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.

Cocoon Forty Years Later

 

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.

The White, Cold Heart of January

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!

Zone A

Photo by me, September 2024.

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.

It is a place I miss.

Dispatch From The Deep Water

Somewhere in South Florida. April 2023.

 

Somewhere in South Florida, Fort Lauderdale mostly, I write this. I am here working on the first drafts of my next novel. I am dueling with myself over whether to write the remainder of the nineties or skip it until some other time. I winged my shadow in the standoff of decisions, yet I am writing and it is the back half of the nineties for now. I really want to write about Brian and his important influence, the other Mark with powdered sugar noses and declare my answer after years of being asked to father a child for someone. The nineties made me as much as any other decade and why not tell it all from the paths that wound through Louisville's Cherokee Park to the stick lady of First Street?

The weather has been blistering hot since I arrived last week, the wind has been moody from offshore to on and nary has there been a drop of rain. The landscape is scorched dry and I sometimes believe I am in Southern California without the Santa Anna. The Mean Season will come and my cracked lips will be grateful. I cannot complain in South Florida, only observe, unless I am stuck on that fatally clogged I-95 with more blockages than Cheney's heart.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

The music that has been kidnapping my ears is from the Cure's albums: Seveteen Seconds, Faith and Disintegration. Listening to them puts me back in the seat of my Z as a teenager, afraid of going through with it with that guy with the funny hair, that sweaty handed nervousness and the guilt before I knew how his lips tasted. I need a little fear and nervousness in my head to get me to write what I need to write. I have to be back down there to touch the bottom of the pool of feelings.

 

A Fort Lauderdale canal. April 2023. Photo by me.

Back to the surface for air and a boat rips down the canal. The water parts in its wake like an undone zipper. Here I am far removed from my office, Rabbit Tobacco Field, and in another place I love that has a name too. A stray cat prowls (not a Hemingway cat), a lizard bobs its head and life slows down enough for me to spin it around in my mind to stare at it from different perspectives. I hear a fountain below me in the courtyard and around me I see a different Florida than what I knew before I ever came here fourteen years ago. This place is not a strip of road littered with Alvin's Island gift shops, put-put golf volcanoes and restaurants named after captains that serve fried seafood. This is a place I had not imagined existed in the states, but it does and this state is not a monolith or what we see presented to us in movies or the news. I cannot share the name, it would give away a secret that I want to keep for now. The name has no associations to Fort Lauderdale or South Florida or water or beaches or birds.

 

April 2023. Photo by me.

I am here to remind you that you are only as old as you feel. Though I may look old underneath my hat, SPF 1 zillion sunblock and behind my sunglasses, I suppose I am feeling pretty good at fifty after swimming against the current, walking through the dunes and getting spooked by the dolphins after being out too far. I have a long history of getting out too far into the deep water. Anyway, this little island paradise, which is not Fort Lauderdale, is my favorite beach from the Keys to Pensacola. You will likely never see me much happier than this. Life is funny … time to eat fresh oysters at this hole-in-the-wall that has walls plastered in one dollar bills signed by patrons – it can not be found on Trip Advisor or in Conde Nast Traveler.

 

 

The Cure, The Same Deep Water As You

Preparing For The 90s & The Joys Of Social Media

 

Key West, April 2021

After a pleasant time in Fort Lauderdale and Key West, I returned home to Atlanta. For those that remember what a VCR is, I am using a borrowed one to go through my archive or personal videos recorded in the 1990s. I have not seen their contents in over a decade as my last VCR died that long ago and new ones are no longer manufactured. I should have learned earlier to not rely on technology to preserve memories as it becomes obsolete too quickly.

Me in 1995 taken
from one of the VHS tapes.

This archive of tapes will be vital to what I am writing for my first novel set during the 1990s. I have my handwritten journals from the period, but watching and listening to tapes from that time is much more immersive. There are hours of VHS tape to digitize. This project is like doing research on myself.

Otherwise, I am tending to my flowers and taking regular walks. I had the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and am waiting on the second. I am glad to see the rollout of the vaccines across the country. Life is slowly returning to what it was prior to the pandemic. All of the predictions that the world never would be the same were hogwash like most predictions from talking heads in the media. I am grateful that they remain consistently wrong.

Fort Lauderdale 2021

One final word regarding my social media accounts, especially Facebook. I treat my social media like my front door. Who I allow through that front door is for me to decide. After two incidents in the last year on my Facebook with people that I went to school with in Paulding County and their acting inappropriately with me, I will state unequivocally that I do not tolerate disrespectful behavior from anyone. That policy includes people that I may have known in the past. These incidents are a good reminder of some of what I left behind and they diminish my already limited supply of sentimentality. If you come through my front door and act like an asshole, you will be treated as such and removed. The only Facebook I have is my personal one and I restrict who I allow there on a case by case basis, which is my right. I may have written two very revealing books about my life between the years of 1979 to 1991, but that does not mean that just anybody can access my current life and treat me as they wish. If you have read my first two books and learned anything about me, I hope it is that I have little reason to miss much of what I left behind. I am also cautious in how I interact with people from that same past.

Over the last several years we have cultivated an online society that behaves as though there is no real life consequence to how we treat others in this digital sphere. In this realm people lose their humanity and treat others as nonhuman entities. We forget that real people are behind these digital manifestations of humans and that is deeply wrong. I understand that some people are assholes in real life and act the same online, assholes are unavoidable, but I believe and I retain some hope that most people are not assholes in person. I know that good, decent and genuine people do exist. I have spoken with them and I have met them.

Consider this, the next time you want to act like an asshole online take a few seconds and think about whether you would say this to another person's face. Also, consider what the consequences of that action might be too.

I do enjoy interacting with readers and I welcome questions through my email address listed under the Contact section of this website. However, I do not respond to abusive or rude people. I treat people with respect, manners and kindness offline and online - I see no difference between the two realms.