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.

The Old State Capitol of Georgia

This Gothic Revival beauty stands after 200 years in a small east Georgia city. Photo by me, November 2012.

This was parts unknown for me in the Fall of 2012 as I traveled south on U.S. 441, crossed Lake Sinclair and arrived in Milledgeville. Other than Augusta I had never been or passed through the east central part of the state. It was a pretty drive south past the farm lands as I traveled from Interstate 20 with the occasional hill and town but mostly wide open spaces on the way to one of the former state capitals of Georgia. Georgia has been around long enough, a British colony in 1733 and a state since 1788, to have had more than one capital city - we Georgians can be a fickle bunch. I live in the current capital so on that perfectly sunny and warm October day I wanted to see the one that preceded Atlanta.

Before state lawmakers took residence under the gold dome in Atlanta this was their home. Photo by me, November 2012.

In 1804 the Georgia legislature voted to permanently relocate the state capitol from Louisville to Milledgeville. Construction began in 1805 for the new state capitol building in Milledgeville and it opened in 1807. It turned out to be not so permanent as Atlanta became the state capital in 1868.  

It was also here that the Georgia legislature made its most tragic mistake in its history in January 1861. The convention to secede from the Union over slavery was held in this building. It was not an immediate decision and several votes were held as legislators were divided among those in favor of secession and those who were Union loyalists. One vote was as close as 166 to 130 in favor of secession, but the final vote in favor was 208 to 89. 

Despite what might be taught, portrayed in the media or people may believe, the South and its citizens are and were not a monolithic block. After the legislature's vote and during the American Civil War there were protests, riots, desertions, militias loyal to the Union formed and a distaste against the war among some of the populace in Georgia. Demands to put the secession to a vote by the people of the state were ignored by those in power. As one newspaper in South Georgia put it, "this has been a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Fools who still today fly the Confederate battle flag or erect monuments have never spoken for all of us in the South and likely understand very little of this region's complex history the same as those outside the region who believe in stereotypes.  

Photo by me, November 2012

Architecturally, the building was different from most state capitol buildings of that period in that it did not have a domed roof. The Gothic Revival building looks more like a fortress or castle than what comes to mind when one thinks of capitol buildings. I quite like it. Instead of a dome it has a pointy clock tower in the center. The lancet arch windows are elegant and the arch is repeated again on the face of the clock tower.

Photo by me, November 2012

Originally budgeted to be built for $60,000 by the time is was finished with additional wings added and renovations it cost $200,000 to complete or $5.2 million in 2012. Though the building was occupied in 1807 by the legislature, it would not be finished until 1835 and today what you see is considered to be the finished product. The building is made of brick that was manufactured in Milledgeville. The walls are reportedly between three to four feet thick.

The crenelations along the roof line add to the look of the building appearing as a fortress or castle. Architect Henry Hamilton is responsible for the crenelations and the two additional wings added to the building in 1828 and 1834.

The north portico that faces out onto Greene Street. Photo by me, November 2012.

The west entrance and stairs to the building. Photo by me, November 2012.

The south portico. Photo by me, November 2012.

The east face of the building. Photo by me, November 2012.

The granite stairs and the porticoes were added to the building in 1835. These additions to the building were designed by Charles Cluskey. Based on illustrations I have seen of the building prior to the steps and porticoes being added it would appear that one would have entered the building one level below from the floor you enter today.

Satellite imagery from Google Maps.

In this satellite view you can see how the capitol building was built in the middle of the square and was originally surrounded by green space on all four sides. This was a fairly conventional landscape design during the time for capitol grounds. Milledgeville like Savannah was planned out with squares and with a gridded street layout.

Photo by me, November 2012.

This is one of the sidewalks leading out from the capitol building in a linear line. This one heads in the direction of South Wayne Street. The lamps posts provide a nice visual aide in guiding the eye off into the distance, I bet they look nice at night.

The old state capitol building looks marvelous today but it has been beset by many unfortunate occurrences. You could say the building might be cursed - it suffered a fire in 1833 to the roof,  an 1894 fire in the clock tower, and in 1941 it had a serious fire from faulty wiring that did extensive damage. Another $8,000 in damage was done when Sherman passed through on his March To The Sea campaign during the American Civil War.

In 1871 the building served as the Baldwin County Courthouse and in 1879 it became the property of the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College which was later changed to the Georgia Military College in 1900. The building today is still the central piece of their campus.

Photo by me, November 2012.

Photo by me, November 2012

These are other buildings that are a part of the Georgia Military College campus. The buildings occupy space on the former capitol grounds and mimic the architectural style of the old capitol building. You can visit the old capitol building which today houses classrooms, a museum and still contains the house chamber from when it was the State Capitol Building of Georgia. 

For a historical perspective here are a couple of photos of the college's football team.

1907. Image courtesy the state archives of Georgia.

And from 1940. Image courtesy the state archives of Georgia.

And of the cadets in uniform before the old capitol.

1887. Image courtesy the state archives of Georgia.

 

   

1915. Image courtesy the state archives of Georgia.

One final historical photo from 1941 looking through the gates which are still there today.

1941. Image courtesy the state archives of Georgia.