January day

There is a certain beauty to the world that one must be a part of to experience. It must be found while walking, jogging, running or in my case, cycling out in the afternoon. It can not be found from the isolated biome of a car, in a city-state little world with gadgets and conditioned air.

Today, I experienced it:

The sun hangs white in the sky, cloudless and deep blue, going on forever and more.

There is a small pasture just off of the four-lane where no animals have grazed for a while. Wild hedges have grown up all along the barbed-wire fencing, except for a ground-level hole on the western-running side, where a pack of dogs makes shortcut to their homes and haunts.

Off of a brown two-lane, colored by its make-up of pea gravel, lie several small, white houses quaint and homely. To one's side, there stands water from the previous weeks' rains. In the middle of the water stands a young willow, and the sun reflects bright off the water's still surface. Shadows lean from everything, right to left, and a warmth blankets the streets.

In these moments in this little town in the foothills, a song comes to mind:

I met my love by the gas works wall,
dreamed a dream by the old canal,
I kiss my girl by the factory wall;

Dirty old town; dirty old town.
 
Clouds are drifting across the moon,
cats are prowling on their beats,
spring's a girl in the streets at night,
Dirty old town; dirty old town.

At the city elementary school, a small girl pushes herself around the asphalt lot while her parents look on. Nearby, there is a house that is beautiful and elegant as this day. In the lawn, just away from the street, is stuck a sign, out of place against the home's perfection. It is for sale, and all I can do is dream.

I heard a siren from the docks
saw a train set the night on fire.
I smelled the spring on the smoky wind.
Dirty old town; dirty old town.

Being awful

I am so awful for not keeping this guy updated. For that, to all you kind folks who read, I am sorry.

The last time I posted anything was the day after that fella showed up to the Dark Knight Rises premiere and opened fire on innocents. That feels like it was years, not months, ago.

I'm sure that my numbers went crazy around the end of September, when I was the center of a pretty big media frenzy. And I am most definitely, absolutely, no way going to talk about that incident here on the Internet, where one misspeak could land me in big-time trouble.

I just want to get back in the habit of posting my thoughts and days and, as a good friend just recently blogged about, misadventures.

So stay tuned, and I know that I have given no one any reason to believe that more is coming, but I'm going to put serious effort into updating.

Oh yea! The reason I came to the Internet was to make an online portfolio that is due tomorrow for my senior exit interviews. Now you see why I don't update ...

Slaughter and the aftermath

It's a dangerous business, writing a piece like this so shortly after a tragedy when the emotions are still raw.

But I'm going to anyway.

I don't find it necessary to again comment on the disgusting state of American society when theaters aren't safe. I don't think I have to say that it's like living in a third-world country and metal detectors will be necessary everywhere we visit because these things actually happen. In the civilian world.

I don't think I have to say that these are unprecedented and intimidating incidents.

I shouldn't have to say that.

But here's what I am going to say: do not take this tragedy and use it as a soapbox to shout "Now is our time" from. Do not make this a jumping off point for a faux children's crusade that will fizzle out in two weeks because it isn't fresh anymore and it isn't the newest cause anymore.

I still cringe and think about the embarrassing Kony 2012 campaign. What happened? What noble and faithful societal correction officers most of those bandwagon supporters are. Not all of them, not all of you, to be fair.

This cinema shooting is a nightmare. But what I find completely distasteful and unacceptable - beyond the senseless murder of living breathing human beings with souls just like mine - is the butterflies that some get in their gut when they see the headlines and immediately knee jerk with a self-elating, self-catalystic call to arms to the like-minded, whomever they are, and when these people begin to make statements about how the time has come to do a thing.

No. The time has passed to do a thing. The time was yesterday or the day before or the day before.

We have failed as humans on every level - socially, culturally, nationally and yes, religiously - when tragedies occur because someone intentionally robs innocent people of their lives en mass. We all foot the bill for this.

Do not take this opportunity to spew empty rhetoric about how the time has come to act. Do not promise that things will get worse and do not all but pretend to hold the other end of the hangman's rope and proclaim that if your people don't act, these things will be more common. How dare we.

The fact is we all shot those people in Colorado. We are all responsible. I'm responsible.

This is not about your children's crusade or rhetoric or perfect opportunity to step up and manipulate the circumstances to forward your message, whatever it is. Be a human being. Mourn. Get angry. But put legs on your desire to do something and stop talking about it. We will be flooded with people talking for the next six months. 

Have some respect; have some empathy. This is not the time to put on closet altruism and pick and choose quotes or texts that vaguely resemble circumstances on your TV. If that worked, we wouldn't be here, because that's exactly the full extent of what most of us have done every time something like this happens.

This is the time to either act or shut up. Pick one.

Independence Day

 The following is a column I wrote for the The Herald-News for the July 5, 2012 edition. It was rejected, so I'll just give it to you all for free.

 I spent my evening Saturday working Graysville’s FreedomFest, the community’s Fourth of July celebration. 

The 100-plus degree heat kept most people away throughout the day. I saw a sparse turnout for an auction, and I heard about the even more stale results from the FreedomFest car show and pageant. 

Around 9:15 p.m., though, people started coming. 

Cars filled up the little gravel parking lot at Kristopher’s Kingdom park where the event was held, and the small streets barely wide enough for one vehicle slowly lined up with parked vehicles as the dark came on. 

By 9:35, around 400 people had come out. 

Graysville has long suffered from a reputation that still circulates around the area. The city and its people are usually cast as poor, dirty, simple and frankly, stupid. The image of the city’s park filling up with sweaty adults and dirty-footed, shirtless kids might confirm that stereotype if taken at face value. 

But here’s the thing: a lot of the people are legitimately and legally poor. They have less than others in other areas of the county, the state and the country. They don’t have enough to eat at times. The dirty faces of children and their longful glances at fundraiser concession chili cheese hotdogs and popcorn confirm it. 

The emotional walls and defensive dispositions of their parents do as well. 

A lot of the people are dirty. They have brown-stained jeans, blackened boots and T-shirts with white rings dried around the collar. They’re dirty, though, because they’ve worked all day, either at a job for a company who will likely fire them for being 15 minutes late, even if there was car trouble, or at home, on an old mower or an old car, neither of which can be replaced because the money isn’t there. 

A lot of the people are simple. They won’t talk about super PACs or the electoral college or Nietzsche or Tiffany, Waterford or Chanel.  They’ll talk about growing conditions and can say exactly what date to plant, how much to fertilize, and when to water. 

They can talk about the real job market and how everyone seems to know someone who has lost a job due to outsourcing or businesses that have gone belly up. They can talk about getting by on a fixed income and surviving on a fraction of what some billionaires received in a severance package and then killed themselves over rather than downgrade their standard of living. 

The people aren’t stupid. The city government is poor – budget wise, it falls last of Rhea’s three cities.

During the firework show that the Graysville Volunteer Fire Department put on for the community, at times there were breaks between rockets and explosions and lights. During those breaks, the 400 or so people standing around the little ball field didn’t boo. 

Clapping and cheering went up. They applauded and said thank you. They appreciated it. 

As a reporter, I constantly mentally and emotionally distance myself from the subjects of my reporting and I maintain a fly on the wall mentality. It’s the way it should be. I may have to report on a scandal in the Graysville Volunteer Fire Department tomorrow. 

But at one point, as I looked up at explosions and lights in the black, hot sky, reflective of the bombs and rockets of the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War, it was easy to again be in love with the idea of America and the Americana community ideal, and I ceased to be on the outside looking in, and I became part of the Graysville community. 

For a minute, during the explosions, America was the greatest country on earth, and poverty and jobs and a slipping world economy and power status were out of sight, and I relaxed. 

Just after the display, I was getting in my car, and I ran into a Graysville commissioner and the city’s utility director. 

I overhead the utilities director tell the commissioner that someone had been vandalizing the city’s fire hydrants. The ball park lights came on and illuminated smoke hanging in the air.

Back to reality.

Summer Solstice

Today is the summer solstice. Today is the longest day of 2012. There is only one.

Today is about this:

Honoring the worthy dead. It's about two markers that say someone great was here. It's about laying the stones beside Jordan.

It's two windows down and warm air flooding in a 15-year-old Jeep. It's the sound of tires on asphalt. It's the on-off, on-off, on-off echo of a passing vehicle bouncing off the stone rails of a little bridge over a creek. It's the nothingness of the sound passing through the railing gaps.

It's the smell of burnt fireworks. It's the rapid popping of firecrackers and the image of several boys shoeless in the backyard daring one another to light more next time

It's face to face, close up and swaying to no music except the chirps of crickets and frogs. Its one set of bare feet on two feet tied up in leather shoes.

It's hot and sweating even as the water of a shower cascades and swirls and plunges down the tub drain.

It's a dog barking, always, somewhere in the night. Sometimes here.

Sometimes there.

It's the green glow of a cat's eyes as he crouches in imagined secrecy at the road's edge. It's his motive for roaming while the rest of the world sleeps. It's his prowling, working his beat.

It's orange lightning flashing away to the east above this quiet valley. It's veiled like the roaming eye of Sauron, piercing and menacing, but distant and powerless to reach a hand this far.

It's purple thistles on the side of a national highway.

It's the perfect song:

"Your mama always said we had nothing to lose
so we danced on a street corner.
Oh, Caroline,
heartbroken hard times never got us down.
Walking the same line
through every shady Southern town.
Hand in hand, your arm round mine,
Caroline, you do just fine."

It's knowing that somewhere out in the dark, there's a barn with horses in it, asleep.

It's knowing there's an old wooden house somewhere, and there's an old man sitting on the porch drinking a beer from a glass and thinking about a beautiful girl and a party under white lights strung like spokes from an old Oak that was already ancient 50 years ago.

It's a hundred-year-old potato storage cabin woven into the very fabric of a patriarchal homestead.

It's remembering all those who came before and not looking past those who are here now.

It's echoes off of a green mountain, as life is suddenly clearly only an echo of the lives that have already been lived. It's belonging.

It's living right now, the smells, the sights, the noises, the memories, the land, the stars, the moon. It's home, and it's never as certain as it is today. It's in the heart on the summer solstice.

Que Sera, Sera.

Gas

I went to a corner gas station yesterday because my fuel needle was hovering between the bottom-most line on the gas gauge and the first marker. This region is orange and intended to show danger if not addressed.

It was warm outside, and I drove with the windows down. Out of the four adjustable windows in my late '90s Jeep, only the front driver's side was down. They are all hand-cranked and inconvenient to turn.

I slid my bank card in and out of the card reader on the pump - pump two - and I began to move the fuel needle out of the orange danger area.

A white SUV pulled up to the opposite side of the pump I was using. The SUV was facing the same direction as mine, toward the store. Its fuel door was on the passenger side. I thought that placement would bother me. I like the driver-side fuel door. I imagined that it would be harder for me to judge my distance from the fuel pump if the fuel door was on the passenger side.

I was watching the black digital numbers tick on the pump's display. I pulled down the spring-loaded piece that fits into grooved teeth on the metal guard of the pump handle and let gas to flow freely into the tank of my Jeep.

The pump was dusty, and on one side, there was a square white sticker with black bold print that said, "PROLONGED EXPOSURE TO FUMES WAS FOUND TO HAVE CANCER IN LABORATORY MICE."

That was only a portion of the entire wording, which I can not remember. But I considered whether brief exposure to fumes over several years tallies up to prolonged exposure.

A man and a woman were in the white SUV on the opposite side of the pump I was using; their side was pump one. He was out working the pump, and the woman sat in the car. The front two windows of their white SUV were down, and she was wearing large, rounded-square plastic sunglasses, and she was not listening to the radio.

His head was shaved, and he had a goatee, and he wore thin, angular athletic sunglasses.

My right hand was on the pump, and I propped myself against it and looked out on the highway to avoid looking at him. As the digital numbers in the "Amount Sold" display neared $40, I took back control of the handle's trigger.

The man putting fuel into the white SUV said that it is about time that we see some relief with fuel prices, and he asked didn't I agree.

I agreed.

He said it's unbelievable and frustrating how much the cost of fuel has risen since he was a kid and it averaged 96 cents.

I agreed.

I said that I even remember fuel costing little more than a dollar. "And I'm not -" I was going to say old, but I realized that he was not old, and it would be rude to indicate that I felt him so much older than me.

"And I'm 22," I said.

We exchanged frustrations. I had long stopped fueling my Jeep. I joked about the Keystone Pipeline. His wife spoke up for the first and only time from the passenger seat. That oil won't go to China if a Republican is elected president, she said. She guaranteed me that.

She was a fifth-grade teacher at my elementary school. I remember her, but she does not know me. I wondered if after I told my age she calculated in her head that I could have been a student of hers 11 years ago. 

I concluded that the entire oil ordeal is frustrating. The man agreed.

"And I fought for this country ..." he said. He didn't finish his thought. I wondered if it was that he felt he deserved relief even more than I, or any civilian, do or does. I wondered if he suddenly thought less of me because I didn't, and won't, fight. I could feel him examining me - my face alone visible to him because of the pump - and holding something back.

I said nothing. He said nothing. His mouth curled into a shape that I could not identify as either a smile or a frown. He swiveled his head slightly to the right with the strange expression in his lips. I was ready to end our conversation.

"Well, we'll see," I said. What we'll see, I don't know. He agreed. I told them to have a good evening, and I meant it.

The library

I went to the library today. I had a Hemingway book that was almost 10 days overdue, so I went to the bank beforehand to get cash to pay my library fine. I took $20 out of my checking account.

I had to stand at the check-in counter for a moment before a lady standing just opposite of me noticed. She finally looked up and asked if I wanted to check something in. I said yes. Also, I said, I had a fine, and I wanted to pay it.

She checked Hemingway in and told me I owed the library $2.40. I handed her the twenty. It was crisp and flat. 

“I overestimated a bit,” I said when I handed her the money. She turned and changed the bill on the other side of the horseshoe-shape desk. She might have smiled when I said what I did. It’s hard to tell because she was walking away from me, but sometimes it does seem that you can see someone smiling by the way they turn their head or where they look, even if it’s away from you. I thought she smiled.

I found Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and I read through the first five pages in the aisle. The book wasn’t what I expected it to be. It was nothing like I had expected. But I was engaged, and although it wasn’t what I was expecting or particularly craving at that moment, I took it, and I intend to read it. 

But it really isn’t what I expected.

The same lady who checked in Hemingway was there to check out Vonnegut. I placed the book on the desk, and I reached for my keys, because on my key ring is my library card. The key ring was not in my pocket. I had left it outside, as I do. 

I went and got it as two Hispanic boys were paying for something. They didn’t know how much to give. The lady behind the desk – not the one who checked in Hemingway – told them it was $2 per day. They stood there and counted out some cash. I saw a lot of ones. She asked if they were paying today. I walked outside.

On the way back in, the two Hispanic boys passed me on the sidewalk. They were smiling. I can only imagine that the transaction went as well or better than they had anticipated, or they were laughing at one another, joking about the lady or something that one of them had said to her or among themselves. 

My book, the Vonnegut, was on the desk where I left it. I stood with it at the check-out station. The lady reached her hand out and I pushed the book toward her. She did not put her hand on the book, and I looked up at her. She wanted my library card. It was the very reason I had gone outside. I passed it across the desk to her. 

She took care of the check-out and asked if I needed a print-out. She didn’t explain what a print-out is, but I knew that she meant did I want a piece of paper with the return date on it. I said no. “What’s the date,” I asked.

If I had walked up to her and handed her nothing and asked her what the date was, she would have told me May 31. But after the check-out and her question, she answered, “the 14^th.”

June 14. That is my dad’s birthday. I didn’t say that to her, but it flagged immediately in my brain. I told her that I’m trying to work through top 20^th century American literature. She said nothing, and I walked away. 

I find it curious that she said nothing. She has made books her life, and I find that most people love to talk about what they do, and in this case, I expected her to have two reasons to answer: one, her career revolves around literature, and two, she certainly has a favorite 20^th century author or work. 

Maybe it's just me.