A Mock Interview

Me in the early 1990s at home in New Hope.

 This is a mock interview in which I interview myself. I borrowed the idea from a much, much more famous writer. It was a fun exercise.

 

So you have your second novel coming out this November and I'd like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

It's my pleasure.

What can we expect from the character based on your life, Chris Rhodes, in your next novel?

A less sexually mixed up character, but maybe more confused in other areas of life. The character enters his late teens and early twenties and as with many people that period is about figuring a way forward from the past.

Are you implying that the character accepts his sexual orientation and becomes comfortable as a young gay man?

Not exactly that. Acceptance is far different from embracing something. There is plenty of daylight between those two positions. The character does evolve through the course of the novel.

The character of Robin was a significant character in your two earlier books, Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake, will he be in the next novel?

I feel like I would spoil something if I said yes or no.

Since these books are based on your life, did you feel like you were invading your own privacy?

It's not like I am telling everything or writing about some subjects in graphic detail. Sex is a good example of this, I consider writing about sex in graphic detail as boring and unoriginal. People may disagree and they can write their own books. There are some parts of my childhood that I never would write about and am hesitant to discuss in person. It does make it different meeting people that knew me before the books and meeting them after. It can be awkward and in some instances the dynamics have changed.

Did you lose any of your friends as a result of the book?

At least one for certain, maybe more. I'm not keeping score.

You've said this next book is not a love story, but a falling out of love story. Can you explain?

People can love other people, pets, places, flavors of ice cream or whatever. Sometimes it is more difficult to get out of something than it is to get into something; love can be like that. My character, Chris Rhodes, is going to learn that lesson the hard way as I did in real life.

How many of the characters from your two earlier books will be in the new novel?

I don't have an exact number, but fewer than I expected when I began writing this book in Fort Lauderdale. I knew some interesting people in the early 90s and I had to make room for them, as a result some other characters were cut. One character was cut for reasons that I won't go into. A few characters do return, Uncle Ridley is one, but he appears in a very diminished role. My life changed a lot during the time period of this book.

So you wrote this book on the road?

Not really, no. I consider Fort Lauderdale a second home to Georgia. Some of the first drafts were written in Fort Lauderdale, parts of one chapter were written in New Orleans and the rest were written in Georgia. The bulk of the work has taken place at home in Georgia.

Dweller On The Boundary had a number of shocking moments, will this next novel have those too?

Unfortunately, yes. It's strange, at the time I didn't necessarily think of these incidents as that shocking as I was so accustomed to crazy events coming out of nowhere. Now, I look back and think what in the hell? This is so wrong and shouldn't have happened. I never would accept any of that today, but I did then.

What have you learned from writing two books and a third on the way?
Too many unexpected things. One being that people that you never expected to remember you, do remember you and will read you. That has mostly been a good experience. I also learned that I had to be better prepared to protect my privacy in my current life. I love getting email and answering reader questions, but I have to keep a distinct line as to how people can have access to me. I cannot work if people can send me an instant message any second of the day and disrupt my train of thought.

Since this book is set in the 90s, what is your favorite film, book and song of that period?

Film would be Slacker because it captures the feeling of the early 90s that I remembered. The early 90s were the best part of that decade and it became something culturally different by about '97.

I can't pick a favorite song, that's impossible for me. Music means too much to me to be able to narrow it down a single favorite. One of my favorites is Roads, by Portishead. The period that song entered my life in '99 isn't in this book, but it was at a time when I felt powerful and was living completely on my own terms. It might have been the first time I ever felt that way. I was twenty-six dating an industrial designer, hanging out in lofts in Castleberry Hill, having all these adult and arty experiences and dating a guy that wanted me more than I wanted him.

Book would be The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White. He is my favorite gay writer and one of my literary idols.

Who is your favorite character in the next book?

The characters in this book are a bit more challenging than in my first two books because I met and knew them as a young adult versus as a child. I enjoyed writing a couple of characters more than the others perhaps. One is a female character named Sidney. She meant a lot to me in real life and I loved the opportunity to share her.

Are you in contact with Sidney today?

As with many of the characters from Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake, I am not. Many of my characters from all of the books have died. I would love to find Sidney and catch up with her if she is still alive. I have a framed photo from the 90s of us together in my office. It would mean the world to find her.

The 90s or The 70s

I have been writing so much for the next novel and in emails that I have neglected my blog for almost a month.

 

After not using my Facebook account in the past couple of months I decided to deactivate it until I need it again. It will remain in that state until my next novel comes out some time this fall. Work on the novel set in the 1990s continues and progress has been excellent especially without the distraction of Facebook. 

 

The 90s are a complicated time to write about because there were so many highs and lows I experienced like many twenty-somethings do. It can be the make or break period for dreams and so much change occurs in a person's life in those years. You hope to come out of it by the time you reach thirty having found yourself and figured out your way through life. The consequences of actions and responsibilities only grow with age and the sooner you accept that the better off you will be.

 

The other day I was flipping through records in an antique store in Roswell, Georgia when I came across an album by the group Bread. They were a band in the 1970s that to my ears are the sound of that decade. They were a hugely successful group with multiple hits on the Billboard charts and today you never hear them on the radio. Most people under the age of forty likely never have heard of them, unless maybe one of their songs has appeared in some comic book action movie in an ironic fashion. Everything from the past is either to be ridiculed or smeared today. Oh how we have forgotten about hindsight and perspective it seems.

Life has taught me many lessons and one is that it always changes. Some aspects of the past were worse and some were better. If you live long enough you will understand that.

 

I was going to snatch up that Bread album, it was priced at three dollars, until I removed it from the sleeve. It was scratched on both sides and that was disappointing. YouTube will have to continue to supply me my fix of Bread.

 

In the first half of the 90s I spent much of that time alone and that is not necessarily a complaint. I remember sitting alone in that big empty house on the hill with the windows open on a rainy spring night. My father was out after he and I had spent the day cleaning house from top to bottom. There were a number of stereos in the house and we had some that played eight tracks. We had a fair amount of eight tracks to go with our massive record collection. I inserted one by Bread. It was intensely peaceful to sit there alone for hours with the lights off, the sound of the steady falling rain and Bread.

 

I thought about the seventies and how I missed being a young boy. I am not a sentimental person or prone to nostalgic fits, but that one night I did miss that time – the golden period from my perspective. Music made me remember a family, a friend and feelings.

 

It is funny to me that in 2022 I had to listen to music from the 1970s to remember a night in the 90s. Pesky time warps via the ears!

If you read one or both of my earlier books you may believe you know my family, but there is more. 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Summer Solstice 2022

 Today marks the longest day of the year in terms of sunlight in the northern hemisphere. Accompanying the summer solstice we are also experiencing an early summer heatwave and dry spell in my neck of the woods. Last week, temperatures were near one hundred degrees with high humidity, making it miserable. A cool down over the weekend was a nice reprieve, but now the heat has returned as temperatures climb again to the century mark this week.

Photo by me, June 2022.

My New Dawn rose in the rear garden has bloomed for the first time in its life. I planted the bush in April after ordering it from a nursery in Michigan. These are the same roses my family grew when I was a child that I have written about in my books. I never expected this rose to be so difficult to find as local growers and nurseries do not stock this rose. I am uncertain of the origin of the rose bush we had at my childhood home, but I know that it was planted in the 1970s. I suspect my mother purchased it at her favorite nursery in Paulding County that was near our house. I had to have one at my new house to go along with the other varieties of roses that we are growing. Of course, the New Dawn is my favorite among the seven bushes that we have.

Photo by me, June 2022.

Last night I heard the cicadas for the first time this summer. I found the first cicada shell and then another this morning while gardening before the heat became too much. Next it will be the June bugs that I am looking for, but despite their name it will not be until July before they arrive.

I do hope that we are fortunate to have some rain by this weekend. It has been an extra chore to establish a completely new garden from scratch at the new house during a dry spring and early summer with high heat. Should this weather pattern last through July then any further planting will need to be scaled back for the year. The rear garden is a multi-year plan anyway, but I am trying to put in place the foundation this year.

 

We have not had a sustained heatwave similar to this one in Georgia in a few years and it has caught me somewhat unprepared. I grew up in Georgia without the benefit of air conditioning so I was accustomed to the heat and humidity at that age. I lived in the country, surrounded by trees and my family used fans and opened the windows for circulation. The daytime could get uncomfortable during some of the hot and dry years of the 1980s, but by evening it was tolerable. It was not until I was nearing the end of high school that we finally had air conditioning. I would not want to live that way again, not at my present age.

 

And after today the hours of daylight will grow shorter by a few seconds and I may not mind it all that much.

He Grabbed Me By The Heart

Flying my kite on the beach at Navarre, Florida. Sept. 2019. Photo by me.

It is on my calendar, the birthday of the real person behind the character of Oliver, but I rarely check my calendar and I do not have it set for reminders. At four this morning as I sat down to the first cup of coffee he crossed my mind like a falling star. I have a few photos of him at the age I knew him as a boy saved on my phone. I looked through them. His memory grabbed me by the arm to whisper something in my ear and  I remembered that his birthday is near. For the sake of privacy I cannot disclose what day it actually occurs.

I remember few birthdays and his one of them even without a whisper to my ear. 

 

He would have turned fifty-years old this year, had he lived past his thirties. His story and the short time I knew and loved him always will break my heart. That broken promise in our youth is something I never let myself forget.

 

Happy birthday.

 

In honor of his memory, my novel Dweller On The Boundary is free on Amazon Kindle on Sunday, June 12, 2022 and my short story collection Terminal Wake: Stories of a Boy 1979-1991 is also free the same day on Amazon Kindle. Both of these books contain stories with him and Two Kites In The Wind is one of the hardest stories I ever had to write.

 

Though I first heard this song performed by Whitney Houston, I prefer the George Benson version. The Greatest Love Of All in memory of "Oliver."

Green Revisited: The Secret Friend

 

R.E.M. Green Album Cover

While I have been painting the interior of the new house over the past seven months, I have been listening to music as music should be listened. I take an album and listen to it in order from beginning to end. It is like reading a novel from the first chapter to the end and you experience the music as the artist envisioned it. It is a journey with the artist and you follow where they want you to go whether it is up a coastline, through a forest or across a room.

I was fifteen when I fell in love with R.E.M. and my introduction to them was the Green album from 1988. They remain my favorite band and that never will change as if I could change the color of my own blue eyes. The band is wrapped into my own DNA at this point.

Green is not my favorite album from the band, that is Murmur, but it is no less important to me. The album was like finding a key to some room that I needed to open and slowly step inside one toe at a time. As the oddball gay teen boy in a rural Georgia county I found a companion in Michael Stipe's voice.

I knew. 

All of the winter of 1988 into March of '89 when I turned sixteen, I closed my eyes and let his voice put its arm around my shoulder. Green was my secret friend. I began driving and I brought their music with me to fill the empty passenger seat and the holes in my heart. Those mornings drives to high school became better, I could look at the sky and the music was a magnet pulling me onward to a destination that I would someday find. 

I got there.

The view from the top of Elsberry Mountain. Late 1980s. Photo by me.

 

Listening to the album decades later with paint covered fingers less nimble I  feel the coldness of my clothes in the winter walks in the woods of my youth and I am sitting atop Elsberry Mountain looking toward Atlanta, the future and the fading light.

Across the room, time and down the road of life; Green is still a secret friend.

It was waking and sleeping nightmares too many years and staring at the shoe tops of the bad times. That gay boy became himself.

Stipe sang or yearned in anguish that vibrated at the same resonance as mine, "it's okay."

World Leader Pretend is the best writing on the album, but The Wrong Child was the glue to patch a hole.

Leave A Message After The Beep

 

When did it, in this 24/7, world of instant communication become unreasonable to have time to yourself? 

 

I need it, time to let the mind wander or think of possibilities or think of nothing at all. Perhaps it was the invention of the smart phone, text messages and instant communication software. Take your pick of poison that you can chain yourself to with Facebook Messenger, Facetime, WeChat, Skype, Zoom etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

 

I remember the world before all of that and it was a better world when it came to privacy and personal freedom. I remember the world without cell phones when there was no expectation on the human mind to always be contacted and connected. I walked outside then and if I did not hear the phone ring, my answering machine took the call and the caller left a message or not. I would return at some point, spot the blinking light or hear the beeping machine that indicated that a message waited on a mini cassette tape. I would listen to that message at my discretion and maybe, if needed, I would return that call or not. The caller could call back later and I might answer then or maybe not. It was my choice and on my schedule. 

 

Now the outside world and other people impose themselves on you and your time at their discretion and expect or demand a reply right then and there. I am reminded of an aunt yanking me by the arm as a young boy and screaming, “you're gonna answer me,” before she left her hand print on the side of my face. 

 

This constant connection has made it harder for us as humans to connect with ourselves and especially our inner selves. Do people close their eyes and think anymore? What is back there in that dusty box in the attic of the mind? I know what I think about every night right before I sleep, it is one of two things and then I am gone to what awaits. What do others think or do they fall over clutching an electronic device that shines white light on their closed eyelids? The constant connection to something other than themselves vibrates, trying to rouse them from the safety of sleep to lure them back into their addiction -pets of Pavlov.

Do they answer?

 

The song Pets plays while I pull on my hiking boots and then roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt.

Not me. Now that I am disconnected again from Facebook this is my time. I am the astronaut untethered and floating through the deep space of my own life. I fetch no more. I can create, work and focus on my next novel without that noise and harassment. I can get lost to find what I need and where no map can lead me. It is all off-trail through the brush, cold creeks and up that mountain again.

 

This is not my first time.

 

When I wrote my first novel, Dweller On The Boundary, I disconnected from all social media and deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts, not deactivated – I deleted those suckers of time, data and humanity. I had no social media except my website and no one contacted me through that enough at the time to bother me. 

 

I digitally jumped off the map.

 

Somewhere in reality. Florida. April 2018. Photo by me.

 

I hopped in the car the next day and set off for Florida. It would be a year and three months before I joined Facebook again and did so very, very discretely. During that disconnected time, only those close and important to me knew where I was on any day or week or month. No one else needed to know, why should they? I did not owe them that right.

No one bothered me. 

 

Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. 2018. Photo by me.

I took a road trip across the country to California and back. I hiked down into the Grand Canyon, got sick in Amarillo on bad Thai food, sweated to death at Hoover Dam in 116 degree heat, danced in the desert, got into the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica and none of it, not one bit of it made it onto the internet. I did not have the thought to show off, boast or perform for social media. At most, three people knew where I was on the planet and only one knew every day where I was because they were with me. That time before I got back on Facebook was the greatest period of freedom I had experienced since the early 2000s.

 

By the time I jumped back onto the digital map I was Rip Van Winkle. The interfaces and designs had changed and of course it had more features than it did when I left to keep you in the spider's web. It was disorienting and I questioned whether it was the right decision for me to put myself back out there for people to find me, that I did not want to find me. My gut said that I did not want or need to be there, but I sucked it up and gave it one more shot. 

 

I had the manuscript of Dweller On The Boundary close to finished by the summer of 2019. I worked, rewrote, added, subtracted and tweaked it for another year. That first chapter had so many versions, but inspiration and the truth had me pick the correct one. I allowed a handful of people to read the original manuscript, made changes and shopped it to literary agents. It was not easy, it was not as smooth as it sounds, it was difficult as anything worthwhile should. 

 

When my feet were wet again with the likes, comments and the connections of social media, I asked one longtime friend going back to the middle 1990s if they would be interested in giving me an opinion on the manuscript. It was by that time nearing the polished form minus the stray typo. I did not want a fully fleshed out critique and I made that clear. I wanted a general opinion and nothing more. They agreed to read it. I sent it with the condition there was no pressure and that they could read it at their leisure, but to please let me know what they thought. It was simple. 

 

My eyes fighting the 1990s sunshine on Tybee Island, Georgia.

 

I knew this person well, we had a long history and many meaningful memories going back to my early 20s. This was a person I had allowed to sleep on my sofa in my Atlanta loft for months. I had stayed with them too for a couple of weeks when I first moved to another city. The last time they were in Atlanta, I hosted their entire family at my house instead of a hotel in the 2000s. They had even stayed at my childhood house in the 1990s, which for me to allow that meant that you were one of the most trusted people on the planet. They met my parents a few times and I rarely allowed that. They had witnessed my highest highs and we sang the RENT Original Broadway cast recording over and over. I had toured them at one of the radio stations I had worked and let them in the studio with me. I gave them a calico cat for Christmas one year since they wanted one. We had developed an idea for a television show involving books and travel – well, I did most of the work, but we had a plan! We had packed U-Hauls together and drove them long distances through the middle of the deserted night in thunderstorms. We laughed at the dumbest things that only twenty-somethings can and haunted bookstores. They had asked me several times that if they never found their soulmate to father a child with them (read that twice). These were not little favors asked by an acquaintance. We had real, see you at your best and worst history. This person was well-read, allegedly open-minded and knew me as an adult, not as a child. There was no better to person to ask. They could have said no, nope, not going to happen and I would not have thought any less of them.

I waited months, since it was no pressure and I thought they respected me enough to come through. 

 

They had not died, I checked and waited more. Why could they not say something? I had said to them that even if they thought it was terrible or they hated it to please let me know. I warned them that it was not a lighthearted novel and could be upsetting. I also said that it was a true story about how I grew up. 

 

I never heard another word from that person since they received the manuscript in early 2020, not even a hello. I assumed they were shocked by what was written and wanted nothing more from me. It stung, but I never contacted them to ask what happened. They rejected that boy version of me without even a wave of the hand or reply to sender. So much for all that shared history. 

 

I was twelve again.

I went ahead with the book without their feedback and I am glad that I did, but I knew it was the end of that friendship. It did not make sense, but not everything does and no one ever needs to remind me of that. Friendships, even the genuine ones that span years and are cultivated, are mysteries to me. It was good to know that I was free of the obligation to reply to their future email, phone call or request for a connection on the digital map. They can leave a message and at my discretion I will wave it off without a second thought.

 

As for the request to father a child with them, well... I said...

 

You will have to read my next novel set in the 1990s to find out that answer. If you have not read either of my first two books, give them a try. You might be surprised where they go and what you did not know. Let your mind be free of the constant connection and get lost with me off the digital map before it existed.

 

Beep.

 

 

RENT Voicemail #1

Reflections

 

Sunset at Mexico Beach, Florida. Late 1980s. Photo by me.

Last night chatting with a couple of people, I could hardly find any humor. That is not me. Even I recognized that I was boring. Getting out of this funk is going to take longer than I hoped. I suppose this is a good reminder of what the first half of the 1990s was like, if I looked for any silver lining in this.

The only thing worthwhile that I said was that I do not blame Facebook as a service, but it was the users instead. I will not be one to defend Facebook because I do believe social media is a terrible invention, but humankind is largely not capable of utilizing it for a better purpose. Scrolling through the news feed was like wading into a mob and having the ability to hear everything going on inside their heads. There was the usefulness, for lack of a better word, in that it allowed you to see the true colors of others.

I am not going to miss it. I could have went out with more of a bang and posted some unexpected controversial opinions for a laugh. Alas, people would have misconstrued it as some sort of endorsement of an ideology and applauded that. There was no winning.

One ray of hope is that I do often hear people say that they are tired of social media. Now, if they would act on it. Those dopamine likes are addictive though. Fortunately for me, there will be no withdrawal as I never cared about that.

I will laugh at myself, I did write people needed to look more in the mirror and examine themselves. I intended it one way, but that too will be misunderstood. People do that too often now on social media, but never get past their own reflection. The really weird part is when people act like they are some brand or persona - they dehumanize themselves all for a thumbs up? I could not understand what part of their needy ego that was about. Just eeewww.

I hope that people I said to keep in contact, will do that. There are still some adults left in the room.

Christopher Cross, Sailing

Dear Paulding County

But everybody else in town wants to bring you down and that's not how it ought to be. - Rockville by R.E.M. 

 

The Lake House. 2013. Photo my me.

Dear Paulding County,

After the latest abuse on my Facebook account, I abandoned it for the toxic relationship that it was. When something is unhealthy it must be eliminated like pruning a tree. The most recent incident confirmed that I cannot remain on that service. It was part of one long string of incidents that took place over almost three years. As a result I have updated my contact and social media guidelines to prevent this from happening again.

I remain angry days later and some of that anger is directed at myself for being trusting enough to allow the past back in the door, even a little. I have been sitting on my patio at night watching the stars, the first lightning bugs of the season, listening to the owls and coming up with a strategy. It feels as though I was in a bad, bad car crash. This feels like a setback to what I should be doing.

The Lake House. Photo by me.

 It was 2012 when I almost died from a stomach problem. The aftershock of that near miss with death is how I feel again. I also felt this way a couple of years ago when I felt pushed to the brink by someone placing pressure on me to reveal the identity of a character. I was disoriented as though it was an interrogation, they pushed me too far. After the 2012 incident the recovery was slow, not in a physical sense, but in a mental one. I would go to my father's lake house one week a month in the warm months and recover away from the noise of the city. It was the most peaceful place, sitting on the porch, watching and listening to the water. I fished, sat on the docks at sunrise with my coffee and loved to watch the reflections of the clouds in the warm water. I was reminded of the 1970s and summers at Lake Allatoona. Otherwise, I was in Florida and when I was back in Georgia I hiked and got lost in the woods as much as I could. 

It took almost three years for me to feel like me again.

Fort De Soto, Florida. 2013. Photo by me.

I do not have three years this time and so I push onward. I have thought long and hard about this until I realized the common thread to the problem and came to a solution.

I have realized that the fundamental problem was that many people do not respect boundaries nor do they know how to communicate. What I had hoped would be a positive experience on Facebook, at times it was, became a nightmare. My real life nightmares had increased over the last two months and my agitation with the people on the service was building until finally someone stepped across my boundary the final time and insulted me. It set off a reaction and I addressed a few issues at once, one being that people had placed enormous pressure on me to reveal the identities behind characters in my books – which I cannot do. I will address this issue at length in a future post on my blog. Needless to say, they never should have backed me into a corner, not with my history.

My present life is fantastic and so much better when they (meaning most of my Paulding County classmates) are not a part of it. I have so much joy and happiness with my better half, writing, traveling, pursuing my hobbies, working on our house and building what I hope to be a beautiful rear garden as an oasis that includes my childhood roses. 

U.S. 278 entering Paulding County. 2019. Photo by me.

Now to address the more complex problem. It is painful, but necessary to write that many people from my childhood caused me anguish and misery then and still do. In some cases they cause me more misery now than they did when we were young, just in different ways. They remind me of everything bad that I left. This does not include all of the people I knew then, but most of them. I still enjoy knowing ex girlfriends and boyfriends and some other people.

One of my high school ID cards.

 Most people from my Paulding County childhood never will understand, no matter how much I write or attempt to explain. Why cannot they understand? I do not know for certain, but I suspect some of them do not care to understand. It might mean looking at themselves for once. Maybe it is their own failures, small-mindedness, misery, phoniness and mistakes? Whatever their issues are, they are not my problem.

There were too many of my former classmates on my Facebook account and they caused these problems every single time. They contained me in a box, or maybe my old locker on the back hallway, that was the past that never was truly me. They see me one way when I never was all of what they thought they knew. I cannot ever be that person and I never was that person. I was someone underneath that they did not understand then and cannot understand now it seems. I do not want most of those people in my life because of the expectations they place on me, sometimes without them knowing it. They cannot seem to update their image of me to reality. I have written this a few times before and here is a reminder: I write about the past, but I do not live there. It was like being trapped in another person's life that is not mine. My books were the real me, the one that grew up in Paulding County and went through experiences that they were unaware. I am not sorry that it does not align with the person they thought they knew. It was time for them to upgrade their thinking, not mine. The person I am today that lives this life and writes these words is the real me. 

I hoped between Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake, especially some of the stories in Terminal Wake, that they would understand the magnitude of how seriously my childhood effected me then. It was not just one incident, but years of them. I would share lengthy excerpts for those that do not want to read a book, but my contractual agreement with Amazon does not allow that. I would say pay attention to the chapters Two By Three, Ringer and I Talk Alone.

My mother's cemetery. 2022. Photo by me.

I do not owe an explanation and I never did. I wanted to explain. The books were supposed to be in part explanations, but I do not think they want or can understand what is written and what it means today.

Paulding County, I loved you as a child no matter what, but I do not owe you anything. I am a son and product of Paulding County, born at the old Paulding Memorial Hospital and educated in your schools. I visit once a year for cemeteries and that is all I can do. The only people that can be a part of my life now on any level is decided on a case by case basis. The rest cannot come with me, not as a part of my present life, only the people that are in some way special to me or that I trust. To anyone else, you are welcome to read my past books and future ones, but that is it. Facebook blurred the boundaries too much and made it too easy for people to step where they should not. My old house on that hill was surrounded by fences and trees on all sides and I liked it.

I am not going to let Paulding County hurt me anymore. You almost killed me before and I am not going to let you have another chance. I have not gotten this far into the story yet, but I gave Paulding County three chances. I lived there three times, most recently as 2001 and even then the county did not let me live in peace. I was paying for a house in New Georgia that I could not live in because it got dangerous. It was an isolated house, I wanted peace, and that was a bad idea by the third year.

Snow covers the ground at my New Georgia house in 2000. Photo by me.

 

Paulding County, I have so much more to write about you, but we cannot be friends.

Thank you for reading.

 

The Pretty Flowers

 

Savannah 2016. Photo by me.

I  know the type, the busy body high on their own fumes that radiate faux positivity and involve themselves in activism as a hobby to make themselves feel better about... themselves. What is a bored person, who believes they know everything, are so hip and down with it, to do in their spare time than try to save the world? I recently met one and it was the most unpleasant and condescending experience that I have encountered in recent memory. These types have no real skin in the game, there is no personal risk to them and they can walk away when they become bored again. But gosh they want to help the little people a few hours here and there to feed their own ego. It might look good on their Facebook and Instagram pages! They say, "see! I'm working to make the world a better place." It's the "look at me, I am so good syndrome." They care as long as it is easy and then they go home to their comfortable world with silver spoons awaiting their mouths. Or they put their phone down and think they have accomplished something after a few clicks and typing in a few buzzwords that might include empathy, justice, uplift or hope - sometimes they become so proud of themselves they add a few exclamation points and hashtags (#geeain'tIthebest!) for good measure. Whatever word salad they can produce that is like the sun breaking through the clouds, peace doves flying,  unicorns smiling like there is no tomorrow and rainbows sparkling just so perfectly that you want to cry, wet your skinny jeans and buy the world a Coke.

The Power Dynamics Of How These People Operate

When these types are confronted or found out, they are armed to throw around apologies like candy from a parade float. They think you cannot see through all the glitter and their filtered shining aura. It is a countermeasure like chaff dispensed from an aircraft to overwhelm radar. Press them further and you will find they have no deep understanding of any of their hobbyhorse issues or any genuine qualifications. Maybe they resort to gaslighting and apologize for triggering some trauma in you. They put the onus of the problem on the offended, they deflect and say the offended is suffering some mental issue. After all, these types are so perfect, how could they truly have an issue themselves or intend to offend? These shallow ray of sunshine types would not know what trauma was if it bit them on the ass and swallowed both of their legs. They have devalued that word just as they have the apology. When you make everything trauma, then nothing is trauma. Trauma for them is having to wait for a parking space outside Starbucks for longer than two minutes or speak to their landscaper about the bill.  Another tactic this type of person will attempt to evade responsibility is the minimization tactic. They will present some minor issue or problem they suffered and try to equate it to a much more significant problem in an attempt to minimize it. See I suffered too, isn't it awful? Imagine a person trying to do that to a person that has endured a violent rape. If pressed further, they try the ultimate trick, they claim they are the victim. These types have no limits, they are a net without a bottom. If the real victim is not sharp enough they fall for this trap and watch the offender wrap themselves in the untouchable cloak of victimhood. That is the golden robe that is akin to the get out of jail free card in Monopoly.

What's an apology to a person when none of the words mean anything?

These types are shameless manipulative hacks and masters of the inauthentic apology. Words have no meaning to them, an apology is like a pretty flower gifted to you and you are supposed to accept with graciousness. Thank you is the expected response and they walk away feeling so much bigger and better about themselves. Yet, nothing changes and the offended is supposed to take it on the chin. They further marginalize the already marginalized.

 

It is dishonesty at a level that is worse than the upfront asshole or bigot. You at least know where that kind of person stands from the beginning and you can interact accordingly. The manipulative hack will smile to your face and stab you in the back the first chance they can or need when you are  no longer useful. It is their purpose to climb over the marginalized and stand atop them like a champion for the accolades. "Love me. Thank me. Can't you see? I've helped you," they bellow as they push your head down into the muck. Get back where you belong! Know your place! I have watched this unfold in street protests and on social media. It is more and more common in the age of social media to encounter these types where people crave attention and meaning in their own lives. They believe the struggles of others are like trying on costumes and role playing in a game. They will know all the right chants, never have an original thought, deviate from the accepted in-group opinion and their cell phone will always be in selfie mode. Unfortunately, enough people are gullible enough to slurp it down.

 

The marginalized person will remain marginalized. Call the bluff on a person like this and you will be the one to get the cold shoulder from others or told you do not know what you are talking about. Dissent is never easy or as Kermit sang, "it's not easy being green." It is very high school and groupthink is the rule of the day.

Thank you for the pretty flowers, I have rooms of them.

 

Coming soon, maybe in the next week, I will write about more serious issues that I touched on a few days ago on Facebook. Though my account sits there, I do not believe I will return to that service even in a limited capacity. People have managed to ruin that for me. For those that are interested I may be reached at chrisvise at gmail dot com. I reply to all emails and for now and the foreseeable future it is the only method I can be reached.

 

Maybe the best concert I attended, it was my first anyway. I saw Duran Duran at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta in 1989. I still love them.

Reunions, The Obituary Of Youth

 

Photo  by me, May 2022.

Standing on the sidewalk in a small town in northwest Georgia I learned about the death of classmate. He died two years earlier and even in the age of social media I was unaware of it. I had to know how as if I already knew and hoped to be wrong. The answer came with a wince and I said that I was not surprised.

Heavy rose blooms bowed in the afternoon.

Spring beauty could not withstand relentless time.

Wounded.

Petals fell on silent pauses.

Blame words, whether too few or in the wrong combination for our failure.

I am not the most connected person to classmates from my school years. That disconnect was not a choice or decision I made, but it went that way starting my junior year of high school and I have written about why that happened. Some people have kept a connection to me going back forty years, but it is not many. I am thankful for those that maintained connection wide or narrow.

Fly like the dreams that only youth can send into the air.

After mortar boards were tossed into the air in 1991, the wind scattered the class like seeds. Some flew farther than others, but it depends on how you measure a life – is it in the distance moved away from your hometown or measured in more meaningful terms? If I could, I would ask one person how much insecurity props up that snobbery from that most big city you call home.

As I write this I count the number of classmates I have met in thirty-one years at six. I passed on the few organized and sanctioned class reunions out of a lack of desire, living in another state and having to relive all of the emotions I could not write about until I put it in two books in 2020 and 2021. The one on one reunions have been what I have managed. These meetings have been a mixture of people I did not expect to see again and some that I did. The experiences have varied in their quality and in their quantity. I valued the experiences no matter how they went. It is nice to remember a face, a name, a memory and an honor for me to be remembered at all.

One person I met with a number of times through the nineties up until 2009, but we have not managed to get together since.

Another I occasionally hung out with in the first half of the nineties, but when I moved away to Louisville, Kentucky in 1996 that ended.

I met another in 1997 at the Waffle House in Hiram, Georgia for coffee and conversation. We were never close in school, but we knew each other well enough to share a few hours.

One of my closest friends from school I met twice in 1998. We reconnected through AOL when the person found me there long before social media engulfed the web. We met at my house and it was like the previous seven years never happened. We picked up where we left off, but on better terms except that he did not accept my boyfriend. I invited him and his girlfriend to dinner and a play my boyfriend was working. The night went well and then I never heard from him again for going on twenty-four years. I was upset about it then, but not surprised after had what transpired in school.

Another I met a gay bar in Atlanta for a drink in 2012. We shared two commonalities, our sexual orientation and having grown up in Paulding County.

Then there is my most recent reunion in 2022. It was an hour in the Sunday sun of thirty-one years. It was a remarkable experience dense with information, questions and smiles. I felt eighteen again. I probably listened more than I said or at least I hope that was the case. I tried to restrain the interviewer in me that sometimes gets the better of my tongue and made an ex crazy. We talked of the past, the meat of a reunion, we talked of the present and future.

Perhaps reunions are less common in the age of social media? Maybe they are the plots of movies like The Big Chill and only happen when a member of our collective past is buried to a Rolling Stones tune or in the case of GenX something by Nirvana or Soundgarden. I prefer something older at my service, a song from the seventies and I am undecided if I prefer the original Boz Scaggs version or the Rita Coolidge – maybe both. The song contains great sentimental appeal to me and says exactly what I would want.

In the social media reunion we are fed on our phones the daily trivia of people we knew between advertisements for mattresses and orthopedic shoe inserts. We believe we are connected and that we know each other again because I scrolled past your dinner or you saw a photo I took in Houston. It could be thought, why meet in person because what will we have to catch up because I know what you ate last night in front of the television? Little of it is meaningful interaction and most of it is small digestible tidbits like soundbites of a politician's speech on the evening news. The value of that information is negligible and our friendships reduced to chicken nuggets. Social media is a poor substitute to genuine interaction between people in the physical presence like Weezer (sorry I cannot bring myself to link to that) covering a Toto song.

I am the bookmark in the book on the bottom shelf. I know my place. I am the sunflower to the sun.

I have had other people suggest we meet up and I have been willing and flattered by the offer. Nothing came of those offers and I remain hesitant to remind them as maybe they changed their mind or never meant it in the first place. I will save myself the embarrassment of asking. I grew up learning one valuable lesson over and over; do not have any expectation of another person. To some, words are smooth stones in the river that the water glides over and to someone like me, almost every word is the grooved rock that feels the current.

There are people from the past I would enjoy meeting again and a few I would not. I understand better with age that time has a speed that a young person cannot grasp beyond the next electronic dopamine hit. Some of us that tossed our mortar boards high into the evening sky have already run out of time and we never again will have the chance to have a true face to face conversation. It surprises me how many people that I shared classes, hung out in their bedroom as a teenager or gave a ride home are dead. Some of these people I knew very well, some I did not enjoy as a child and some I loved.

Life is adult busy now; some are raising children, caring for elderly parents, nursing their own health issues or in my case renovating a house, constructing a garden, working on two books and out observing life. Studying for an advanced literature test or memorizing a marching band drill seem much less pressing by comparison. Time has to be created, carved out like the initials in the bark of a tree and it can be done if you truly want.

The truth adheres to no dial.

Fear is bigger in my heart and redder on my cheeks than the biggest stop sign that the department of transportation could ever dream. A shy boy from New Hope is still a shy man wherever I live in Georgia. I think of a few people I knew between 1979 to 1991 that I would like to sit down, talk about everything under the sun past and present, have them tell me what they really thought of me, if they hated me or loved me and I would like tell them what I really felt or thought instead of disguising it in a book.

At home, I sat at my desk and I read a brief obituary. It was short on obvious answers, but what went unwritten said more. It hurt more than it should. I question what his stop signs were.

Thank you for reading.

 

The Pine Trees and The Winding Road

 

Leaving southeast Texas for the hill country. April 2022.

On the recent road trip out to Texas I listened to a lot of Jim Croce. I planned it that way because I find that Jim's music keeps the mind active and on a long drive it makes a good companion between the rest areas and the pines along the road- in that stretch of I-65 between Montgomery and Mobile you need it and strong coffee to make the miles.

I often heard Jim's music in my childhood home in the 1970s. My mother had a copy of the 1974 album Photographs & Memories. I posthumously must thank my mother for exposing me to so much music in the seventies and eighties instead of television. Jim died at the age of thirty in a Louisiana plane crash six months after I was born. His music reminds me of dark wood paneling, the scent of the fireplace, sunshine in the pines and endless days. 

 

Jim Croce was a 1960s and 70s singer/songwriter that reminds me of the English singer Nick Drake, of which I am a big fan. Nick died of a drug overdose just a year after Croce and their music is similar in that it is largely acoustic guitar driven folk melodies. As much as I adore Drake, I admit that Croce's writing is richer, deeper and more varied. It is a shame that there is so little of it, only five studio albums. It can be unfair to compare the music of one artist to another, but I see such parallels between these two that is not an unfair comparison. Jim was also a better vocalist, listen to his phrasing and the delicate vocal delivery in the last minute of Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels). He shows the listener instead of telling them when he sings, “I've overcome the blow. I've learned to take it well. I only wish my words could convince myself.” He confesses and inhabits the role like a believable actor. Drake for all of his talent and troubles never had that ability.

 

Jim also put in the work on the road touring where he ultimately died. Nick Drake by contrast was known for not enjoying even the smallest tour in the U.K. or performing live because of his mental health. The story of Drake is a heartbreaking one like Jim's, but in a different way. Listen to the pain in Black Eyed Dog or Hanging On A Star and try not to cry for the obvious suffering.

 

I am of the impression that Croce's music has not been embraced by the hip set like Nick Drake's music in the past couple of decades. Perhaps it has something to do with Nick's staggeringly good looks and his posh English background, whereas Jim with his bushy mustache and rolled up sleeves looks like he just got off work at a steel mill. 

 

I will love them both. Jim can be for the road and mowing grass. Nick can be for the rainy days at home. Whatever your preference and musical tastes, I hope you enjoy music as much as I do.

 

I heard a much more recent song from 2020 called Cheap Cocaine by Willi Carlisle and that was a nice surprise. 

As I finished writing this, I entertained the thought that maybe, just maybe, Croce was as good a songwriter as Kristofferson. Hmm... 

Thank you for reading.

The San Antonio Incident

Me outside the Rothko Chapel. April 2022.

 

 I walked in Menil Park in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. A group of fifteen young people in their early twenties lounged in the cool morning sunshine. They were probably students of the nearby University of St. Thomas. They were enjoying themselves and were loud to my middle age years, but not loud for college students. Maybe they were not loud at all and I just have sharp ears. I neared them and adjusted the strap of the overburdened leather messenger bag on my right shoulder. I was glad for my dark black Ray-Bans so that the students could not see my eyes looking at the ground. I was nervous. The San Antonio incident was less than twenty-four hours ago and my third cup of coffee had not yet fixed my morning mood.

My sleep was the standard eight hours of dead-to-the-world goodness that I can achieve in a hotel as long as I sleep on the side nearest the wall and I can see the door – old habits? Perhaps there is no way to rewire my brain after thirty-eight years. As a bonus I did not remember any dreams and the dose of melatonin must have seen to that. Before the beginning of this trip I had one vivid dream that ended in waking up covered in sweat. I dismissed it as fatigue; work on the house and the novel for the past six months caught up with me that night. Someone had written something about abuse that bothered me too, but I kept pushing it aside and knew that I would find a way to address that in time.

Montrose is hip, arty and the closest thing Houston has to a gay neighborhood, but this is Texas. I hated to concede to that thought of fear and reminded myself that yesterday was San Antonio not Houston. I remembered all of the good times I had years ago in Dallas and Fort Worth dancing and stumbling around S4 and Throckmortons. Texas can be cool. It was Cobb County, Georgia in 1995 when I was assaulted over a rainbow sticker on my car.

I was dressed in a black jacket, a dark blue shirt and dark jeans in Menil Park. It was my invisibility cloak. It was my do-not-notice-me outfit. I wished my hair was longer, but I cut it off last month and I am not twelve anymore.

Keep walking. Always keep walking. Do not stop on the side of the road in New Hope, a trail in the woods, or the streets of San Antonio. Walk.

“Hey faggot,” he called at me.

A man in his twenties secured my attention that was elsewhere. He leaned against a railing on N. Presa Street in San Antonio that I was walking past a few feet away.

I matched his voice to the background noise I heard before he called to me. I had not understood what he said before as he was of no interest to me until then. I was walking down the street in my own world in a new city to me. The surrounding streetscape was of little interest on that block and my mind must have been steps ahead on the beautiful Riverwalk.

It was early afternoon on a sunny April weekday, people passed between his menacing smile and my rock hard glare. I was stunned for seconds then my anger brought me back. I assessed the threat and my middle finger saluted the guy.

He smirked at my digital reply.

I walked away, glancing back twice to make sure I was not followed..

That was the end of the face to face encounter with the bigot. Had this been a duel we had both fired and winged each other, in chess it was a stalemate and in reality it was unfortunate. Had I been of a younger generation, I suppose I could have whipped out my phone and confronted the guy for a viral moment, but despite what the eager sales lady at the Houston Saks department store would say to me the following day, I am not of the younger generation. I am not wired to think phone first before anything else. I am grateful for the emotional maturity that I have earned.

I passed through the students in Menil Park as a ship coming into a fogged over port.

Inside the Rothko Chapel, I signed the register and sat in the security enforced silence. The worn wooden benches without backs looked like something from a rustic wilderness campground. I examined the dark paintings on every wall. This was depressing and if this experience was intended to be spiritual then the outlook was bleak. All I had was a thought of how they resembled the black monolith from the Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I loved that film, but these paintings were like staring at the soot covered back of a fireplace. Rothko's other paintings held such power and intensity, these were as if he was resigned to the nothingness or The Nothing that wanted to devour all of Fantastica in The Neverending Story. He killed himself in 1970, not long after these were painted.

I left after five minutes. The weight inside was too much. That was a tomb inside a coma where dreams were impossible. Outside I laughed. It was the appropriate response a living person would have to shake off that darkness. I did not want that to cling to me like yesterday. The loud college students were the sound of life.

I came expecting to hear Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel playing in the background; that might have helped with the experience some and made it more spiritual. Feldman wrote Why Patterns? which I consider to be the natural sound of New Hope and mentioned it in Dweller On The Boundary.

In the reflecting pool I saw myself. I was not invisible, but my profile was low. There was no rainbow sticker on my forehead, but the contradiction I cannot solve floated in the water like oak leaves.

A contradiction exists in how I write and how I live. It is difficult for me to reconcile this and it was the same problem when I was in broadcasting. I hated to tell people that I worked at The Weather Channel and was on radio stations across the country from New York to Los Angeles, but people would ask what I did for living as a way to measure and judge me. Work for most people is a means to an end and I no more impressed with a physician than I am the cashier at Home Depot. It felt like boasting to say that I did television voice overs, commercials and had been a disc jockey too. It brought unwanted attention from the woman that cut my hair, to drive-thru bank tellers and I suspect one guy slept with me just because of how I made money. People did not think of me that way when I had worked in a warehouse and drove a forklift between radio gigs.

My two books (and my next one this fall) are very revealing with midnight dark secrets long kept under lock and key, but I like for those books to speak for themselves. I wrote them and I lived them, but they are detached from the person I am today, though I am uncertain what the audience thinks. I live in the present, not in 1980 or 1990 or even 2021. Sometimes I believe that people expect me to be looking at the sky for a bird, sweeping away the stars on the ground, running through Rabbit Tobacco Field and being a reactionary chess player. I understand that people connected with that boy, my family,the tragedies or another part of the past on some level – all those things are me, but I do not live or think precisely the same in 2022.

When something big occurs in the present, I sometimes do share it on social media and it might not always be something good. Bad things do happen in the present and I am not one to construct a faux social media persona that consists of sunshine, rainbows and filtered selfies. The incident in San Antonio was such an occasion. A problem arises when it is expected of me to react in the same way that I would as a boy, teenager or a young man in my twenties. Life experience teaches humans to adapt in ways that lead to self improvement and for me that would be more restraint and patience. It does not mean that my passion for life is extinguished, it is a matter of keeping it under a more firm control. I learned that the only part of my existence that I control is myself. 

My reaction to the asshole in San Antonio was adequate and the incident did me no lasting harm. I was unhappy that it happened, but I was not about to give that stranger or the word faggot any more power over me. The incident shocked me, I thought about it until the next day and I let it roll off into the gutter where it belonged. My adult perspective was shaped by having been physically attacked in the long ago past and other experiences that I have written about from my childhood. Another person might react some other way and had it happened to a child or teenager then it may have caused them more lasting harm. Restraint was my best weapon against this fool on the street on this particular day. Had I reacted in kind towards him then it possibly leads to an escalated situation that could include violence. I walked away with my dignity and he will remain a miserable asshole that I never will meet again. I understand my limitations and I cannot change him if I wanted nor can I change the world; idealism is a luxury of youth and the inexperienced. There will be random assholes on the street, the highway, the mall or out hiking on a trail and I accept that. Some might think it was the perfect opportunity for a 'teachable moment,' well let me see you try to educate an asshole like that. There is no utopia and if one did exist, it would be as boring as my white sock drawer. The only safe space is in your own home and head and for some they do not even have that.

In today's culture exists a tendency to overreact to every situation as if it was a choice between life and death. I am no sociologist, but I believe that social media is in part to blame for this. Most of our challenges, setbacks and losses are not that crucial and as adults we should remember that. Another troubling trend in contemporary culture is a belief in some circles that words are equivalent to violence. If you believe that then you likely never have been subjected to actual violence. I suggest you take a fist to the face and tell me that feels the same as someone calling you a faggot on the sidewalk. They both hurt in different ways, but words do not make a face swell, make us bleed or die. As children we would say, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall not hurt me.” It was a defensive rebuttal to taunts that sounded nice at the time, but it did not provide me Teflon skin against the hurtful words. I felt bad from being called a queer or faggot or other things as a child, but not once did I suffer a physical scratch from a word. It was the hidden cumulative effects of those words over years that did me harm.

Words can incite violence, but they cannot jump from a printed page, a phone screen, or a fool's mouth to break your bones. An aunt slapped me into the next day when I was a boy, the only time I was slapped as a child, and that was violence. I was in two school fights when I experienced the sick feeling of my fist driving into another boy's flesh and that was violence. A word, any word, will not make knuckles hurt. Words may grab the heart, arouse the mind, generate goosebumps, make us laugh, cry or feel an emotional response of some kind, but show me one cut, bruise or x-ray of a broken bone caused by a word.

As I have written about in Dweller On The Boundary, I was a reactionary chess player growing up and that style of play cost me more games than it won. I am not the same little boy under Robin's wing getting worked up at the stupid games of the Cannon Creek Boys. I am less reactionary as an adult and the words hurt me less. The internal scars that I wrote about do however remain. Sometimes people trip over them without knowing. I forgive them. I trip over them too. I do not easily speak of some of them. I should not have to do that, there are two books that lay out in detail what happened. You either want to know or you do not.

Thank you for reading. I keep walking.

 

The Scars Are So Old And Ain't Nobody Home

 

A 1990s letter from me.

The dog of nostalgia bites hard and deep on a Sunday morning and the romantic notion of writing letters sloshes around the attic of my mind between the cerebral cobwebs. I will pick up that hotel pen from the Flamingo in Las Vegas or the Holiday Inn in Crystal City, grab a sheet of paper, sit at my desk and write a letter like I used to do in the eighties and nineties. But to whom? Well, no one really and I will not even bother writing that letter unsent or licking the envelope shut. Letters died and it is a shame, yet nonetheless they have gone to meet the great inkpot in the sky.

 

The idea of writing these letters to no one was spawned by my reading the often witty, always dramatic and sometimes wicked letters of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. I wrote my letters in the eighties to my French penpal in Marseilles as a boy, friends, enemies and former lovers in the nineties and that is where it ended. Technology more advanced than the pen and the postal service came along and I typed out electronic letters via email. 

 

Nostalgia would try to convince me that I could recapture the spirit of times past and maybe even the faintest trace of my youth with ink and paper. They may claim to have a Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine too, but bathe in it all you want and you will not get any younger, the only thing you might achieve is a criminal record or a strange infection in a bad place – possibly both. It is a dastardly trick that nostalgia; it is as healthy as injecting a gallon of bacon grease directly into your veins and running the Peachtree Road Race high on cocaine in high heels. The reality is that wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes like those cerebral cobwebs and the promise of paper cuts to the tongue will wisen me up after the second cup of coffee. Nobody is home at the other end of the mailbox and if they are, they are expecting their next shipment of toilet paper from Amazon. Misty memories will have to be satisfied listening to Barry Manilow on Youtube. Even now, even now...

 

I write about the past, miss some of it, value much of it but I do not live there. My letter writing friends are dead or gone and my desire to chew on a pen and hope that my handwriting is not indecipherable is a passing motorcycle in the fast lane. The dog of nostalgia must be leashed after you feed it or it will devour your present and future.

 

Johnny Thunders gives the best advice and no, his 1991 death in New Orleans was not a mystery.

You Can't Put Your Arm Around A Memory