The Middle Of Somewhere

 

January 2024

Crossroads, seem to come and go, yeah
The gypsy flies from coast to coast
Knowing many, loving none
Bearing sorrow having fun ...

A bird sang on a cold Sunday morning and a week began. My head was empty and that is the best way to roll out of bed, go downstairs and make coffee. Nothing except coffee needed to be made, not the bed or decisions. This was a planned week off from novel writing after a very productive week before.

It was a week that I wanted it to snow, but it did not. Instead I enjoyed the snow in Louisville at the end of my fingertips. It was a week dressed in wool in the wind, the sun and the rain that stretched from Woodstock to the northwest, Dawsonville to the north, Gainesville to the northeast and Warner Robins to the south.

Roads had me. It was a week of being in the middle of somewhere in the middle of something. The unfamiliar and the familiar were all the same like the double yellow line. I really am the character Chris M. Rhodes from my books as much as I am Chris M. Vise.

Bennett Street Atlanta. January 2024.

It was a week of buying furniture and art. Legs were stretched, a salesperson carried a lamp for me assuming I was too old and a stranger talked about cell phones in an old mill. It was the South as it was long ago faded like jeans hanging from a clothesline. I could love it again like watching Coal Miner's Daughter for the thousandth time. Somewhere Dew and Loretta were cutting up and ordering sliced bologna in a general store.

Again the morning's come
Again he's on the run
Sunbeams shining through his hair
Appearing not to have a care...

 

Pretty roads were traveled and the miles climbed only to be erased by a head on a pillow and a quilt pulled up high. Georgia Highway 11 between Gray in Jones County and Monticello in Jasper County was some of the prettiest two-lane country road I have seen in Georgia. We drifted through places called Round Oak, Wayside, Adgateville, Hillsboro and places that once had names, but only the road, the train tracks, the pines and broken down homes remain. It was a nice stretch of road from Flovilla by Indian Springs in Butts County down to Forsyth in Monroe County on Georgia Highway 42 too. The quiet was as persistent as the January cold.

It was a week that reminded me that the moments I ever loved Atlanta were few and gone. Sitting in traffic, hunting limited detours and holding back the frustration of being inconvenienced by careless drivers who needed to crash into each other on the interstate was enough.

 

Monticello, Georgia. January 2024

 

Long shadows on the town square in Monticello came from the sun and history. A teenage couple walked into a local coffee shop, cars circled the square to get to some place else in four directions and my head filled.

Crossroads, will you ever let him go? No, no, no
Will you hide the dead man's ghost?
Or will he lie, beneath the clay?
Or will his spirit float away?

 

I began jotting down thoughts about Confederate monuments and the darkest part of my family's history that I have never whispered or hinted. I had a thousand words before the spell broke and I needed a break. I was uncertain if I wanted to write that. I suppose it means I should. The easier something is to write, the less interesting it is.

Macon was a city that I only knew from I-75 going to Florida or I-16 going to Savannah. It was a place to get gas or use the rest area. Many times I had said that I was going to the cherry blossom festival there and many times I found a reason not to go. Macon could never seem to capture me. It was odd for me, I had walked on the streets of the other small Georgia cities such as Columbus and Augusta, but never Macon.

A river and a railroad passing time. January 2024.

I liked how lost in time and left behind it felt. The states of decay that the South has cannot be achieved elsewhere as if the red clay and the kudzu are special ingredients mixed with the heat and humidity. The impression that Macon had on me that once it was important and now it was a relic. In the smaller places of Georgia you see the connections and similarities the state has to its Southern neighbors that metro Atlanta does not have. I could have been just as easily in Gadsden or Fort Payne or Meridian instead of Macon, but those places did not give us Otis Redding or Little Richard or Ronnie Hammond (lead singer of the Atlanta Rhythm Section) or The Allman Brothers Band. There must be something special about the crossroads there and rolling down Highway 41.

Warner Robins, Georgia. January 2024.

I-985. January 2024.

The sun set on Saturday and a week ended. My feet went on my desk and outside as I write this it is nineteen degrees in the backyard. My lips are chapped and I am a little sore. It is time to be home again and to empty the head that is in the middle of thinking about something.

I Have Seen That Face Before

Oh...

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head

A mugshot is that moment for the public when a crime becomes real and a criminal is made. For the accused, it probably feels like a ceremonial performance as part of having their finger prints taken and the handcuffs placed on them. Perhaps it does not seem genuine until the bars close behind them and they are left with only their potentially guilty thoughts and a filthy shared toilet. It might emotionally sink in for them when they have been caught and the game is up. The mugshot is enough for the rest of us to understand that this is official without a need to experience the rest of it.

I have seen numerous mugshots of people I have written about in my books. Some of them, with multiple mugshots, were expected and then there was one I saw this week that shocked me. I might have expected it if it were Rowe (he has several mugshots) or English Stan (he has none). The person staring ahead in the orange jumpsuit and bad lighting with a scowl I saw for years was the real person behind one of the major characters in all of my books.

It seemed impossible. It seemed ludicrous.

Side by side I compared older photographs of them to the mugshot taken in 2023 and even overlaid them in Photoshop. It was the identical bent ear and the same messed-up eyebrow. Not that I should have needed more convincing once I looked into their eyes, I still did not believe it. I scoured the internet for two days to triple-check the information. It was as though I tried to convince myself that the tsunami I faced was only a ripple on an infinity pool caused by the breeze of a palm fan. This could not be.

There was some reason for disbelief, the last I saw of them was in the 1990s, when they resembled the dorky and youthful person I knew. They were not this scruffy, wrinkled, sun-blotched person who had let themselves go. Was I wrong? I still questioned it despite the exact match of their first, middle and last names and their date of birth.

Something else that threw me off and gave me the biggest doubt was the incorrect information about where they were raised. No, they were not raised in that state; they were raised in Paulding County. I was sure of it; I had known them since elementary school. I had slept in their bed, worn their clothes and much, much more. There was no evidence then or now that this person had a doppelganger.

My fingers kept clicking and my browser kept digging deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole. I learned that they had lied about where they were raised to cover their tracks. That lie was part of a larger scheme lasting two decades.

Emotionally it sank in for me, the information was correct. I was left dizzy in a state of unexpected disappointment. How had I gotten this person so wrong or had they changed? To call it a shock would be to call losing an arm in a gory chainsaw accident a minor scrape with a Husqvarna running wide open. Why had this person allegedly committed these felony crimes and potentially spend the rest of their life in prison? I do not understand.

It was not unexpected that the bullies and bad characters that I have written about have all gone on to become criminals of varying degrees. None of them redeemed themselves in adulthood or made the world a better place. Once a bad apple, always that, I suppose, but this person was not a bad apple. This person was one of the people I still held admiration for, albeit with a few misgivings. It was as if a worm had breached the red skin and made them rotten. This moral threshold that everyone of us have, with a few exceptions, that establishes at our most fundamental level what is right and what is wrong, was perforated. They went from an adult with a distinguished career to possibly a felon on multiple counts.

I scrambled my brain looking for markers on the highway of life that might have predicted this outcome for them.

The look in the mugshot is one I recognize when this person is seething with anger. I did see that face from them a few times, but that is not enough to convict them or say that this person will grow up to become a criminal.

I am reminded of a scene between us next to a cow pond in Dweller On The Boundary.  They throw a large rock into the water disturbing the universe. The crows are gathered in the tree tops, pacing and watching. The conversation goes somewhere I do not want. There were signs of something I did not understand in their personality and they, like many people, had a few loose connections, but not once did I believe there was anything other than a shining goodness in them that steered their decisions.

There is also an experience I have withheld about them, but I am compelled to write about it now. It is not included in the first draft of my next novel, but with these new developments, I will work it in. It seemed insignificant in the context of the times and in 1986, but now it makes more sense and takes on a bruising shade of seriousness. It could have some relevance to what became of them.

Some of the other accusations levied against them without being charged yet, but hopefully will if true, are violations of federal law. With the gift of hindsight, I can see the origins of these accusations taking root in the games we played as kids. Those inconsequential make believe games we played then carry stiff consequences if carried out by adults. How could a smart person be so dumb? This person acted like he was Peter Pan, except they knew it was not a game. I have seen the evidence of these accusations as presented by knowledgeable people in this field and it is damning.

Ethically and legally, I cannot write why they were arrested, even if it is a matter of public record or their other shady and dishonorable dealings, for fear of revealing their identity in my books. With these constraints, there is little detail I can write, but it is bad, very bad. The alleged crimes are bad enough that this person's arrest was covered on every local television news broadcast where they live. Not to offer them any defense or to minimize the crimes, but they are not violent or of a sexual nature and instead involved a very planned deception. The justice system affords them the presumption of innocence and in my heart I would like to believe they are innocent, but based on the evidence and patterns of behavior I have learned about, the allegations are probably true. This was not a one-time spur of the moment bad decision by a good person. It was a series of intentional bad choices over a long period of time by someone that had a substantial part in my young life.

I have to think maybe I saw this somewhere buried in their eyes, at the corners of their mouth or in their arrogance behind closed doors, but I did not. They always claimed to know so much about human nature and then they gave into the meaner, more desperate side of it. It upends my view of them in the past, our shared memories, what I have written about them and they are now tainted. 

If a conviction comes down before publication of my next novel, then I will address it in the epilogue, as this book was intended to tie up all of the storylines from this series. Beyond that, I will have no further comments about this person.

Inside My Skull

Me in 2000.

 

To write about the past is not as easy as opening your head and spilling it out onto the screen. If only it was that easy then I could write much faster. 

 

One of the techniques I use to remember the past is immersive. I visit places from that time, listen to music from then, watch videos if I have them, look at photos, read my journals or hold objects from the  time. Those actions are an attempt to reconstruct what it felt like in my life  and to coax out memories that may have been misplaced. Since my next novel is set in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s I still  have clothes from that period that did not end up in one those charity bins in a shopping center parking lot. Luckily the clothes still fit and I have put them on.

The year 2000 was a big year for me with many changes. I had come into my own, was successful, confident and was having a lot of fun. I was into trip hop, trance and jazz since rock music was going a direction that little interested my tastes. I was exposed to trip hop by a guy I dated in late 1999 that was Mr. Hip Designer, living-in-a-loft guy. It was a brief relationship, but it changed me for the better. I cannot listen to the sensual downtempo music of Massive Attack, Portishead, Alpha or Hooverphonic and not think of him. He left his fingerprints inside my skull.

A copy I still have of an XY Magazine from 2000.

I was rummaging through the bookcases in my office and came across this magazine. I remember buying it at a Borders bookstore near where I lived. I had grown up a magazine reader and in the early 2000s I often went to bookstores rifle through the magazine rack and read. Even a simple magazine from twenty-three years ago had memories attached to it that had little to do with what was printed on its pages.

 

To look at this XY Magazine from November 2000 is for me to remember how much I loved the television show Queer As Folk. I added Showtime to my Direct TV package just to watch and I cared little about television. The show debuted that December, but there was much buzz about it in gay circles beforehand about just how gay and sexy it was going to be. It turned out to be just as advertised and in those first couple of seasons I never missed an episode or taped it on the VCR if I could not watch it when it was scheduled.

Looking at this magazine also reminds me of a guy I met that fall and the deep red accent wall of my master bedroom. I remember him holding this very magazine in bed next to me after sex and asking who the guy on the cover was as he pointed at Justin played by Randy Harrison.
 

"He's hot. Who is this," he asked.

I agreed and explained that he had grown up in metro Atlanta and some of his family still lived here.

The guy I was in bed with was twenty-one, a twink, from the small Georgia town of Jefferson. I had aged out of my twink years and was twenty-seven. He was attractive, good in bed and a fling that lasted a few weeks. Our getting together was never meant to be anything more than temporary fun. I was on to the next guy and he probably was too.

I did write about this guy in the first draft of the next book, but whether he will make it through the further drafts remains to be seen. There are so many stories that could be told in every life, but never will and that is one of the more difficult parts of writing, knowing what to cut. A good memory does not always make for an entertaining one or one that fits within a larger story that is being told.

To the Jefferson twink, I still remember your name and if you are out there and you find this, I hope you are doing well.

It might not be trip hop, but that year I loved Macy Gray's I Try.

 

All Dressed Up For Christmas

The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens. Photo by me, December 2022.

Christmas in Georgia is rarely white, but it can be cold as it was last year with lows at my house in the single digits and afternoon highs in the twenties for several days. The cold was refreshing and it made wandering through the state botanical garden light displays in Athens a more festive experience. More commonly it is a cool and cloudy holiday here. This year it will be a wet Christmas with rain expected from late Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. I would have hated that forecast as a kid, but as an adult I am quite okay with the cozy weather.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

 

People would likely disagree with me, but last Saturday the 16th in Dahlonega, Georgia the weather was near perfect with heavy drizzle falling and a temperature in the middle forties. I was there to see the lights and browse the shops on the square and so were many others from the crowds and traffic I encountered.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

The lights were pretty, but not overwhelming. I saw prettier houses on the drive over through the city Gainesville than I did in Dahlonega. The mountain town north of Atlanta and just out of reach from its exurbs has been in the spotlight this year after being mentioned in Southern Living Magazine for the Christmas decorations and events. The mention was picked up by Atlanta television stations and the crowds flocked up Georgia 400. After going, I speculated if it was not some type of paid promotion to drum up tourism in the slowest of all seasons in the Georgia mountains. Had I not seen the stories on the Atlanta news websites, I probably would not have gone. I enjoyed myself, had a good lobster roll from a food truck vendor, but I was not impressed with the lights. Dahlonega is not my favorite mountain town anyway and the shops there are not on par with another mountain town, Blue Ridge.

Dahlonega has an interesting history besides being a former gold mining town, there was a bit of a scandal there in 2017. This story, in the U.K.'s Independent newspaper is quite kooky and worth the read.

Also last weekend I visited one of my favorite towns, Madison, on Sunday.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison is a small town I would feel comfortable living in. It has a charming and refined beauty about its downtown with several good shops and many fine old homes. The people have been friendly on every visit. A shopkeeper remembered me from my previous visits and finally asked if lived there or if I had family that did.

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

Some of the shop windows were wonderfully decorated for Christmas.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

These are a couple of the many grand homes in Madison decorated for the holidays. The town has the appearance of what people would consider the Old South or antebellum style. 

I have been busy, like most people, dashing to and fro this month. I have been down to Atlanta two or three times during this period.

Phipps Plaza in Atlanta. Photo by me, December 2023.

Santa taking requests at Phipps Plaza in the city.

Sometimes the best way to see Christmas lights and enjoy the sights is to loaf around in the evenings and at night between the planned activities.

Dusk in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

I pass through the small town of Bethlehem, Georgia once a week. Growing up in Georgia, I remember the annual news story that ran every December on the Atlanta television stations. It was the story of people making the drive to Bethlehem to mail Christmas cards for the Bethlehem postmark. Since mailing cards has declined I suppose people no longer visit the post office there in the numbers as they did decades before.

Photo by me, December 2023.

A nicely decorated home in Monroe, Georgia.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Every small town is all dressed up this time of year with Christmas lights. Monroe, Georgia does a simple but pretty job with their thriving downtown.

Season's Greetings And Christmas Cards

Some 1980s Christmas cards from WXIA-TV Atlanta that I received during my time affiliated with them from 1985 to 1990. Signed by Johnny Beckman, Guy Sharpe and other meteorologists and staff.

---

 Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to see the phrase “Season's Greetings” on Christmas cards, advertisements and other decorations, but the phrase dating back to Victorian times seems to have fallen out of usage or I seldom seem to encounter it any longer. My mother seemed to favor it for our family Christmas cards and I remember as a child seeing it the most often compared to other popular phrases like Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. 

 

Without fail and with enjoyment, my mother sent out Christmas cards every December. Revco, Zayre, K-Mart, Richway, Rich's or from wherever she got them that year. I was there with her, going through the boxes in the aisle next to the wrapping paper, until she asked me what I thought and she decided on just the right one. Some years it was a reindeer, a sleigh, a bird or barn in the snow or Santa with a bag of toys slung over his shoulder that she chose. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we did not.

Christmas cards from my childhood home in the 1980s.

 

The tradition was for her to retrieve the red address book from the telephone table in the living room and sit down to write out a stack of cards intended for friends and relatives. People got them even if she had not seen or spoken to them during the year; she was going to think of them for the moment it took to write their name.

 

The addresses rarely changed as people did not hop from house to house like the nomads of today seeking an upgraded kitchen and twenty car garage, except for a crazy aunt of mine who was constantly marrying, divorcing and moving. Houses are no longer homes, but investments and there are more people in Georgia than I ever would have imagined as a child. You could write my name and Route 5 Dallas, Georgia without any other numbers or a road and the mail carrier would have known exactly who I was and where I lived thirty or forty years ago. Not so today.

 

Christmas cards on a fireplace mantle in my former Louisville home. Photo by me, December 1996.

I sat next to my mother on the sofa and watched and waited for my turn in our conveyor belt Christmas card operation. Her handwriting was much prettier than mine; I am a left-hander and she was a righty, so she did the writing. My job was to stamp and seal the envelopes after she had signed the cards and filled in the address. Some television show would be on the background that neither of us cared for or in the seventies, she would have the Elvis Christmas LP from 1970 playing on the wood cabinet stereo.

No one interfered with us, as it was likely there was no one else around. When the writing, stamping and licking were done, we would drive to the post office in Dallas and I would run inside and drop them through the slots marked "Dallas Only" or "Out of Town."

A 1970s Christmas card from my great grandmother and great uncle in Visetown, Tennessee.

I do not imagine a scene such as that often plays out in contemporary life. Children have little interest in anything that is not on a phone screen and the same could be said of adults too. Christmas cards have been replaced by social media posts that sound like they were written by public relations firms and accompany an over stylized family photo in front of a Christmas tree or a summer beach vacation at Destin or Panama City at sunset with everyone dressed in white. The smiles will be wide, the hair will be blown, the sand will fill every wrinkle and the sunburn serious. Were these people stranded in the desert? After all, there are appearances to keep up and as I said to someone recently, everyone on social media appears to be happy and living the best life. Much show must be made of every moment at that very moment.

Most people of my generation and older will think of the Christmas card as an artifact of our past lives. Younger generations likely do not think of Christmas cards at all because they have probably never signed one. The Christmas card can be considered The Ghost of Christmas Past warning Scrooge to remember the innocent Christmas spirit that he possessed in his youth, lest he die miserably and sentenced to become a ghost chained up like old Jacob Marley. It might be Dickensian to hold the antiquated Christmas card in high regard or give it such powers of sentimentality. As a fan of Dickens, I fondly remember the cards as much as the parties more than I do any G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures that I received as a present under the tree. Receiving a Christmas card meant that you mattered or were thought of, even if it was only for a moment. There was a human connection in the handwriting, the brief words written, the tearing open of the envelope and the licking of the stamp.

There is no human connection in the 'like' button or the heart icon underneath the thumb holding a screen. You might as well keep scrolling for the next video or selfie or time-wasting piece of content.

Half of the enjoyment of Christmas cards was receiving them in the mail. I liked to see the variety of cards that people chose and the handwriting styles. After opening the cards, they would be placed on the mantle above the fireplace, where they would sit until after the new year, when the decorations came down and were boxed up. While they were there for a month, I would look at them and be reminded of that person and imagine our card sitting on their mantle. The lifespan of the Christmas card was another part of the tradition. The unsatisfactory modern equivalent of social media posts cannot be perched on a mantle or satisfy my need to tear open an envelope. Their lifespan is less than a second, as it is scrolled by and never seen or thought of again. Such is contemporary digital life, where nothing endures.

 

The Lenox Square tree in 2007. Photo by me.

Similarly, Macy's killed off the Rich's Christmas tree tradition after seventy-four years in Atlanta. I have been to Lenox Square twice since Thanksgiving this year and the Christmas spirit was lacking and some of that was not seeing a Christmas tree atop the Rich's (it'll never be Macy's to me) store. It was a tradition I grew up with, even in years I did not see the tree in person at the Rich's flagship downtown store on the crystal bridge or when it moved to Buckhead, as the night of the lighting was always broadcast on television. In my lifetime until now, it has always existed and so from my perspective, it should always continue to exist. Tradition is something humans grasp onto when other aspects of life shift with the times and become unrecognizable. They are reassurances on cold, windy nights that some things still matter and are constant when little else behaves in that manner.

The last Christmas card my mother sent me four months before she died.

The season's greetings are not mailed anymore, but are more likely Instagrammed and forgotten. Traditions require too much time, thought and effort in the age of instant and constant gratification. This is how traditions fade out little by little with the passage of time and people. I still send Christmas cards and I will keep sending them until I can no longer find them in the stores or have no one to send them to.