads is their best and one of the best songs of the 1990s. Take a long drag on that cigarette, clutch that mic and sing along, "Oh, can't anybody see we've got a war to fight, we never find our way regardless of what they say. How can it feel this wrong?" I still get chills when the strings come in at the bridge.
Beth's first solo album Out of Season from 2002, a collaboration with former Talk Talk's Paul Webb, is one of my all-time favorite albums released this century. In 2024 she released her second solo album, Lives Outgrown. For whatever reason I put off listening to it until this autumn. I am enjoying it, its typical of Beth moodiness and the hungry soul lyrics. Like listening to Portishead, Beth's solo works take me out of the everyday world and transport my mind to place more dark, rich and mysterious.
I hope there will be another Portishead album one day and more Beth solo albums too.
A sale at the Historic Macon Foundation last weekend in Macon. Photo by me, October 2026.
There is a hurricane coming tonight.
Hurricane Isaias is visiting this weekend. It is also Atlanta gay
pride as I was reminded a week ago.
Last weekend I was in Macon for an
event put on by the Historic Macon Foundation. I was about to leave
for Warner Robins when the crowd parted and there appeared someone I
had not seen in twelve years like magic. It is funny how random,
small and strange life can be. Twelve years? That could not be right,
but I looked it up and yes, it had been twelve years since I had seen
him at Oscar's in Atlanta during gay pride. So much had happened in
our lives in those twelve years, he had moved to New England for a
time then moved back then moved to Macon which is his hometown. I had
left Atlanta too for the hinterlands in the direction of Athens.
There in an old warehouse with exposed beams in downtown Macon we
hugged and caught up.
“I'll be coming up to Atlanta next
weekend for Pride,” he said.
Perhaps the astonished look on my face
betrayed me as I asked, “Is that next weekend?”
“I suppose that means you won't be
going?”
I had to search my mind to remember
when I had last went to gay pride. “I stopped going out ten years
ago,” I replied.
The gay pride parade down Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta. Photo by me, October 2013.
A few days later and looking through
old photos I found that the last one I attended was in 2015 when
friends had come to visit from New York and California. The last
parade I went to was even further back in 2013. Gay Pride and
nightlife I outgrew and traded for different activities. Atlanta
changed as cities are meant to do. Pride changed with the younger
generations and attitudes and I changed as people are prone to do
with age. Yet, I realize change in relation to the city, nightlife, attitudes and gay pride does not mean progress.
Half the bars and clubs I used to hang out in have closed or
moved. Bukhart’s is now the Eagle? That does not sound appealing,
the Eagle was always interesting just for its decrepit location on
Ponce, not to mention what went on inside that dark, gritty place
that was a mix of leather queens and the most down to earth softball
playing gay guys in Levi’s.
Somewhere in my mind I have connected Joy Division with the Eagle.
Have you ever paid attention to the lyrics of Shadowplay? I am
convinced that they are about the hunt for an encounter in a gay bar,
a dark gay bar in the middle of a city. The Eagle was that kind of
place. That is my spin, my imagination and the reality I knew.
A rainy night out front of the old Eagle on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta. Photo by me, August 2012.
I do not have but a few distinct memories of the old Eagle. There was one gay
blogger, Curt, I knew twenty years ago who was this beautiful blonde
computer programmer and was always inviting me to join him there on
Friday nights when I would run into him on Saturday nights at Jungle.
“You must come. Dude, it's hot,” he would say. I doubted it was
as hot as he was. I liked the old Eagle well enough, but it was only
an occasional place for me, Heretic, with a more ready
for anything crowd, was my spot.
One occasional Eagle night, there was that young thing in a too
tight Hollister tee from Panama City, Florida with his sugar daddy.
Mr. Young Thing spun and danced like a cheerleader with imaginary pom
poms directing planes on the deck of an aircraft carrier as the rest of us watched in amusement and embarrassment for
him. It was Pride Sunday night, the night where everyone goes for one
last night to let loose before checking out of the hotel the next
morning with a hangover and their darkest sunglasses before driving
back to whatever smaller and less gay place they live. They swear
they will never do that again and after a few miles down the road vow
that they cannot wait until next year's Pride.
Panama City Beach, Florida the afternoon after when I had met those guys at Splash. Photo by me, August 2009.
I had met the sugar daddy the year before in a raucous night on
Thomas Drive in Panama City Beach in their sole gay bar called
Splash. People I had traveled with danced atop the bar and I met a
stripper I knew from Swinging Richards in Atlanta who was on a
“stripper tour” as he called it. His next stop was New Orleans. I
hung out on the patio talking with an older attorney in a suit from
Lower Alabama. He liked to talk about his dogs and cars. The next
afternoon I sat hung over on a beach towel on the powdery white sand determined to swim too far and too deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
That last visit to the old Eagle was a showery and windy August Saturday night.
Puddles collected, it might have been the remnants of a tropical
storm or hurricane that night but I do not remember, on Argonne
Avenue where I parked. I made my way up into the back entrance through
the house portion of the ramshackle place. I do remember the twink. I
was thirty-nine so I remembered twinks when they appeared. I was
embraced and kissed by a softball playing skinny twink of a stranger
on a stairwell. He was still wearing the his team's tee shirt, seemed
sweet and looked like the type that had a jungle of houseplants in a
tiny one bedroom apartment somewhere off Moreland. That apartment was
probably the first one he had after graduating college.
The Eagle that I remember would seem like an ill fit at Ansley. I
looked at the photos posted on their website and it does appear the
crowd has changed. The Eagle at Ansley appears to be nothing like the
one I remember. They are also charging anywhere from $33 to $97 to
get in for gay pride weekend. That is nothing like the old Eagle.
That is severe inflation. In the past, it was not uncommon for gay
bars and clubs to jack up prices during pride, but now it seems like taking advantage of the community. People go along with it, look the other way, complain about higher prices for everything else including basic necessities, but this goes unremarked about. Gay pride is now a luxury, VIP experience. Fools or suckers? You do not need a high priced ticket to celebrate gay pride, you can do it every day of your life for free.
I am glad to be out of the scene as I am an ill fit that believes that not all change is progress. I have brown hair, not blue,
with some natural gray. I do not have tattoos. I have never done drag
or even watched a single episode of Drag Race. I stopped
watching Project Runway after season four and that was in
2008. I am an over fifty gay man and I have other priorities. Sitting in
a bar that plays thumping auto-tuned music is as appealing as
watching Johnny from Easley, South Carolina twirl in his cut offs and
a neon green crop top until he hurls rainbow vomit in the corner next
to a meth dealer. Gay pride is no longer my scene. Hurricane or not,
I was not going anyway.
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.
Along the Pinellas Bayway near St. Petersburg, Florida. Some scenes of Cocoon were filmed in this area. Photo by me, 2009.
On a recent summer night, I re-watched
the popular summer of 1985 hit, Cocoon. The movie was released that
June and my mother and I watched it in our local small-town theater,
The Paulding Plaza. The two of us spent many a night in the late 70s
through the mid 80s going to movies together until I started dating
or going with friends. We saw lots of duds and some good movies too,
but Cocoon was a dud. I was a bored twelve-year-old watching a movie
about elderly people swimming, dancing and arguing while wearing bad
clothes. The characters were the ages of my grandparents and less
entertaining. I was eager for the credits to roll, charge up the
aisle into the lobby and throw away the empty popcorn container. My
mother and I would have discussed the movie on the fifteen-minute
drive home with the windows down letting in the cool night air. She
liked it and I told her that I did not. She probably said something
like I was too young to understand or that I was too picky. She might
have been right, but I saw nothing wrong with being picky about what
kind of entertainment I liked.
I was willing to give the movie a
chance and had reasons to be hopeful that it was going to be good.
After all, I was not just any twelve-year-old boy; I was a
twelve-year-old gay boy that was into space movies, the ocean, the
beach and my newest secret Hollywood crush, who was the same age as
me, was in the movie. It was to be the second movie that he was in
that had come out that month. I was excited to see Barret Oliver
again. I had just seen him two weeks before as the main character (a boy with a big secret) in another new movie
that I enjoyed, D.A.R.Y.L., and had liked him since
The Neverending Story.
Barret Oliver in Cocoon.
It was not to be, as I was soon
disavowed of that hope when I saw that the aliens and their spaceship
were not cool in a Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind
way. Barret Oliver was barely in the movie, appearing as an ornament
at the beginning and at the end and was absent most of the movie. In
the few scenes he was in, he looked as bored making the movie as I
was watching it, which might have been the result of the wooden
dialogue he was given and bad direction by Ron Howard, who has
directed an entire career of pablum. I felt cheated out of a good
time by the movie.
The highlight for me was the ocean and
the laid-back atmosphere of 1980s Florida that permeates the movie.
Ron Howard at least managed to capture the Florida I miss. Florida
was a different place then, more relaxing and peaceful. It was before
the state was overly built up, filled with crazy drivers who have
boiled their brains with too much sunshine and humidity and it was a
place not trying to be more than swamps and orange groves surrounded
by nice beaches with Mickey Mouse in the middle. Miami, gauche and
trashy today, was not even that big in 1985 despite how the hit show
that debuted the year before, Miami Vice, made it seem.
Wilford Brimley and Barret Oliver during a scene along the Pinellas Bayway in Cocoon.
Cocoon was
filmed in St. Petersburg, a place I have spent plenty of time over
the last two decades, second only to the amount of time I have
enjoyed in Fort Lauderdale. St. Petersburg's downtown has undergone significant
change too, but some of the film locations are still recognizable
like, John's Pass and the Pinellas Bayway/Tierra Verde/Fort De Soto
area. One can go to the beach in St. Pete and not feel as though you
are surrounded by influencers faking their fantasy lifestyle of faux
wealth and the lie of eternal happiness.
Cocoon was a bland movie about old
people who wanted to live forever even if that meant leaving everyone
that they claimed to love behind on another planet. It seemed selfish
to my twelve-year-old eyes. The old people were silly and the aliens
acted more like a cult. Forty years passed before I chose to
watch it again. This time, I would have the eyes and experience
of a fifty-two-year-old and I would watch it at home. My mother has long since died; she did not get to live forever
with aliens, and I was closer to the age of the actors in the movie.
I might have an ache or pain every now and then, or “once in a blue
moon,” as my mother would have said, so maybe I could relate to
physical human frailty. Barret Oliver has not made a movie since
1989, The Plaza Theater closed in the early 2000s and I live nowhere
near my hometown. I have always kept my love for movies and this
year, after eight years of not going, I returned to watching them in
theaters.
Sometimes my perspectives on movies
from the past change. A movie I loved as a kid might be one I like
less now or a movie I did not like then might be more interesting at
this age. The Breakfast Club, which also came out when I was twelve
in 1985, is a movie I loved then, but today a film about a group of
teenagers doing detention in a school library is as entertaining as
reading people's political diatribes on social media. Even the
nostalgia factor cannot keep me interested. I am one who believes
that tastes in entertainment should mature as we age. I find it odd
when adults, especially men, are interested in Star Wars or Legos or
collecting toys from their childhood to display. It is some sad
symptom of Peter Pan syndrome.
Forty years onward, I still did not
like Cocoon. The movie had an interesting beginning but quickly lost
itself in the waters of the fountain of youth or the Gulf of Mexico
and became sugary sweet and sentimental. It was an instant pudding
movie that was safe and the same no matter how many boxes you tasted. I
forced myself to finish it. This is a movie about selfish people
leaving the ones they love behind so they can live forever without
pain or responsibility.
Brian Dennehy and Steve Guttenberg in Cocoon 1985.
After forty years, I remain picky about
my entertainment choices. If anything changed for me, it was
developing an appreciation of the short swim trunks and nice body
that Steve Guttenberg showed off on his boat. I have also traveled Florida from Pensacola to Key West and back several hundred times and there are parts of the state I still like, but those are a secret.
A snowy view from the second floor of my house. Photo by me, January 2025.
It was only supposed to be flurries here and it mostly was for over three hours, but the atmosphere was so dry that it became a high ratio snow and it gushed. At the three in the afternoon the snowfall began it was twenty-three degrees with a dewpoint of twelve and those were unusual circumstances to produce snow around here. A typical snow here is one with a high moisture content, produces big and fat flakes, is sloppy, heavy and occurs under conditions with temperatures in the low thirties and dewpoints in the upper twenties to low thirties. Yesterday, the conditions were different with an Arctic airmass in place and the snow was dry and productive. It has been a few years since a snow of this type occurred here and when it does, it creates havoc with quick accumulations that land on roadways turning them quickly into sheets of hard ice.
Photo by me, January 2025.
Photo by me, January 2025.
The storm's arrival at rush hour stranded people on the untreated roads over the hilly terrain of this area. Cars unable to climb these icy hills were abandoned and if people were close enough to home they walked the remainder of the way. I observed many stunned and bone chilled cold people on foot coming up my hill from the river on a road that has no sidewalks, but plenty of curves.
If you are a native to northern Georgia, like I am, then you will remember
the similar scenario that occurred on January 12, 1982 and it was
called SnowJam! I was a couple of months shy of turning nine, but that was a fun storm as a kid and a horror show for adults. In some ways, it is reassuring to think that as much as life has changed in those forty-three years, that we Georgians make getting stuck in the snow a memorable adventure.
Photo by me, January 2025.
Photo by me, January 2025.
This was a minor snow here, amounting to an inch, that was a big headache for some. So far this winter, there have been five inches of snow here and within a short period of only eleven days between two storms in the white, cold heart of January. This is above average and compared to the two previous winters there was no snow, not even a flurry.
The cold has been exceptional too. This morning it was eleven degrees here and three degrees above zero in the mountain valley town of Blairsville. The U.S. Forest service stations at Cohutta dropped to six degrees and the one at Brasstown (not to be confused with the state's highest peak, Brasstown Bald) achieved four degrees. The temperature was below freezing here from 6PM Sunday to 1PM Wednesday for a total of sixty-seven straight hours. We reached a high this afternoon of thirty-four for only a couple of hours.
The U.S. snow depth map for January 22, 2025. Courtesy NOAA.
Aside from the cold, the most impressive aspect from a regional perspective was the record breaking snow from the southern tip of Texas, along the Gulf Coast and South Atlantic Coast. For most in the coastal areas this truly was a once in a lifetime storm and in some places it was record shattering.
Today's visible satellite imagery showing the snowfall through southern Alabama, northern Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.
New Orleans received over nine inches breaking a record from 1963 by seven inches.
Mobile, Alabama saw eight inches.
Snow meets beach on the Florida Gulf Coast.
Pensacola Beach, Florida had seven and a half inches.
The small southwest Georgia town of Camilla accumulated eight inches.
Milton, Florida broke the state record for the most snow ever with 8.8 inches.
Savannah reported three inches of snow, but I suspect most of it was probably sleet.
This was a rare storm in that areas further to the south saw more snow than areas of the region to the north. Atlanta's record was not so impressive as it snows there more often than
the other places listed. Atlanta broke the daily record for January
21st from 1983 with 1.1 inches. I was ten at the time and do not have
any particular memories of that snow, which was probably more where I
lived in the northwest part of the state. We may have called that SnowJam 83! as every snowstorm after 1982 for several years was called SnowJam!
It was time to come north from Fort Lauderdale and while I did, Hurricane Helene was coming north too. She and I were leading parallel lives.
A view from my hotel balcony overlooking the docile waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the day I arrived. A wedding was taking place on the beach that evening. Photo by me, September 2024.
I was in a hotel at North Redington Beach on the gulf coast near St. Petersburg. I arrived two days before the storm and the same day storm chasers and network media swooped in to hype the storm and shout catastrophic predictions. I was aware of Helene, but expected or maybe hoped that she would stay far enough out in the gulf as she headed north to avoid the worst of it. I had been in Florida in the center of a tropical storm before, but not a major hurricane. I expected strong winds and pounding rain if we could stay on the periphery of Helene's track. I was not expecting the end of the world; the internet and television gave me immunity against that way of thinking.
The next morning, a television reporter stood on the beach waving his arms like a hyperactive and malfunctioning windmill before a camera directly in front our hotel. He had forgotten or perhaps was never taught that waving and pointing your hands directly at the viewer is considered a threatening gesture and people will change the channel. He and his crew I had seen in the parking deck the day before and drinking in the hotel bar that night. He needed to hire himself a talent coach, spend less time in the gym and cruising in hotel bars.
I went for a walk along Gulf Boulevard and had coffee. Walking back to the hotel, I was jolted out of my remaining haze of sleep. A sheriff's deputy pulled next to the sidewalk and barked through a loudspeaker about a mandatory evacuation and that everyone needed to leave Zone A. I jumped out of my skin. It was like being warned at a protest that this was an unlawful assembly and teargas was incoming. My phone alerted me next with the same message. The expected storm surge was forecast to be destructive and deadly if we stayed.
Was the world not aware that I need at least two cups of coffee and an hour of quiet when I wake up before I can muster more than a 'good morning'? It was too much stimulation. I blamed that arm flapping reporter for conjuring Helene to come closer.
There was a controlled chaos at the hotel. Elevators beeped, luggage rolled carelessly over toes and the staff scurried about stowing things away. The hotel was closing up and sending all of the guests to somewhere other than there. A quick call was made to a hotel in Orlando and a reservation was secured before the rooms were gobbled up. The retreat inland was on before I even had breakfast or a third cup of coffee. My last moment at the hotel was passing the reporter and crew sorting through their gear. In their excitement I detected that they hoped for the worst, great footage, ratings gold and maybe a promotion to a bigger market. Damn the rest of us. This was their storm of the century... until the next storm of the century.
The night before, Pinellas County locals were overheard at dinner discussing the storm. They planned to ride it out saying it would not be so bad and joked about stocking up on alcohol. These were not young people being cavalier, they were in their fifties and sixties, though it can be hard to assess among sun crispy Floridians what their true ages were. Their misplaced confidence was no doubt based on past storms that just missed them or were not as bad as predicted.
They neglected to consider that the weather, climate and landscapes are not what they once were. Hurricanes are more intense, ocean levels are higher and Florida's coast lines are more perilously populated than ever. Storms of the past were not the best indicator of what the storms of the present were capable of doing.
Photo by me, September 2024.
You see evacuation signs when you travel in coastal regions of the country and you say to yourself that you will never be caught in an actual evacuation. In all of my decades of traversing Florida from Pensacola to Key West I had never been through an evacuation until I was. Hurricane Helene was a category four storm that morning in the gulf and headed to Florida.
The traffic leaving the beaches. Photo by me, September 2024.
Some people were taking the order seriously, at least the out-of-towners like us were, as the hotels closed giving us no option but to leave. We were stuck in a miserable jam through Tampa and I-4 to Orlando was a mess moreso than usual. We exited outside Tampa and took the back roads by the tattoo parlors, trailer parks, strawberry fields, miles of planted pines and people hoping to sell watermelons out of the back of an old Chevy van. It was a tour of the hidden away Florida that tourists do not see. I like to think of it as the real Florida that is swampy, often ugly and crazed by the relentless sun and humidity. The real Florida is not a vacation of seafood, the yachts of Fort Lauderdale, the morning drunks on Duval Street in Key West and sand between the toes, it is a sun beaten dream in a faded 7-11 tank top, broken flip flops and with ass crack showing from cutoffs.
Photo by me, September 2024.
Photo by me, September 2024.
Leaving Florida several days later and heading north to Georgia, there were lines of trucks from utility companies and downed trees for as far as one could see. The damage became more obvious to structures and there was limited gas north of Gainesville and into South Georgia. I thought about the people that rode out the storm on the coast. I saw what became of our evacuated hotel through photos on Reddit. The first floor was washed out by the storm surge and damage had reached the second floor. Cars and boats were washed away like the sand and the beach was much smaller than what I had stood on the week before. If we had stayed and not evacuated we would have been stranded without
power, water, sewer and cell phone service. For the locals that stayed and
survived they likely regretted that choice.
Along I-75 we stopped to take in some of the remaining tacky old Florida
that is getting harder to find with each passing storm and year.
Photo by me, September 2024.
Photo by me, September 2024.
Photo by me, September 2024.
This was the Florida I loved in the 1970s as a cutoffs and flip flop wearing kid when the state seemed like a wild adventure of clear inland springs with mermaids, jungles, dolphin shows and wide beaches with fun sized waves for my toy boats and plastic sharks. It was a wilder, bigger version of the woods behind my childhood home and camping at Lake Allatoona. It was the state before I ever knew what a Zone A was or required an hour of silence and two cups of coffee before my brain worked.
Me falling in love with Florida at Marineland in St. Augustine in the 1970s. Photo by my mother.
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