And then, this happened. So, I decided to go for a more understated approach this season.

It isn’t just that I’m still sore from that thrashing or that I’ve found love in my heart for the bastards from Gainesville. I hate the Gators more than any other sporting team on the planet. It is just that I’m a pragmatist. It is hard to talk much trash when you’re headed for a near certain ass whooping. The Gators are the defending National Champions, they are the unaninamous number one team in the country, they’ve won 16 of the last 19 games with the Dawgs. Georgia, on the other hand, is unranked, having struggled to a 4-3 record on the season. They have been wildly inconsistent on both sides of the ball. They are about 16 point underdogs in Saturday’s game.

God I hate losing to the Gators.

But here is the thing: the Dawgs can win. Florida has shown more than one weakness in the last several weeks. A really bad Arkansas team nearly took them out in Gainesville. An even worse Mississippi State team gave them a good scare last week. Florida is beatable. They have never had a perfect season, despite winning two of the last three national championships. I think that they are due a loss this season as well. And every now and again the good guys get to win.

The Dawgs can win.

But the probably won’t.

I fully expect the team that collapsed in Knoxville a few weeks ago to take the field in Jacksonville on Saturday. Georgia seems to have some sort of mental block when they step out onto the field at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.  I am pretty certain that Florida’s stifling defense is going to shut down Georgia’s ineffective offense. I’d be willing to put a large sum of money on I hope I’m wrong, because I have a chance to watch this game live on the TV. For the second time in four years, and the second time this season, the Dawgs will be playing on Australian free-to-air TV. So, come 6 a.m. Sunday morning, I’ll be there with the rest of the Bulldog Nation. Fairly certain of defeat but still hopeful, as our boys take the field. I’ll drag my boys downstairs to watch my alma mater take the field against their most loathsome opponent. And I’ll watch the whole blasted game. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be surprised.

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One of my favorite British acts, The Broken Family Band released their latest LP, “Please and Thank You” earlier this year. If it stands up to 2005’s “Welcome Home Loser” it is worth the purchase price. Get these two and more by the Broken Family Band at .

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Crowd

Mascots

I know book banners and I know what they look like and sound like. I grew up in a small town on the steaming pine flats of north Florida. This particular town was famous for two things. One, Ted Bundy killed his last victim there. Two, they banned Chaucer from the schools. When I was a Freshman in High School, my county school board banned a humanities text book that contained excerpts from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. That’s right, 5^th century B.C. Greek drama and 13^th century English frame tales were too dirty for our developing minds. A local preacher’s wife was helping her daughter with her homework one day and came across the mere mention of the existence of sex in Lysistrata and the “The Miller’s Tale” – a farcical story in verse that includes medieval fart jokes – and went all histrionic. She got her husband on to the case, who used his own little bully pulpit to get a rise out of his Southern Baptist congregation. As these things do in small towns, in a matter of weeks there was fury from the community about their precious innocents being forced to read such smut. Smut that 99% of them hadn’t bothered to read. Smut that the vast majority of them couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell.

The irony, of course, is that in the late 80’s most of these delicate flowers were having more sex than Aristophanes could ever conceive of and the jokes I heard in the halls of my school would have caused Chaucer to blush. But logic and reality tend to be irrelevant when a community is stricken with a righteous fury and the school board, with a cowardly unanimous vote, caved under the pressure and banned both the humanities book and the original text.

At the time, I didn’t know Greek comedy from situation comedy and  I didn’t know that Chaucer was the father of English literature and laid the path for seven centuries of words to come. I was 15 and had bigger issues to deal with and I just didn’t really care about the ban.  I was young and still labored under the illusion that elected officials knew best and had my interests at heart. I’ve always been a little bit ashamed that I wasn’t angry at the time, that I didn’t get angry until I went away to college and read “Lysistrata” and “The Canterbury Tales”. It was at that point that I realized what had been done to me by the preachers and the school board.

I have no problem with anyone’s religious beliefs, none whatsoever. Largely because what anyone else believes is absolutely none of my business. If you don’t want to watch a movie or read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine. If you don’t want your child to read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine, though you probably ultimately do your child a disservice. Nonetheless, none of my business. But the Christianists that banned Chaucer and Aristophanes went a step too far, they didn’t want anyone to read, watch or listen to something that offended their faith. This is where I have a problem. This is where your religion offends me. This is where your beliefs tread on not only my beliefs, but my freedom to practice them. This is where it becomes my business.

I learned that in my first year of a private Christian college in South Carolina. I learned that I should be angry about what had been done in my hometown. I learned about book banning. It didn’t just happen in that small town in north Florida. It had happened throughout history when zealots with a modicum of power and more than their fair share of influence convinced an ill informed population that a book threatened their morality. And I got angry. And I wrote an essay for a literature class about book banning and book banners. My professor encouraged me to send that essay to my local newspaper and they published it as a guest editorial.

My small salvo in the war against book banning got me my first job as a writer. The surprisingly progressive publisher of our local paper gave me a summer job as an intern reporter. I spent two summers reporting on the local politicians. It was during those two summers that I became a liberal, that I began to question authority, that I learned the dirty truth about small town politics. During those two summers I got to know small town, small minded politicians who are so convinced that their personal morality is right that they are willing to force it on everyone else by any means necessary. I learned that if people wouldn’t listen and change, these people of will litigate their world view. There are lots of book banners on school boards and county commissions in small towns around the country, particularly in the South. I know them, I’ve worked for them and I’ve worked against them and I have had enough of them.

Now most of the time, these people don’t get far in politics. But every now and again one of them is clever enough, glib enough or charismatic enough to climb the political ladder. Sometimes they get elected to the State legislature, sometimes they might be elected to the House of Representatives. Occasionally one of them becomes governor or even a Senator. Increasingly, these small-minded proto fascists are making a dent on the national stage. Recently they’ve made their way on to the U.S. Supreme Court and into the White House itself. Things look a bit better after the latest American elections, but these folks are like bad pennies.

And I’ve learned that it isn’t just an American problem. Australia has a dubious history of censorship as well. As author Frank Moorhouse put it in an ABC Radio National program from 2006:

But the truthful joke about that period, and I’m talking up until the early 70s, was that if the Martians had landed in Australia and read our literature they would not have a clue how the species reproduced. There was not a clue in any Australian writing about how reproduction occurred. And of course as young people we were bereft of information about how to reproduce or how…most of us were trying not to reproduce.

But book banning is still alive and well in Australia today. In 2006, the Australian government refused classification to two books, “Defence of the Muslim Lands” and “Join the Caravan” by Abdullah Azzam. The Australian government is concerned that these two books may incite people to acts of terrorism. I guess my small town school board in the 80’s was worried about us thinking about sex and flatulence. Presumably advocates of banning the Harry Potter books were concerned about their children becoming witches and wizards. Today it is terrorism, the pornography of the 21st century. It is always something, but there is never a justification for censorship.

The American Library Association has a list of suggestions of what you can do to fight censorship, keep books available in your libraries, and promote the freedom to read as well as a disturbing map of book bannings and challenges in the last couple of years in the U.S. Whether you’re aware of it or not, censorship is alive and well in the United States and around the world. Anyone who loves the written word has an obligation to do something about it.

Personally, I’m going to hit the grass roots. I’m going to try to instill a love for the written words in my son the same way that my parents instilled it in me. By reading to them every day*.

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Talking Heads’ “77″ is available from .

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*Yes, I know that’s Dr. O’C and not me reading. But I do lots of reading too. I also do most of the picture taking. And the cooking. And the bulk of the work around the house…

What is fixing to get banned, however, is that dummy (pacifier) stuck in Boy Z’s mouth.

But I was back at work for half a day today, which allowed me to clear the cobwebs from my head. With that clarity, I’ve decided that rather than posting cute photos of my sons or moaning about the hardships of life as a father of two, today I want to talk about race.

Yes, I know that after that prelude, I’ve gone and posted a picture of my kids. I was trying to get a good picture of my study, where I do a fair bit of my writing, for a different post – one that I’m no longer interested in writing. I decided to take this shot, however, as an illustration of why it is essentially impossible for me to work from home right now. Creaking bed springs and gurgling baby are not sounds conducive to writing a lecture on human evolution or a report on a new cancer drug.

Your eye was probably immediately drawn to the two flags on the wall and they are what I want to talk about.

My friend Jamie and I liberated the flag on the right, the banner of the State of Florida, from St. George Island State Park during a drug fueled midnight run to New Orleans. I’m pretty sure that we broke both state and federal laws that night and that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be living outside the reach of the Florida and U.S. criminal justice systems. However, I’d be happy to assist authorities in the apprehension of my accomplice, who was in fact the criminal mastermind. And a Florida Gator fan, which ought to be a crime.

But let’s be honest, if you’re American your eye was drawn to the flag on the left. The old Georgia flag featuring the Confederate battle flag – one of the most potent and divisive symbols that we’ve got in the States. You were probably thinking to yourself,  “Well, I’ll be damned. I know A Free Man has a penchant for college football, but I didn’t realize he was a redneck. A racist. A (shudder) Republican.”

One of the things I don’t miss about the USA is societally mandated political correctness. American society has become so precious about race, gender, disabilities, religion, etc. that it was like a breath of fresh air when I landed in the slightly less PC United Kingdom and dramatically less PC Australia. It’s not that I want to walk the streets spouting racist or sexist diatribes. It has just gone too far in the United States. Gone so far, that a bad joke can get someone fired and exiled from polite society. Gone so far, that we’ve become humourless as a culture.

Gone so far, that legitimate political opposition to a black president is presumed to rooted in racism.

I don’t like the Far Right. I disagree with almost everything that they believe in. But they absolutely have the right to criticize the President. The same way that I, as a radical leftist, had the right to criticize President Bush. I’m sure there are some pissed off white supremacists out there who hate the president because he’s black. But most of the detractors on the right have, in their mind, legitimate political disagreements with Obama. Yes, some of them are being nasty and some are being dishonest. But I think back to 2002-3 when I began to realize that Bush was an incompetent at best or a liar at worse. I wasn’t very nice about him. Nor were a lot of the bomb throwers on the Left. But that had nothing to do with the fact that Bush was a white, Protestant from Texas. Just like the vast majority of the teabaggers’ problems don’t stem from President Obama’s skin color. Let’s get real.

But we need to talk about that Georgia flag. I bought it in 2001 after the state, under heavy political pressure, replaced it with a tepid politically neutral compromise. I picked it up, because at the time I thought Georgia was being cowardly by surrendering to the moral majority of the left – the forces of political correctness. And it was an incredibly unpopular decision in the state, leading to the election of the current governor – Sonny “Praying for Rain” Perdue. (Probably time to get off your knees, governor.) Perdue held a referendum which resulted in the replacement of one Confederate symbol with another one.

I never really ‘flew’ the flag when I was still living in the States. I’m sensitive to the divisiveness of the battle flag and the statement that it makes about an individual who displays it. But that has always annoyed me. Why does it mean I’m a racist if I choose to hang that flag on my wall? I’m kind of an amateur U.S. Civil War history buff and I’ve always had more sympathy for the Confederacy than the Union. I admired the spirit of the rebellious South, their gallant military leaders, their unwillingness to accept the reality that their lifestyle was untenable and their revolution was doomed.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m an advocate of slavery or even racial segregation. And, when it came down to brass tacks, that is what the Confederacy was about – the continuation of slavery. Unfortunately, the symbols of the Confederacy are inextricably tied up with racism.

Ignoring that part of Georgia’s past is nothing more than historical denial. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the battles over segregation are part of what Georgia and the rest of the South are today. I don’t know if you need to fly the Confederate battle flag in front of the state house, but banishing it from the public eye doesn’t do any good either. One could argue that Georgia and the other ten states of the old Confederacy should be required to fly the battle flag lest they forget. It is so oft cited that is almost cliche, but George Santayana’s most famous quote rings true again – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today, I don’t know what that flag means to me. I don’t know why, when I pulled it out of a box of stuff we had shipped from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia, I decided to hang it on the wall of my study. I like it. It doesn’t bear the heavy burdens here in Australia that it does in the U.S.  It reminds me of the five years I spent in Athens in the late 90’s. It reminds me that political correctness is a blunt, ineffective instrument for changing public opinion. But it also serves to remind me of the shameful legacy of race relations in a part of the United States that I love, both despite and because of its history.

It does not, however, mean that I’m a racist. Or a redneck. Or a Republican.

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The coolest man in Country, Dwight Yoakam’s classic 1988 LP “Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room” is available from .

Flag images from Wikipedia.

I’ve been thinking a lot about accents these days, particularly in terms of my kid(s. It is still weird to use the plural). Every time I get an e-mail from my Strange Scottish friend in Oxford she asks, “does Wee Z have an ozzie accent?” And I always reply to this question in the same way – “He only speaks in three word phrases. You daft c*nt.”

We have that kind of relationship.

Daft or no, she’s not far off. Boy Z and Not Max will most likely develop a South Australian accent as they get older and move further away from the parental sphere of influence. I’m not crazy about this, but I guess it’s better than a Sydney accent in a lesser of two evils way*.

I lay awake for a little while last night wanting to know how accents work. This is how I ended up in science – sleepless nights trying to figure out how things work. I want to know why there are so many regional dialects, even within a fairly small geographical area? There are probably a dozen fairly distinct accents in the British Isles – a land mass about the size of the state of California. Why? Where do all these accents stem from and how are they maintained? Why do children pick up the accent of their peers rather than that of their parents, who teach them to speak? Why does  a person maintain the accent of their childhood even after a lifetime away from their childhood home?

So this morning, I got up and started doing some research. I’m not a linguist, but this article seems pretty thorough to me. Apparently your accent is all about peer pressure and mimicry. According to the article, “children who grow up together are a ‘peer group’. They want to speak the same as each other to express their group identity.” But it isn’t that simple:

People do not have a single fixed accent which is determined by their experiences. We can control the way we speak, and do, both consciously and unconsciously. Most people vary their accent depending on who they are speaking with. We change our accents, often without noticing, as we have new life experiences.

This statement, I can definitely relate to. Both my parents were born and raised in Canada, but haven’t lived there since the early 70’s. If you spoke to my Mom, you would never know that she left. She still speaks with a pretty pronounced Ontario accent. My Dad, on the other hand, is a mimic. These days if you had a conversation with him, you would think he spent most of his childhood in north Florida.

Like father, like son.

My family moved around a lot until I was about 10 and we settled down south. At that point, I would guess that I was speaking with a mixture of the eastern Canadian accent of my parents with a bit of western New York that I picked up in elementary school. When we arrived in the pine hammocks of north Florida, my accent marked me as a foreigner among the slow-talking, twangy natives. I found the easiest way to fit in was to mimic the accent. So, at school I tried to speak like a native Floridian. At home, I spoke like a native Canadian. As I got older and struck out on my own, I kept up with this mimicry – picking up a Carolina lilt while living in the Piedmont, a Nordic hoot during my time in the Pacific Northwest. Down in Georgia, I stuffed my mouth with gravel and honey before flattening out my vowels for a stint in the Midwest. When we crossed the Atlantic to Oxford, I started enunciating crisply and studying the diction of BBC television presenters for cues on how to speak to the locals. Down Under, my R’s are vanishing and I’m drawing out my vowels.

I don’t know what kind of accent I have any more. These days, when people meet me for the first time they rarely guess that I’m American. This is partially out of politeness, it’s a bit risky to misidentify someone as a Yank, but I think my accent has just morphed into something that is difficult to identify. In fact, roughly half of the people that meet me for the first time guess that I’m Irish. I’ve never lived in Ireland and Dr. O’C, despite being born in County Cork, has no trace of an Irish accent. But after five years abroad in the UK and Australia, I definitely don’t sound as American as I did before emigrating.

I also found this site in my internet research. Set up by linguists at George Mason University, it has sound files of hundreds of people from all over the world reading the same passage:

Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

I don’t know why they chose these words. Presumably, they have characteristic sounds that differ among different accents. Whatever the reason, it’s a pretty cool resource to compare accents from South Africa to Siberia.

I thought I’d do a little (unscientific**) experiment. If you didn’t know, where would you think I came from based on my accent. Have a listen to my version of “Please call Stella…” and tell me what you think.

Bonus question: what is your favorite and least favorite accent?

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*I find the ‘typical’ Australian accent – the one endemic to New South Wales – to be really grating. It’s the nasal pronounciation, drives me nuts. As does that really nasal northeastern U.S. accent. The South Australian accent is a little softer, more English sounding. Here you are – compare Adelaide with Sydney.

For the record, my three favorite accents are:

1. Glasgow
2. Southern United States (especially the Carolinas)
3. South Africa

And my three least favorite:

1. Texas (thanks W)
2. Eastern Australia
3. New Yawk

**Dr. O’C has pointed out in great detail the many flaws in my experimental design. Damn scientists.

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Johnny Cash’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Southern Accents” is from his 1996 album “Unchained”. It was the second in his ‘American Series’ that catapulted him back to fame after a couple of decades in the Wilderness. Also made him a household name again for Gen X hipsters like your underwhelming correspondent. It’s an outstanding record and if you don’t own it is definitely worth the price of purchase from .

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Image credits:

Mouths

Mimic

Elocution

It was also the last summer of my relative innocence. I was not comfortable enough in my own body to ever be successful with the opposite sex and despite being smack dab in the middle of one of the major cocaine trafficking routes in the southeastern United States, had yet to dabble in much beyond Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers and Benson & Hedges menthol 100s.

In the summer of 1989, a good time for A Free Teen was hurtling along the hot, flat asphalt of the north Florida pine hammocks in my Mazda 323 with a couple of guys as passengers. Listening to “A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own” and singing along in the glaring Florida sunshine:

Well I been to Brooker and I been to Micanopy
I been to St. Louis too, I been all around the world
I’ve been over to your house
And you’ve been over sometimes to my house
I’ve slept in your tree house
My middle name is Earl…

That all changed the following autumn. Not for the better, not for the worse – just a requisite turn on the road to A Free Man today. Within a couple of months of my matriculation at that private Christian college in the Palmetto State, a lot of things changed. “Full Moon Fever” became, like my virginity and relative sobriety, the detritus of childhood. A few years later, “Full Moon Fever” got literally left behind – sold or lost sometime in the mid 90’s. And I was OK with that.

A great album is one that you can keep coming back to, for years and years. A great album is one that features prominently at different points in your life, one that carries you through tough times and pops up as an accompaniment to joyful times. I have never really thought of “Full Moon Fever” as a ‘great album’. It is a solid rock album, but is overproduced and comes of sounding artificial and insincere. It does have some great rock tracks – “Free Fallin’” never fails to get me singing – but I found it fairly easy to live without it for 10 or 15 years.

I picked it up again a couple of years ago on a trip back to the Midwest from Oxford. I was going to be doing a lot of driving through the Missouri countryside. I wanted to pick up one of those classic American driving albums to blow the speakers of my rental car. When I saw ‘Full Moon Fever’ in the discount bin at Slackers, I knew I had found my soundtrack for the fortnight.

After serving its purpose for that time in Missouri, “Full Moon Fever” has remained relatively unmolested on the CD shelf.

But it popped up again last night, randomly on my iPod  as I was getting Boy Z ready for bed. And that was fine, wouldn’t have been my choice, but that’s OK. I hummed along to the more upbeat tracks while changing nappies and pulling on pajamas.As the lights went out, ‘Alright For Now’ came on.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this song in the last twenty years – hundreds probably – but I never heard it like I did last night. In fact, I may have never really heard it at all. I always thought of it as a throwaway track – a snoozer wedged between the more rocking “Apartment Song” and “A Mind With a Heart of its Own”. It’s a short, simple little diddy:

Goodnight baby, sleep tight my love
May God watch over you from above
Tomorrow I’m workin’ what would I do
I’d be lost & lonely if not for you

So close your eyes
We’re alright for now

I’ve spent my life travelin’
I’ve spent my life free
I could not repay all you’ve done for me

So sleep tight baby
Unfurrow your brow
And know I love you
We’re alright for now
We’re alright for now

And with that, as I watched Boy Z slip gently into sleep, “Full Moon Fever” joins the pantheon of great albums for A Free Man.

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Buy Tom Petty’s “Full Moon Fever” from .

Image credit:

Road to Hastings

From the Great Minds Thinking Alike Department, see Reinventing Dad’s post on the Summer of 1989. And Tom Petty.

A Free Man favorite Wilco has released an internet only cover of Woody Guthrie’s “The Jolly Banker”. The band are asking for a minimum $2 donation with proceeds going to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives.

Download it here.

Wilco’s newest LP is due in June and we’ve gotten a glimpse at the new album art – camelicious. (Thanks to Dave from Ramblings)

Speaking of Wilco, the latest effort from fraternal Florida act Dish puts me in mind of Tweedy and Co. “Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour” is their debut full-length and at its best has that fluid, meandering style that Wilco has made into an art form. Dish stops well short of being derivative, however, with drummer Nathaniel Aguilar’s ‘junk-gypsy found percussion’ giving the album a raw and rattling sound that’s nicely tempered by Jay Bellerose and Jen Condos’ polished production. Definitely worth a listen.

Download ‘Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour’ from .

This post is Part 2 of a story I started yesterday. I can’t tell you what to do, but you’d be advised to read the first part first.

I’ve been going over the end of this story in my mind since last night and I realized that I stepped into a trap of my own design. I’m setting up Zelda as a femme fatale, which she absolutely was, but I’m not going to come off  well myself without some major historical revision. I like to keep these things as close to reality as my memory allows, which probably isn’t that close.

Before carrying on, there are some details to address. During the months of Zelda’s absence I had moved out of the four square into the gun cottage – I don’t know how she found out where I was living. At the haranguing of my friends, I had begun to ‘get over it’. I started dating again, using my coffee shop job as a personal dating agency. At the time of her unannounced return, in fact, I was dating a 19 year old sorority girl from South Carolina who looked and sounded a lot like Zelda without all the mystery, misery and annoying tendency to vanish.

I was bored.

But when Zelda turned up that night on my porch, I was a wiser man. I wasn’t going to be sucked back into a disastrous relationship. I would have that proffered drink (who was I to say no to a drink?) but that was it.

Let me quote from my diary at the time…

Back in my life, my bed, my heart is [Zelda]. Tall and beautiful and cold, she’s found a way to open my heart again. On a balmy winter night my bourbon soaked mind broke apart and gushed into her listening ears. So far, she’s been sweet. Her cold steel eyes are soft and inviting. She’s sane and easy.

I made her breakfast in bed the next morning. But still, I didn’t want to give up a healthy, albeit dull, relationship with a robust young South Carolinian for what I knew (somewhere in my reptile brain) was going to be pain and melodrama. Instead, I decided not to tell them about each other.

This was a manageable arrangement for a while. With Zelda, I went to gay bars and smoky basement clubs. With the sorority girl I went to formals and tailgates. There was never any reason for paths to cross. It went this way all through the winter and early spring – dating two girls, having my cake and eating it too.

There were moments – when my razor-sharp brain forgot which night I was meant to be with which girl. There was a Saturday lunch with Zelda, some friends and vodka martinis that got way out of hand.  We stumbled back to my place at about in the afternoon and collapsed into bed. There was a niggling memory in the back of my brain that the sorority girl was coming over for dinner and I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I had run interference of some sort. Zelda was out cold and I was…

I came to early Sunday morning with the crucifying headache that can only be caused by six or more martinis and a sense of something ominous in the room. I looked over and saw a tangled mess of curly mahogany hair, which could mean one of two women. A gently shove, a soft moan and I saw the softer features of the sorority girl. To this day, I don’t know where Zelda went or when. I guess that habit of vanishing wasn’t all bad after all.

All through these months, my friends were spending equal amounts of time laughing at my stories and warning me that it was an unsustainable situation. They all said the same thing – get rid of Zelda.

‘Are you still dating that crazy bitch from south Georgia?’

‘She’s just using you for a good time for a while, she’ll be gone again in a few months.’

‘What does she do, Chris? She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t go to school. She just spends your money.’

As the spring got older, I was getting tired. I was at UGa full time, working full time and holding down two relationships. So, I finally made a decision.

I broke up with the sorority girl and invited Zelda to Florida for Spring Break. She was thrilled – a real vacation and for a while things were good. We started intermittently co-habitating – she moved clothes and makeup and that White Diamonds into my cottage.

After this decision, I was talking to a friend – a sweet little punk pixie from Savannah – who rang me up asking if I wanted to go out in Atlanta that night.I said no, that “I need to save momey for Florida. I need more than usual, because of Zelda and all.”

“No wonder she likes hanging out with you, Chris”, she spat back at me and rung off.

A week before the trip, on a Friday night, she wanted to go dance at the gay bar. I didn’t. The gay bar wasn’t that interesting to me. But I indulged the request and we were away. I sat at the bar drinking poofy drinks and watched Zelda dance with the queens. About 2, I was ready to go home. But Zelda wanted to go to an after party.

‘Just for a bit’, she soothed.

It had been a hellish week – exams, overtime at work and I demurred. “But, you’ll come back to my place after. Right.”

She kissed me deeply, gave me the full brunt of her cold grey eyes and said, “Just give me an hour and I’m all yours.”

I sat up drinking expectantly for an hour. Then drinking worriedly for another hour. Finally, I drank angrily until the sun came up. I threw all of her clothes and makeup into a garbage bag and put it at the end of my drive.

I was awoken at noon by the sound of broken glass and screaming. Zelda was systematically smashing my windows with a tire iron and screaming obscenities. I suggested that she fuck off and not come back. She expressed that she was perfectly fine with that and – breaking one last window on the way – fucked off.

By nightfall, she was back – composed and bearing a full bottle of Maker’s Mark, some clear plastic sheeting, a roll of duct tape and a bucketful of abashed contrition.

We went to Florida anyway. Me seething resentment through endless miles of south Georgia. Her sleeping. We took the long way down, stopping in Albany for a night to pick up camping gear from her mother’s house. I had visions, largely painted by Zelda, of a southern manor – all stately oaks and Greek columns. Her Mom lived in a double-wide on a half acre pine thicket outside of Albany. She chain smoked Virginia Slims, washed down Valium with Old Crow and spoke of lost beaus and phantom illnesses. Looking at her, I saw Zelda in a couple of decades and the artifice of the relationship that I had created.

We camped on St. George Island for a couple of days and then skirted the swampy armpit of Florida on the way down to Ybor City. By the time we arrived, I was done with the trip. I’d been driving for three days without any help from my passenger. She spent most of her time sleeping or bitching and I spent most of my time drinking and driving. Somewhere along that drive I had an epiphany. Again, from my diary at the time…

After meeting her Mom, I can’t fathom a long term relationship with [Zelda]. After this trip, I can’t imagine much of a short term.

I’ve never been very good at breaking up with people. That night in Ybor City we scored some coke, which she didn’t want to do, and hit the bars. Out of my mind on cocaine and rum punch, I decided that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. That night, I treated her the way that I perceived she had treated me throughout our intermittent relationship. I was cold. I flirted with other women. I danced half the night with a Cuban woman that couldn’t speak any English. When Zelda was ready to go, I tossed her a rolled twenty and told her to take a cab.

The trip back was even longer and dead silent. I pulled an all day drive and got us back to Athens just before midnight. She fell asleep on my couch as soon as we walked in the door and I left her there and went to bed.

The next morning, she and all her meager belongings were gone. Except for a note, scrawled in her manic, looping script.

“I know you don’t believe it, but I loved you. As much as I could.”

I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

That wasn’t enough then and it’s never been enough since.

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Image credits:

Femme Fatale I, II and III are by Karen Dupré. Images from art.com.

R.E.M.’s “Chronic Town/Dead Letter Office” is available from Amazon.

A Free Family’s vacation continues and so do the guest posts. Today, I’ve got the pleasure of welcoming Mickey from The Prettiest Denny’s Waitress aboard. Mickey’s got the uncanny knack of making my laugh my ass off on a regular basis, so I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have captain the ship for a day. Without further ado, here’s Mickey…

I hope A Free Man is out there earning his moniker right now, gallivanting barefoot on those white sands he was telling us all about, frolicking in the surf and enjoying the waning days of the southern summer. Watch out for the sharks, dude. They bite.

I was thinking about some of my childhood family vacations, random scenes bouncing around in my head. My memories of them are just that, individual scenes I recall out of context, flashes of fun that I have to concentrate on to recall which particular trip they were a part of. In doing so, I’ve quickly come to the conclusion that my kids (should I ever have any) are never going to Disney World. I went to Orlando and its surrounding attractions when I was five or six years old, and, for the same reasons kids frequently enjoy the cardboard boxes more than the toys that came in them, I think that kind of thing is lost on a kid. Or at least it was lost on me.

Here’s why: River Country. Yeah, I thought Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad were a blast and I recall the thrill of the water slides at nearby Wet ‘n’ Wild water park, but far and away the most fun I ever had in Florida (and that counts several trips to that armpit of a state as an adult), was at Disney’s River Country, a collection of rope ladders and tire swings in a natural-water lagoon. In other words, amidst all the high-tech put-on splendor of the Magic Kingdom, the most fun I had was in their approximation of a redneck backwoods swimmin’ hole. (It has since closed, in part due to laws against water parks in natural bodies of water, but also because of the high-tech put-on splendor of Disney’s other, newer water attractions.)

That theme of enjoying the low-brow and inexpensive continued in my life. A family reunion in upstate New York saw us kids spending the whole day trying to avoid getting impaled on the six-inch valve stems of old inner tubes while we splashed euphorically in a muddy little pond. Absolute heaven. I barely remember the nearby kitsch of Niagara Falls.

But why go all the way to Florida or New York? Outside of those two trips, we really didn’t travel far when I was a kid, and it’s a good thing. One of the best times I ever had as a kid was in my own backyard. For reasons now forgotten there was a pile of railroad ties in our yard. There never was, before or after, any landscaping in the yard utilizing railroad ties. Regardless of their intended purpose, my brother and I did what all kids eventually do with anything not tied down: we built a fort. Putting it up like giant Lincoln logs, we had a sturdy fort you could get inside of or on top of, held together by nothing but gravity and faith, and a child’s faith is no small thing. A stack of rough, splintery wood kept us perfectly happy for several days of summer vacation without even having to leave the yard.

Shoot, the most memorable part of a week-long summer camp was flinging lumps of wet clay at each other at a clay pit on the banks of the Chester River in Maryland. That still sounds like fun to me. I guess I’m just a dirtbag at my core.

To this day I cast a wary eye toward any diversion that costs a lot of money. It’s not that I haven’t had good times spending far too much money in a bar or enjoyed the hell out of an overpriced concert, but even as an adult most of my fond memories have more to do with the company than the extravagance of the event. That’s why I’ll trade a noisy bar for a bunch of friends around a campfire with a cooler full of beer any day.

And that’s why my kids are never going to Disney World. Besides, they won’t know the difference if I instead take them to that spot far back in the woods in Tennessee with the big ol’ tree with a rope swing hanging out over deep, still water. If they ask, I’ll just tell them the water moccasins are animatronic.

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Get Patterson Hood’s “Killers and Stars” and and other great music from eMusic. Sign up for a trial membership and get 25 free songs. Best of all, you can cancel at any time and pay nothing. It’s a sweet deal.

Image credits:

Live Rattlesnakes

River Country

Fort

Check back in with me tomorrow, gentle readers.

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Bon Iver’s new EP “Blood Bank” is absolutely beautiful and a steal at $4 from .

Our receptionist at work turned me on to my latest TV obsession – “Friday Night Lights“. I didn’t expect much – a teen melodrama a la “90210″ at best – but this is inspired television. It’s a well-written, gritty drama, with some stunning performances. For a football fan like your underwhelming correspondent, the realistic game scenes are a regrettably too rare bonus. Above all, it’s a realistic portrait of a football obsessed Southern town. Dillon, Texas could be one of a thousand towns between North Carolina and Texas. Small towns with little to draw them together but for the success or failure of their children on the gridiron.

Last week, when I started writing this post, I had intended to use a different tone, a different punchline. I had planned to talk about how I grew up in a real-life Dillon – a dead-end town in the far north of the state of Florida. I had planned to flay Lake City, a town of about 10,000 to which my family moved in 1980, my father following the tail-end of north Florida’s phosphate boom. From the way this post is flowing, it looks like I’m still going to tell you that Lake City was famous for pretty much nothing, that was a squalid rest-stop on the way to better places. Lake City was a sleepy Southern town that would have been more at home in Georgia and Alabama than the Sunshine State and like most Southern towns, football was king. Lake City was pretty far removed – geographically and culturally – from the nearest pro clubs in Tampa Bay or Atlanta. Neither were there any major colleges or universities in town. But there was a high school and much like Dillon and their Panthers, the town of Lake City lived and died with their Tigers.

Every autumn, Friday nights were reserved for football. It wasn’t just high-school students that headed downtown for the games, anyone who was anyone hit the stands of Memorial Stadium. Grown men reliving their lost youth living vicariously through seventeen and eighteen year old boys. Alums who had reached their prime at about 18 and now tried to reclaim some of that vigor by hollering out from the steel bleachers at boys in purple and gold on the cropped grass below. The mood of the town for the following week was dictated by the number on the scoreboard at the end of four quarters.

At some point in my teens I realized that Lake City had nothing to offer me. I got the hell out of Lake City as soon as I could. At seventeen I graduated and after one more summer in a devil town, hit the road for college. A couple more summers at home and I never looked back. I came back for visits. My parents remained there until about five years ago when they headed for greener pastures themselves. With their departure I knew I’d never be back to what I have to consider my ‘hometown’.

I’ve written about Lake City before. I’ve written with scorn about the people and the complete lack of culture and opportunities. I’ve written about the poor public education system I’ve written about my gratitude that I never have to go back, that I no longer have a single tie to the place. But I don’t want this to be another post about how much the place I grew up sucked. It did suck.  Yes, I took what I consider to be more than my fair share of shit in high school, much of it from guys who were a lot like the gridiron starts of “Friday Night Lights”.  But that taught me to be quick witted, allowed me the charisma I still use to get out of tough spots today. Yes, the public schools of Columbia County were absolutely dreadful – some of the worst in a state full of pretty awful public schools. But I had some great individual teachers and I had opportunities to excel beyond the curriculum. I learned how to think on my own and learn outside of the classroom – skills that I still use today.  Lake City offered little in the way of culture (OK, I got to see Johnny Cash in the community college gym once) and no career opportunities outside of the Super Wal-Mart (currently the city’s number one employer). But this taught me to keep my eyes open for opportunity wherever it may raise its head and to find entertainment in the simplest things. Above all, Lake City, in all it’s stifling blandness taught me to see the beauty in other places.

I am where I am because of my personal history – both the people, places and things that were fantastic and the people, places and things that sucked. Lake City sucked. But without those years in a devil town, I may not be where I am today. I’m happy today, and I guess it’s time to recognize that Lake City played a role in getting me here. So, through gritted teeth, I’d like to thank a shitty little dead end town in north Florida for its role in getting me where I am today.

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One of my favorite things about “Friday Night Lights” is the soundtrack  – subtle indie and alt-country tracks that accent the show perfectly. One of the songs that I’ve got stuck in my head and that inspired this post is Daniel Johnston’s “Devil Town”. I love this Bright Eyes cover from “Noise Floor”. Neither the original nor the Bright Eyes cover is featured on the soundtrack, but the latter is the best I’ve heard.

Image Credits:

Lake City #1