Well, well, well, No promises.






Saturday, February 27, 2010

Old News

It wasn't me who said it tonight. I wasn't the one who said, "being in here right now makes me feel old," but I had thought it the night before. Maybe it was the place I was in but the music was bad and loud, and thou I think the me of ten years ago would have said the tunes were bad and loud, I had no desire to be there. Other than a couple of my friends were there.

And sometimes you stick your nose in places you know you don't want to be just to confirm you don't want to be there. Remind yourself of your preferences. A lot of people are leaving. One was the reason I was out last night and another I found out about tonight. But that's the way things happen, and nobody in the places you've come to expect them to be in. But the dog still licks me when I walk inside. And people are supposed to leave and I'll leave one day, yet that day isn't today or anytime soon. And there'll be days and nights when I don't feel so old.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Pedal Commuting


If the rain stops and the streets dry some then I plan on riding my bike to work in the morning. It's been nearly a year since I last rode into town for work. It used to be my savior, those three or four miles, where I was alone and pedaling. Riding woke me up in the morning and evaporated all of the stress and frustration of the day's work on the way home. And it gave me the energy that I've missed.

I've got a new job and thus a new route-but I've still got my helmet. (mom) Please scoot over a couple of inches if you're trying to pass me and wait until after you've passed to honk and waive. No I don't know Lance Armstrong & I'm not going to race in the Tour de France, but I'll feel like a kid once I've clipped into my pedals. I'm not going to stop at the three-way stop by the airport and if the guy in the giant red truck yells at me again I'll probably let him hit me so I can collect a big fat check and he can join the Aryan gangs in parchman.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

A Flannery A Day...



A month or so ago I purchased The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor and it has been sitting on my shelf while I tried to figure out how to read it. The book is thick, roughly 500 pages, and I knew that if I tore into it I wouldn't appreciate all the stories as individual works of art and they would meld into each other. Finally, the other day I decided that I would read one of Flannery's stories a each day until I finished the book. There are 31 stories so I've got a month of great stories to digest.

I'm only a couple of days into my mission but thus far the stories and my plan have been great. If at all possible I've tried to read the daily story in the morning and thus I have the opportunity to think about it all day long. Several times I've found myself standing around at work with nothing going on and I ask myself which story I read that morning. Then I replay the story in my head. This process seems way better than reading a bunch at one sitting because each story is clear and separate in my head. And since the collection is organized chronologically I will get to witness Flannery's progression.

Right now I'm reading the stories she wrote while working on her MFA in Iowa, they are good but don't yet have the violence of her later work. I'm excited to reach those.

If this goes well I'll consider doing the same for another author, possibly Carver or someone else you suggest.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Assessing While Walking The Dog

A real estate agent wanted to show my house this afternoon and thus Joe Lon and I had to leave the house for a couple of hours. We went to the dog park, but it was mud coated and I had just cleaned my house, so we didn't stay long. Then we went for a walk around town.

I've taken Joe Lon on a variety of adventures, mountain biking, doggy wrestling, puppy playtime, driving to Georgia, but what we haven't done until today is walk on sidewalks with cars going by. It was a struggle, the restricted walking, for the both of us especially while I was talking on the phone. At the gettin' down Moses woods I hung up the phone, let Joe Lon poop and then we started back.

Because I was on the phone and began to notice how many houses I had passed on my walk that I had been in to clean the windows. I could have been a tour guide on those couple of streets. There was the house with the couple of dogs-one of which bit me on the calf. It's the only time I've ever been bit and it took damn near all I had to not kick the dog the next time they called us. Around the corner was a guy who we've done work for several times in the last four years. So he had seen me before, but when he called my boss about getting on the roof of his porch and nailing a giant decorative star on the wall he wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to be me that got on the roof. He was worried I was too heavy. But this guy lives next door to his parents and from the street there houses look like they are separate but the backyards are fenced in together so it kind of looks like a creepy polygamist Mormon compound.

Next door to that guy is a house that has a really bad mildew problem, we're over there several times a year. But I heard from someone that the man of the house is a bit of a nudist so every time I'm over there I'm afraid I'm going to catch a little swinging richard action. Across the street is a couple from Minnesota. When I told them I was from Athens GA the woman told me she had a great story. She then proceeds to tell me that she and her husband conceived their first child in Athens Ga. They also have one of those eight foot long pools that pushes the water against you when you swim so you don't go anywhere. Next to the Minnesotans lives a woman that I swear has it bad for my boss.

Further up the street is a man who once told us that his little dog likes everyone but queers. That's the guy that reminds me I'm living in Mississippi. There were other stories on that street but since it's taken me longer to write this blog than it did to walk from the woods back to my truck-parked in front of the house where the mini horse lives, I'll go ahead and wrap this up. But while thinking about all of this I was reminded of a time when a friend asked me what I would do-how I would relate to this town when I no longer cleaned windows. I don't have an answer and I would prefer not to think about it any longer.