My first book on the shelves at Barnes & Noble in 2020.
In response to changes in the
publishing and bookseller marketplaces over the last year there has
been a strategic reorganization of my ties with certain book sellers.
This realignment is also about readers having the easiest access to
my books at the best price. Inflation has increased prices on the
backend of the industry with higher printing and distribution costs
eating away at author royalties over the past year. I have been
mindful that substantial price increases are unwelcome news to
readers and I have done my best to keep my books priced at a
reasonable value.
In May, I severed direct ties with
Barnes & Noble and Apple Books. My books may still be ordered
through Barnes & Noble or found in select store locations, but
they are distributed by Amazon to Barnes & Noble. With that in
mind, it is easiest to order direct from Amazon for the best price
and fastest shipping. The hedge fund owned Barnes & Noble has unfortunately taken a more adversarial approach to indie writers and publishers in the last year under its latest CEO. That same CEO has also said that he would be willing to sell AI generated books and that is a slap in the face to all writers who are committed to writing the best books they can for readers. He has since tried to backtrack on his statements, but the truth is out there.
My decision to end my publishing
relationship with Apple was after an assessment of their minuscule
share of the book retail market. Their limited reach was no longer
worth the effort and resources to maintain that relationship.
My
new arrangement with Amazon means that Ebook versions of all my books
are now exclusive to Amazon Kindle.
If you have enjoyed my books please
share them and tell people about them. Every writer, no matter how
great or small, writes to be read. Also, I ask readers to be kind
enough to submit authentic reviews and ratings on Amazon.
Thank you to my readers for your time
and understanding. I am hard at work on my next novel. I may also have a surprise for later this year.
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.
Sometimes the world is so flat it feels like you could slip free of Earth's gravity and slide off. Early February on the road. Photo by me, 2026.
The tail end of January and the
beginning of February was two weeks on the road, sometimes dirt
roads, of the south. It was the winter thaw for the mind collecting
new sights, sounds, scents, tastes and discarding the mental plaque
of the previous year. I wore my accent when needed, gave nods of
indifference to strange politics of strangers and found myself
shooting the shit in the middle of the road with locals. I wandered
for hours through another history museum, watched water flow and
listened to the birds in the trees. There was lots of bad coffee in
gas station travel cups too. Some of the experience might end up in a
book or maybe in a blog post. I thought a lot about the death of an
old best friend between the mile markers and the hash marks on the
speedometer. I wanted one more stupid teenage argument with him for
the fun of it. This is how life and death go as the inseparable pair that they are.
Columbus, Georgia. Photo by me, February 2026.
I came home to bulbs waking up from winter and sat behind my desk. It was time to get back into the rhythm of writing my next novel.
Golly gee. Tell me about them lyrics son. You are one pontificating rascal, that's what you are.
Somewhere I was in a bookstore and
noticed in the prominent displays by the door a stack of poetry books
with the bedraggled face of the hammy actor Matthew McConaughey. He is the actor/renaissance man who straight guys of my generation have crushes on and secretly wish they were. As
you can tell by the sepia toned cover photo Matthew is a man with
deep thoughts with his half open shirt and is surely in the running
for a Pulitzer. Poems & Prayers is exactly the book that the world
does not need, but it is what it gets. Traditional publishing is on a mission to destroy and humiliate itself in the most shameless ways. I hope he
publishes a cook book next. Maybe something called Corn &
Coca-Cola.
I read this Atlantic piece on Rod
Dreher. It was interesting as the writer attempted to portray Dreher
as some noble romantic fighting to save the soul of Western culture
from Budapest, but instead he seemed miserable in a fantasy world of
his own making. I have only read a few pieces by him over the years,
though I have known about him for a long time, and Dreher is a
peculiar one. The slipping in of the line by the brilliant and highly regarded atheist Richard Dawkins about him being a “cultural christian”, which I am
familiar with, is intellectually dishonest with the usage of
“declared” as if it were some major proclamation from on high (it
wasn't) and it is very troubling for the use of “ally” (it is
laughable to suggest he is, since Dreher is anti-science) and there is
zero context given. I remember Dawkins saying that remark either in a debate or interview and it was not a grand gesture as it was a
reference to how he was raised during his childhood without a choice
on the matter. I respect and agree with Dawkins more than I ever
could with Dreher. The tone of the article seemed to be a weird
attempt to launder the ideas of Dreher and position him for future
shadowy political influence in the United States.
Most of Carlton, Georgia. All five of these storefronts are occupied by this one antique store. Photo by me, February 2026.
One day well east of Athens in Madison County near the Elbert County line we stopped in the tiny community of Carlton clinging to life next to the train tracks. It is the kind of place you have to pull off the main road and intentionally seek out or you would never have a reason to pass through. Few people do as evidenced by the population change from 1900 to 2020 that was a loss of fourteen people in one hundred and twenty years down to two hundred and sixty-three. I find it charming that communities like this have managed to survive safe from Atlanta's sprawl. I remember when places like this were the norm in North Georgia outside of metro Atlanta in the 1980s.
Photo by me, February 2026.
This is the kind of place you have to dig, maybe get a little dusty and you will be rewarded. Two buildings down to the left next to the post office is a local branch of the Hell's Angels. I suppose they will not bother you if you do not bother them.
Photo by me, February 2026.
You do not know the smile and warm feeling I had when this jukebox played Don't Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle. I skipped by like the small child I was in 1977 when my mother would play this record on our living room stereo which was near the same size as this jukebox.
Photo by me, February 2026.
A cat strolled through on its rounds as I flipped through a copy of the photo book Warhol and Friends.
Photo by me, February 2026.
It was digging paradise where prices are rough ideas.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Another day I attended a festival in downtown Athens and tried to shake loose a ghost. That old best friend of mine who recently died lived there in the early 1990s while he attended UGA. He went off to New York afterward to work in historic preservation. Athens of the '90s was a different place from the Athens of today, kind of like most of the state. It was one of the hot music scenes at the time like Seattle.
This is REM performing live in their hometown at the 40 Watt (pictured above) in 1992.
And so it goes...
Me. February 2026.
on the road with an accent in my pocket chasing those sunny days.
A storm approached, diving south from the Great Lakes, on Sunday at sunset.
Winter howled and then bit early on
Monday with afternoon highs in the upper thirties and wind of forty
miles per hour. Occasional snow flurries fell through the afternoon
on the strong northwest wind and I watched from the windows like an
excited child. It was one of the earliest times I can remember snow
this far south outside of the Georgia mountains. In the early 1990s
there was a Thanksgiving with snow showers the entire day that left a
dusting, but snow on November 10th is quite exceptional in
the Piedmont region. More significant and accumulating snow was
common in the mountains including Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet which
had a Tuesday morning low of eleven degrees and a high for the second
day in a row in the upper 20s. It was not quite so cold here at 1,000
feet with a morning low of twenty-six degrees. The first frost was at
the beginning of the month and now the first freeze is out of the way
too.
It was cold enough for quilt weather. I pulled out a quilt made by my grandmother in the early 1970s. I think of my grandparent's 1800's Victorian house and I remember how cold it was in winter in that bedroom I sometimes slept in during the 1970s. The disorder of the quilt is comforting to me.
******
Rimbaud as a man and boy.
Yesterday was the also the anniversary
of the death of gay poet and miscreant Arthur Rimbaud. He died of
bone cancer in Marseilles one hundred and thirty-four years ago at
the age of thirty-seven. I did not remember the occasion, but he had
crossed my mind while retrieving the Christmas tree from storage in
the garage. Unbeknownst to me it was the day he died. Sometimes life
is strange that way.
I do not fully understand Rimbaud
leaving Europe and never writing again for a life in exile in Yemen
at twenty-six when he had such a gift. He was part poet, lover and
explorer. It sounds romantic, but his life was not easy and his death
was a miserable one. I suspect there was some self hatred, plenty of
disenchantment and perhaps he was a misanthrope, but who is to know
for sure? There are likely abundant numbers of modern mind readers
who would like to pathologize him instead of simply enjoying his art.
I am content with not knowing everything in his heart and letting his exile
be a mystery.
“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible
landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and
poetry were laughable.
What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage
sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints;
old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of
misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales,
little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave
rhythms of country rimes.
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard
of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out,
revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to
believe in every kind of magic.”
Season In Hell, Delirum II, Alchemy of the Word - Arthur Rimbaud
Or I do understand him.
Alchemy of the Word (Altered Video Version) (video, 16 min, color, sound, 1987)
This video above reminds me of something that would have been shown on Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes MTV show during the same period in the 1980s.
I would love to see the original version of this film from 1975.
Summer's death duly noted in Athens, Ga. Photo by me, August 2025.
Summer died on the backs of my knees in
a cool, dry breeze this past Sunday in Athens. It was a recognition
the same as the flocks of birds beginning the migration south as they
speckled the sky of smeared clouds. It was a relief as if I had
accomplished something more than play witness to the passing of
another season. I was running errands and the surname of the
protagonist of my current novel had come to me. I had been stressing
over this not-so-minor detail for months. The last name had to sound
right or sing when spoken aloud with the first name and I had paired
numerous names in my head without success. Then in a parking lot
among the first tinges of fall color in the sugar maples it came. The
name was simple, solid and was a fine tonic to the more complex first
name. The character was fully born.
Fiona Apple's album When the Pawn...
I have been listening to lots of Fiona Apple the past couple of weeks and this happens to me most every
fall. I am the eternal fan. Her music reminds me of Louisville in the 1990s and a particular
autumn when I thought everything in life was as perfect as life could
get. I was in my twenties and foolish; what else can I say? Life is
never perfect except in small increments and the good news is that it
happens even long after the twenties are nostalgic memories. Perfect
in a parking lot in the breeze in Athens, Georgia kind of way or
perfect in the sense of appreciating happiness in victories over
creative blocks.
With perfection comes the imperfection and Saturday we attended an arts festival
on the square over in faraway Marietta. I can do without ever attending
another arts festival for the rest of my life. I am so tired of
seeing booths of the same makeshift art projects made in garages and
basements with glue guns, glitter and limited inspiration.
The book cover of Pieces of the Frame by John McPhee.
Labor Day was about getting in the
miles on the legs through the woods, reflections on a lake and
feeling fresh in the crisp air. Fall is a rejuvenator not sold in a
bottle at the cosmetics counter or in the energy drink aisle at the
grocery store. Deer foraged in the shadows and my mind thumbed
thoughts on the book I have been reading, Pieces of the Frame (1975)
by John McPhee. There was a story in the essay, Travels in Georgia,
about McPhee, Sam Candler (an heir to the Coca-Cola fortune) and
Carol Ruckdeschel (a conservationist) canoeing down the Chattahoochee
River with then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter with Georgia State
Patrol troopers as bodyguards. Carter, a country boy, a former Navy
officer and an avid outdoorsman, fit perfectly into the canoe trip,
which was meant to serve as a way to convince him to protect the land
along the Chattahoochee, which he did as President of the United
States. After the trip, the group ate grilled cheese sandwiches at a
twenty-foot table under a crystal chandelier and then played
basketball in the driveway of the governor's mansion on West Paces in
Buckhead, a thirty-room Greek Revival home I toured as a kid in the
1980s, either during the George Busbee or the first Joe Frank Harris
administration. I thought, “Well that kind of politician no longer
exists,” but politicians sure like to play up and pander to the
average common person when trying to get elected. Carter, disparaged
by people who have never done a decent day's work in their life,
unlike the phonies, was genuine. Since 1980, if you are as old as I
am, you have to wonder what people value and expect from their
presidents.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Monday wound down as I re-watched
Sunday Bloody Sunday from 1971 starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch
and Murray Head. The movie, nominated for four Academy Awards, is
about a love triangle between a straight woman, a gay male Jewish
doctor and a bisexual artist. It was the right cozy movie to start
fall with the drab London weather and scenery and what I like most
about that movie is the abundance of brown fashion.
All the world is beautifully exquisite seventies brown.
Every character
lives in shades of the color brown from scarves, jackets, pants,
coats, vests, sweaters, ties, turtlenecks and so on. The costume design was by the late Jocelyn Rickards who also designed for Blow-Up, FromRussia With Loveand many other films. She was a painter too and published her autobiography in 1987. It is very
1970s, as I remember that decade. Brown is a color not worn enough
anymore. It is a sophisticated color that works well in any season
and people should wear it. It is also the better choice between it
and another popular seventies color, ghastly orange which is best
suited for pumpkins. Perhaps the reason people do not is because it
is a modest choice and does not garner enough attention in our
narcissistic decadent times.
Other than Fiona Apple it seemed to be
an all-out seventies entertainment weekend as the season turns from green to brown.
Happy Fourth of July from Broad Street in Monroe, Georgia. Photo by me, June 2025.
It was during a hiking trip last fall and sitting in a barbecue joint in Gainesville, Georgia when I knew I had enough notes and ideas to begin writing the first draft of a new novel. This realization was a nice change from when I had stood in Micanopy, Florida in September chasing down the ghost of River Phoenix. I was undecided if I was on a wild goose chase or if I was seeking twisted inspiration. Inspiration can come from anywhere I suppose, even from long dead movie stars with bad drug habits.
The town square of Gainesville, Georgia. October 2024.
After eating, I walked around the square and aired out my thoughts like sheets on a clothes line. I had two people in mind who I had known that I could use as inspiration for characters. One was a prim and proper person and the other was a person who lived below their raising and had wasted their chance at life. These two would be among the foundational characters at the heart of the novel. I decided to set this story primarily in two places I know well, Monroe, Georgia and Athens. River Phoenix and Micanopy, Florida might still figure into this somehow or maybe not, River did spend time in Athens hanging out with Michael Stipe in the 1990s.
"The bike is the answer." Athens, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2014.
At the mid point of this year, this book is a long way from being finished and I am still writing the first draft. There will be no new book from me in 2025. Other than what I have written above, the only new tease I have for this book might be found in the Eagles song One of These Nights crossed with the mood and themes of the Chris Isaak song Wicked Game. A previous tease can be found in a post here.
A week ago, Shadow's Gravity had its one year anniversary and I updated the cover.
The new cover features a portion of a photo of my mother from the late 1940s when she was a toddler. She was holding on to the back of a parked Mercury and had dropped her toy cat.
The first gay book that I ever read was in the early 1990s and it was A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White. I nervously ordered it through the Barnes & Noble mail order catalog since there were no stores anywhere near me in rural Georgia. Ordering it through the mail also saved me the embarrassment of buying it in person in a store in Atlanta. The coming of age story was all too familiar to my own experience and it helped connect me to a larger gay world that I knew existed, but was too shy to join. My relationship to that book was likely the same as many other young gay men of Generation X and the Baby Boomer generation.
Edmund White became an inspiration to me and a personal favorite among gay writers. I went on to fall in love with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony which were also based on his life. That trilogy of novels were the model on which I based my own novels about my life as a young gay boy to early adulthood. I owe a debt to Edmund White and so do many other gay writers of my generation.
Edmund White died last week at age eighty-five in Manhattan. The obituaries and tributes spilled across the internet from across the literary spectrum and from fans in praise of his work. He was a gay literary legend and everyone in that world knew him, met him or he knew them; he was often a notorious name dropper in some of his books and interviews. White left behind a husband, a legacy of over thirty books and a rich life. He lived in Rome, New York, San Francisco and Paris during the sexual freedom of the 1970s, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, more widespread acceptance of gay life in the 2000s and he had been living with HIV since 1984. He was still writing and publishing into 2025 with his last memoir, The Loves of My Life.
In 1980, Edmund White appeared on the Studs Terkel show for an extended interview. He was promoting his latest book, a travel book, called States of Desire.
From a local perspective, Atlanta is in the book and some of his observations still have some merit today. The gay scene can be racially segregated, but much of what remains is self segregation and not enforced by discriminatory door policies. The scene, as I knew it later on, was diverse in bars such as Blake's, Heretic, Ten, Burkhart's, WETbar, Jungle and other places. Gay men were far more likely to segregate along their desires for twinks, bears, leather queens or other factors.
It is interesting Edmund, who was very open about his sexual voraciousness and desire for much younger partners, comes across as a bit of a priss and hypocrite on sexuality and ageism in this interview. There is also discussion about the 1980 gay murder movie, Cruising, which was at the time despised by gay activists because it dared show sex cruising in clubs and in the Ramble in Central Park. Activists did not like what they considered a negative portrayal of gay men even though it was accurate to some degree. I love the movie and think the activists were wrong. Pacino was fantastic in it. The film was the second gay movie by director William Friedkin, The Boys In The Band from 1970, and is a classic too.
Statham, Ga. Not the love shack, but a nod to the B-52s from nearby Athens. Photo by me, April 2025.
The last weekend of April, the sun was
strong, almost summer strong. It was Sunday and we loafed into the
town of Statham, Georgia, fifteen miles outside of Athens on the old Atlanta
Highway. Father John Misty played on Bulldog 93, the local
alternative station. In my mind thoughts turned over about
an interview with the late writer David Foster Wallace in which he
stated that what great artists do is “fracture reality.” I am not a
Foster Wallace fan or disciple. I am of the mind that if one dared look, reality is fractured plenty and it is the job of the writer to
make something of that chaos. The uncomfortably smart Foster Wallace
was by his own admission and by contrast an anti-realist writer who
thought of himself as avant-garde and postmodern. Yet, I did like his
phrase, fracture reality.
A funky little shack. Statham, Ga. Photo by me, April 2025.
We had passed through Statham a few times and
never stopped, but this day it was our destination to browse through an
antique store with creaky floors and that old building smell of
spiced, slow decay that I enjoy.
Photo by me, April 2025.
Statham, founded in the late 1800s in
Barrow County, was once a railroad stop and cotton town with a
hotel. The trains stopped stopping and the town is now mostly known as a
speed trap. Those shiny police cruisers do not pay for themselves
after all and if they could find a way to ticket the freight trains,
they might. I saw more cops than citizens that Sunday as I stood on
the treeless sidewalk wanting for shade. I looked around and decided
this town waited for a reason to still exist other than for writing
tickets to people going to Athens from Winder and vice versa.
"Sometimes even now, when I'm feeling lonely and beat, I drift back in time and find my feet down on Main Street," Bob Seger in the 1977 song Mainstreet. Photo by me, April 2025.
Photo by me, April 2025.
The antique store, as it turned out,
was like most antique stores with few antiques and old
discarded stuff piled up that was better suited for a flea market. Such is the story of modern antique stores that are anything but. The business model of these
places is dependent on nostalgia which they hope will bite you in the ass like a
hungry chigger and make you buy something you do not need. Maybe it is that old Hess truck you had as a boy
that you left outside in the rain and mud and forgot about by the
time you turned nine years old? Or maybe there is a dish your mother
or grandmother had and cooked some Betty Crocker casserole in the late
seventies or eighties? As if buying that Corningware with the pale blue flowers will satisfy an inner hole that cannot be filled. Are you craving that beef
stroganoff over noodles yet? Antique
stores in old railroad towns and the vintage shops in
the city prey on that weakness. Whether it is a good deal or has any value depends on
how deep that sentimental hole is inside you. But let's not lie to ourselves and
call these items antiques and I will never not feel silly calling
this stuff "vintage," as if I were brainwashed by a lazy, idioctic social media
influencer recycling "content."
The Statham train station. Photo by me, April 2025.
"Going back to a simpler place and time," Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips 1973. Photo by me, April 2025.
Looking in the direction of Athens. Photo by me, April 2025.
In 1991, when I was eighteen, I bought
Stephen King's Needful Things, in hardback no less, and now I was reminded of it. This was not Castle Rock, Maine,
but Statham, Georgia and maybe there were similarities that Sunday
afternoon. I would reread the book if I had not lost my copy in a
flood from a tropical storm twenty years ago. As a teenager I read
everything by King and put him on my bookcase alongside
Dickens, who was my favorite writer. One day I sense that I will walk
into an antique/vintage store and find another copy of Needful Things
on a dusty shelf and I will fight against the urge to buy it. Thirty-two years have passed since that book
was published, so that must make it an antique?
People my age, in their 50s, are likely
missing the design aesthetic of American Colonial Revival that was
all the rage around the Bicentennial in the 1970s. Hell, I live in an
American Colonial Revival house. You know you want a faux wood eagle
with spread wings on the wall, a sailing ship on the center of your
mantle and a wood cabinet stereo that is big enough to double as a
coffin. This was when Americans were proud to be Americans; we loved
our fireworks, disco and short shorts and it was before colonial and all of its variants
became dirty words. It was also before that pandering, awful Lee Greenwood song had
ever been thought.
The center of Statham and the center of a moment of my nostalgia. Photo by me, April 2025.
America was great, I thought as I stood
at the “very center” of Statham and I did not need a politician or a patriotic country song to remind me. Here is a wild thought: maybe it was better in the 1970s? In some ways it was and others not.
People must come from all over
Barrow County just to see this monument and rub their finger across
it in awe as I did. Statham must surely have a reason to exist and maybe one
day people will line up for selfies in this very spot like they do at
that deodorant stick looking monument in Key West. Until then, this is the fractured reality.
I have not been writing much on my website this year, but that does not mean I have not been thinking about it. I think about it a couple of times a week, but I have been making notes, researching (often in the field) for my next novel and writing the first draft. Writing a book takes precedence over writing on a blog.
A warm Georgia Easter Sunday in the 80s. Photo by me, April 2025.
The dark spots in the water below are turtles. I spotted at least thirty of them, but there were probably more. Photo by me, April 2025.
I have been taking my long walks in nature too, getting in the miles and enjoying the scenery. This past Sunday I saw a few deer and lots of turtles. I consider myself fortunate to be able to get out near home and enjoy the woods and not have to drive so far as when I lived in the city. The older I get, the more I cherish time away from people and the noise of society. The hubbub, the nightlife and parties stopped ten years ago in my early forties as I aged out of the scene. A person has to know when to get out and I am thankful for being out of it and being no worse for the wear. I have reverted back to how I lived as a child and that was even more rural than where I now live. My long term introverted desire is returning to the countryside where I see and hear no neighbors.
Photo by me, April 2025.
There are too many people crowded together into cities and suburbs in this country and you realize that if you ever do cross country travel by car through the wide empty spaces. When I was born in 1973 the U.S. population was 211 million people and now it is 341 million. The population of Georgia was 4.9 million and in 2024 it was 11.1 million which is more than double in fifty odd years. Georgia is the eighth most populous state and it feels like it with the traffic, the sprawl and everything in and around Atlanta being overcrowded.
The continual plowing under of Georgia for more sprawl. The conversion of GA Highway 316 between I-85 and Athens from an at grade road to a controlled access highway such as GA 400. Photo by me, April 2025.
Most every place I knew as a younger person has become unrecognizable
and that is difficult to think of as progress or being okay. I would be
pleased if people would find some other state to pave over and sit in
traffic as Georgia could use a break. The growth is unlikely to stop, but it is nice to think it could. Not only are we losing the natural landscape and the wildlife, but we are losing the quiet too.
