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.

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.

Let’s head back to mid 90’s northeast Georgia again. Your protagonist is working two jobs to pay tuition at the finest university in the South. At this point living in a one bedroom apartment carved out of the top floor of a genteel old four-square just outside of downtown. Restless, irritable and discontent due – in large part – to a lack of companionship from the fairer sex.

To assuage my frustration I was doing a lot of reading and during a particularly steaming Georgia summer, I went on an F. Scott Fitzgerald binge. I fell in love with his heroines – racy, beautiful, irreverent, unstable and utterly captivating. I learned that most of his female characters was based on his wife Zelda. So, in essence I fell in love with Zelda Fitzgerald and I wanted, more than just about anything, one of my own.

If I can deliver the predictable cliche – be careful what you wish for…

My personal Zelda quite literally walked through my door one July morning. That kind of Southern morning that wakes up hot and crushes your soul before noon. Living in another apartment lacking air-conditioning, I had all the doors and windows open to maximize a largely imaginary breeze. I was laying limp on my unmade bed praying for a cold front when I heard a gentle tap on my door frame. Weakly, I raised my head and was instantly smitten by a tall, busty brunette with the crisp Anglo-Saxon facial features that I associated, from my high school years, with the cruelty of indifference.

Dripping honey and gravel – that accent endemic to a swath of Georgia from Brunswick to Albany, “Pardon me, sugar, do you have a screwdriver by any chance?”

What else could one say? “Phillips or flathead?” (Actually, if one were a bit more suave, one could say ‘Phillips, flathead or Smirfnoff?” But I’m only that suave in hindsight.

And it started there. She was moving in across the hall from me. One of the, many, idiosyncracies of this place was that the two top floor apartments shared a bathroom. With my previous housemate, a sweaty musician, this had been a burden. But I began to see the advantages of a shared powder room as I helped Zelda put her old iron framed bed together. In fact, I was completely in her thrall from the outset. She had that quality of a particular type of Southern woman – Blanche DuBois, Annie Savoy, Scarlett O’Hara – you know the type. I don’t know if it’s pheromones, or what, but I had been living among these women for a year or so at the time and could never get the time of day from one of them and now I’d be sharing the most intimate of spaces with one. Well not the most intimate, but you know.

I needn’t have worried; we were sharing that space fairly soon as well.

Zelda had dropped out of Tech under dubious circumstances and was trying to get on track at a local tech school so she could get into Georgia. She didn’t seem to work or to go to school much for that matter. I kept odd hours and no matter the time of day, she was there. The smell of White Diamonds and cigarette smoke wafted up under the door along with muffled dance music that she listened to incessantly. Everytime I came up the stairs, she would slink out from behind her door and invite me in for a ‘toddy’, regardless of time of day. I never declined. She told me stories, but never of herself. She told me stories of nights out in gay bars in Atlanta. She would tell me of shopping extravaganzas and vacations on Hilton Head and Pawley’s Island. And we would drink. Bourbon. When she was out she drank Manhattans, but at home she drank bourbon. Bourbon on the rocks. Any of you who have spent an evening with a person you’re attracted to talking and drinking bourbon on the rocks will know the inevitable outcome.

Now, I know that you know how this is likely to end. But in my defense, even as a randy 24 year old I wasn’t a complete idiot. We had some fun. We ‘went out’ for the rest of that summer. By going out, we spent most of our time in the top floor of that four square. But when I got paid, we’d hit the bars. Long drunken nights of drinking, dancing and necking. And fighting. God did we fight. Zelda was a flirt, one of the things that attracted me to her. I was plagued with the vicious jealousy of an insecure man. Virtually every night we went out we ended up roaring at each other outside of a bar over some perceived indiscretion on her part. Usually this was followed by a walk home on separate sides of the street hurling epithets at one another and a pair of slammed doors. But inevitably, one of us would creep through that shared bathroom with a bottle of Jim Beam and all would quickly be forgotten.

That’s the way that summer went. I was irrevocably enchanted and, to my credit, she seemed to be as well. She never paid for a drink, but then a gentleman wouldn’t let a lady pay for a drink. The petty jealousy was always assuaged by the fact that she was always there and always waiting when she heard me creaking up the stairs.

One day, shortly after the fall term started, I had classes all morning and then had to pull a double shift at the coffee shop. I went out for a drink with a couple of friends that I hadn’t seen since I met Zelda and didn’t get home until well after three in the morning. And her door didn’t open and her bathroom door was locked. I didn’t think much of it, but the next day I was home early from school. I made as much noise coming up the stairs as humanly possible, but still her door didn’t open. No smell of White Diamonds, no house music. Late that afternoon, I took to the roof, clambering over to her side of the house. It nearly  ended badly for me as I saw within an empty apartment. She, and every trapping of her, was gone. Even the cigarette smoke and perfume fumes seemed to have faded overnight.

I didn’t have a clue how to find her. The landlord was as clueless as me. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous. I’d never met any of her friends. I knew she was from Albany, Georgia but that town seemed to be populated entirely by people with the same surname. I asked around. I haunted the bars in which I knew she felt at home. I wandered around northeast Georgia discovering not even a hint of her existence outside my own mind and a couple of snapshots.

Then one night in late November – as insolently as she vanished – I found her smoking on my front porch with a half empty fifth of Maker’s Mark and a battered vanity case.

“Do you want a drink sugar?”

What else could one say?

Now, I hate to be all “The Bold and the Beautiful” on you, but this post seems to have grown legs of its own. Nothing’s worse than reading a 10,000 word blog post. Instead, I’m going to employ that coldest of writerly tricks – ‘to be continued’. UPDATE: Continued here.

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Image credits:

Zelda Fitzgerald’s ‘A Mad Tea Party’

My photo of the infamous four square.

Big Star’s “Third/Sister Lovers” is available from Amazon.

Because I’m easily distracted, I’ve been daydreaming at some of the rental houses that I’ve occupied in my time rather than looking for a new one*. There was the roach and (later) gecko infested studio in Tallahassee. There was the sprawling 1920’s behemoth on Melbourne Street in Columbia that Dr. O’C and I rented for next to nothing in my last couple of years of grad school. And the most expensive house I’ve ever lived in, a Victorian tenement house in Oxford that was so narrow I could almost touch both walls with my arms spread.

But the house that sticks in my mind the most was an old tin-roofed servants cottage behind an Edwardian mansion in Athens, Georgia. I lived there for a couple of years while finishing up my bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia. The house dated from the early 1900s. There were two rooms and a small front porch with an afterthought of a kitchen carved in at some point in the 1950’s. There was no air-conditioning and the back yard was shared with the owners of the big house and their two ridiculously aggressive Dobermans. It was broiling in the summer and frigid in the winter, but I loved it. It was quietly tucked away in the trees with only a little dirt drive off a side road, so it afforded me a perception of blessed isolation.

The isolation was only an illusion, really. I was only about 200 meters from one of the biggest sorority houses in town. My landlord busted me for growing a few marijuana plants on the side of the house. And my house got broken into. Twice. The latter was kind of my fault. (Actually, the former was as well). You see, I rarely locked my door. I lived in a world that hadn’t existed for about fifty years if ever. Unfortunately most everyone else lived in a world in which if you didn’t lock your doors all your stuff got stolen. After the first break-in, I probably should have learned my lesson. But at that time, I could almost see up to the poverty level from where I lived, so I didn’t have much to steal and after a week or so of vigilance I reverted to form.

The second robbery was a bit scarier. Someone came into the house while I was sleeping. I woke up and saw a shadowy form rummaging around my living room. I jumped out of bed, buck naked and yelling. The guy bolted and I chased him, still naked, half-way down my drive until I realized that I was coming into the line of view of the sorority house.

The day after the second break-in, I decided that I needed to do something to protect myself. Now, locking the door would have been a good start but common sense has never been my strong suit. I should preface the rest of this story by saying that I used to drink a lot. And by a lot, I mean a lot. I was convinced that life’s hard decisions could be made with more clarity after about half a fifth of Jack Daniels. So I sat out on my rickety front porch and got down to some serious thinking and drinking.

At about 2 in the morning I decided that what I needed was a gun.

The problem was acquisition. The State of Georgia in the mid-1990’s did not have the nation’s most stringent gun control laws, but you did need at least a driver’s license to buy one. I had lost my driver’s license a couple of years ago due to some unpleasantness in Seattle, but what I did have was some dodgy friends. I talked to my bartender friend who I knew was a gun nut. She introduced me to a ‘business associate’ of her boyfriend who lived off the grid on the east side of town. After a bit of drinking he decided that I was OK, and he could help me out.

I worked in a downtown coffee shop at the time and just before close a couple of nights later, the Business Associate came in and asked to talk to me in private. Five minutes in the men’s room, two hundred dollars poorer and I had a shiny, oily and delightfully loaded Cobra .22 calibre pistol in the left pocket of my jeans.

I’ve got to admit that I felt pretty butch walking home from work that night with a pistol in my pocket. The weight of it, the secrecy of it, the power of it was all absolutely thrilling. I couldn’t stop touching it, feeling the slick steel. I got home and put it gently in my bedside table, got a tumbler full of whiskey and a book and lay down for bed.

And I didn’t sleep.

My mind wouldn’t shut down. I kept thinking about the gun. Would I really be able to use it if the robber came back? Would I be able to aim it and squeeze the trigger? Would it fire? Should I test fire it? Maybe at the landlord’s dog? What would happen if I could do everything right and I hit the robber? Would I go to jail? What if I shot myself while I was messing around with it?

About four a.m., overwrought and exhausted, I got out of bed, grabbed the gun and headed out the door.  I headed through campus down past the stadium to the woods on the east side of the campus. I hit the Oconee River  pulled the gun from my pocket – gleaming darkly in the moonlight. I paused – a long heart beat – and tossed it into the muddy river.

After that I just made sure to lock the door.

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*Anyone in the Adelaide that has a house to rent (between the CBD and Flinders) or knows of a good one, please do let us know!

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Uncle Tupelo’s “Still Feel Gone” is available from Amazon.

Image credits:

Tin roof

Cobra

Oconee River

Most NCAA football teams report for practice this week, which marks the beginning of a very special time of year for A Free Man, and A Free Boy. While his Mum is not enamored of this photo, I’m pleased to see that Baby Z is working on his game face for the upcoming season. He’s even got a bit of drool there in the corner of his lip to indicate that he’s preparing for the 2008 season with just the right amount of rabidity.

Those of you who are relatively recent readers may not be aware that A Free Man’s Saturdays (now Sundays) in Autumn (now Spring) revolve largely around the exploits of the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team. You may not know that I take the goings on of my alma mater’s football team so seriously that I have been known to be reduced to tears after a tough loss and have woken neighbors on two (soon to be three) continents with glorious, though often untimely, shouts of victory. Even Baby Z has been, possibly unwillingly, caught up in the excitement of the college football season – sporting a different Georgia Bulldogs’ inspired ensemble every Saturday last Autumn. Well, almost every Saturday.

Well, the 2008 season is around the corner – a mere 26 days away – and a lot of the pundits have my Dawgs ranked at the top of their preseason polls. I tend to be a bit skeptical – the Bulldogs have big games at LSU, Auburn and Arizona State and a “neutral” site game against the loathsome Florida Gators. In addition, some members of the team are acting like they’ve already won a national championship.  Jinx potential aside and despite the tragic loss of our mascot earlier in the year, it looks like it could be a great year to be a Georgia Bulldog. And, yes, we’ll be taking wagers from anyone who has the stones.

You may be surprised to learn that Georgia Bulldogs gear is hard to come by in places like the south of England and South Australia. So, Baby Z and I have relied largely on family, friends, and blog readers to help us out. For example, the top he’s wearing in the picture at top comes from our friends at The Dawgcast. Now, I’ve got a little deal for you my readers. Georgia Bulldogs gear is remarkably hard to come by in South Australia. So, Baby Z and I are willing to reciprocate any gifts of kid sized Dawg kit* with a little something special that you may not be able to find in your neck of the woods**. Just one more think I need to say….

SIC ‘EM DAWGS!!! WOOF WOOF WOOOF!!

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* Other SEC teams’ kit are not welcome, Jamie.

** Kangaroo scrotum wallet, Jason.

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Elliott Smith’s posthumous “New Moon” is available from .

UPDATE

Jamie brought out the Gator smack talk early, so I feel justified in responding with a brief photo essay:

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I’ve never really been much of a punk rocker. They heyday of punk was about a decade before my time, and by the time I got exposed to the genre it was hackneyed and kind of commercialised. For example, you could buy your own pre-safety-pinned leather jacket at the Oaks Mall in Gainesville. I came to age toward the end of earnest jangly rock and the beginning of grunge, so while I appreciated the paths laid by punk, it wasn’t really what got my musical groove going. I mean, I loved a bit of “Blitzkrieg Bop” but when someone turned on The Adverts, I rolled my eyes and wandered to more melodious pastures.

For a while, when I first moved back down to Georgia, I ran around with The Punks (TM). I can’t really remember why, but when I first moved to Athens, I was adopted into this group despite not really looking the part. I liked my jeans loose and boot cut rather than tight and peglegged, and my boots made by Tony Lama rather than Doc Marten. I had never sported a mohawk and my tattoos were a bit more reserved than most of the Athens punks. Nonetheless, they took me in and for a year or so were my best friends in town. They allowed me to be different, to stand out from the crowd and feel OK about it. By sticking with a group, I had both figurative and literal protection from the drunk frat boys that populate the streets of downtown Athens after closing time. (The irony here is that about five years earlier I was a drunk frat boy staggering the streets of a different Southern town). I could turn up any time of day at the local punk bar (Lunch Paper at the time, for my Athenian readers) and find a friendly face. Basically, I could be different in the cozy confines of a group of similarly different people.

Hanging with the punks didn’t make me a punk. I found the rules a bit stifling – which music you could and couldn’t listen to (Black Flag, yes; Nirvana, no), which beer you could drink (PBR, yes; Sam Adams, no) and so on. Thus, I was never a very good punk. But, in that year of cheap beer and additional tattoos, I learned to love punk rock. I had been exposed to the basics – The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The New York Dolls – but I never really got them until I started wandering the streets with my Georgian punk friends. I never really got the angst, the sense of persecution, the anger that these early punk rock bands shouted from the rooftops until that first year of dodging drunken alumni looking for someone to take their frustration out on after the Dawgs got smoked by Bama. I understood how three chords, strung together apparently at random, could provide succor when some bowhead from Macon made fun of your fashion decision. From the granddaddies, I branched out and learned to love artists like Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Dead Kennedys and Pere Ubu. These were people who had changed rock music forever and from which sprung some of the “grunge” and “alternative” artists that I held up as heros.

I stopped hanging with the punks after a dark winter night following a particularly heavy session at the local. We headed to the Waffle House for some 2 a.m. sustenance. The details are hazy, as they would be after a night of PBR and Jim Beam, but something instigated a stand-off between my group of punks and a group of African-American guys across the restaurant. Starting off, as these things do, with a misinterpreted glance and escalating through strong words and big talk, it ended up in the parking lot with circling threats of violence. Fortunately it never got physical and everyone ultimately went their separate ways. For me, however, it was the beginning of the end of my running with these guys.

Something happened after that night, a veneer was stripped away. You see, in that Waffle House confrontation I saw my friends for what they were. Which, at the end of the day, was not much different from the drunk frat boys that they battled with. They hung together as a group, a group that relied on internal rules to dictate their behavior. The frat boys had their rules and uniforms, rules and uniforms that repulsed the punks. But as I stood back and watched that night, I saw my friends in their uniforms bridling against another group that they were different from and it got a little bit ugly. I saw the fear and insecurity that all that leather and all those piercings were failing to hide. And I saw a nastier, darker side that I didn’t know was there. It had never occured to me to discuss race with my friends, and it became clear to me from that night on that I had less in common with them than I had thought. From that night on, I decided that I needed to make my own way in the world, without a group, a herd, a tribe, to protect me.

I still like a good three-chord shoutfest now and again, though.

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And so, apparently, does Baby Z. He’s reached a stage of his development at which he approves quite strongly of disorder. It seems, in fact, that the idea of order offends him in some way. If you put his toys in the toybox, he rips them back out again. Given any kind of paper (news, toilet or other) he rips it to shreds and  scatters the remains to the four corners of the room. Given a container of any sort, Z will not rest until those contents are fully removed and preferrably destroyed. Maybe that’s why he appreciated The Sex Pistols so much.

“I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!”

My little anarchist grinned and giggled the whole way through “Never Mind the Bollocks”. I thought of pulling out The Ramones, but thought the boy might start pulling up the carpet or shaving a mohawk on the dog.

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The Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” is available from .

OK, that’s not exclusively true – this guy was one of the biggest rock stars on the planet at the time, so flattery is an understatement. As for my heterosexual roots, I’m not sure how far my protestations and denials would have stretched.

I used to get teased incessantly by friends and co-workers about this incessantly. They would call me Mrs. Rock Star X, they would turn on some of his more suggestive songs as soon as he walked into the coffee shop and so on. One late Friday night I had been drinking in the way I drank, immoderately, at the bar next door. I stumbled over to the coffee shop to try and straighten up a bit. I came up to the counter and asked one of my coffee-slinging colleagues for a perk me up. My barrista buddy started giving me the business about my rock star paramour and, in a fit of frustrated drunken rage, I loudly proclaimed: “I will not fuck Rock Star X!”

The rest happened in slow motion. My friend’s face dropped and his eyes focused on a point behind me. I knew before I turned, but I turned anyway and saw not only Rock Star X, but his manager, lawyer, and another well known chanteuse of the day, let’s call her “Ophelia”. I couldn’t actually tell you the expressions on their faces as I was sprinting in shame out of the shop.

From that point on whenever Rock Star X came into the shop, I would dart to the back and swap with whoever was doing the dishes so I didn’t have to deal with my shame. I did that for months.

There’s a happy ending. One day, whilst I was washing the dishes, Rock Star X poked his head around the corner and said in his inimitable voice, “Hi Chris, long time no see. You OK?” That’s why I still buy their albums even though they haven’t done a great one since 1996.

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There is no point to this story other than to say that “New Adventures in Hi Fi”* is one of the all time best albums for travelers. It was written and recorded on the road and that sense of moving while standing still pervades the record. It is the perfect soundtrack for this drawn out circumnavigation. This morning, I woke up dying – in pain, voiceless except for the muscular contractions that forced out mucus and tore the lining of my throat. My slightly weakened physical state made my defenses just porous enough for that little germ called anxiety to slip in.

And, while my immune system is busy with other matters, that niggling anxiety has multiplied to full borne fear. If the truth be told, I am scared shitless. I mean what kind of idiot moves his family half way around the world with no job and no house. What kind of pater familias am I? Is this all going to crumble around us like an illusion? More importantly can I keep it together? It was one thing when I was flitting around the U.S. in a pick-up truck with a steamer trunk. Wandering the world with a family in tow – well that a whole different box of spiders.

“These corrosives do their magic slowly and sweet
Phone, eat it, drink
Just another chink
Cuts and dents, they catch the light
Aluminum, the weakest link…”

-R.E.M.* – “E-Bow The Letter”

R.E.M.’s essential “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” is available from and Amazon.

* This should not necessarily be taken to imply that Michael Stipe was Rock Star X. The pictures, of course, are just gratuitous showing off of my new toy.

As it feels like Autumn here in the midst of the British summer, I’ve got to thinking about the college football season. It’s just over a month until my beloved Georgia Bulldogs open their season against the Oklahoma State Cowboys in beautiful Athens, Georgia. September 1 is when my Saturdays become off limits to family and friends – though that may change this year. Probably won’t be able to convince a crying baby that a Georgia football game is more important than a new diaper.

College football is the one American sport that I remain truly passionate about. There’s something special about this sport for me. I’ve never become a real fan of any professional sports franchise – I just can’t drum up the passion required. I grew up in a small town in north Florida when the nearest professional teams in any sport were in Atlanta or Tampa – and the Braves, Falcons, Hawks and Buccaneers all sucked. I think unless you feel allegiance to one of the big cities were pro teams live, then you don’t feel allegiance to the teams. But just down the road in Gainesville lived the University of Florida Gators. I am ashamed to admit these days that I grew up a fan of Florida football.

We all make ridiculous youthful mistakes and fortunately I had the opportunity to get my Bachelor’s degree at the finest public university in the South, the University of Georgia. And as a bonus, during my time at that fine institution, I became a die-hard fan of the Georgia Bulldog football team. I’ve been to other universities since then and have cheered on, with a modicum of enthusiasm, the Missouri Tigers basketball team and the Oxford Blues cricket team. But none of these teams induce the passion that my Bulldogs do.

Now, it can be difficult to be a Bulldog football fan. Last season in particular was rough. Big wins over Auburn, Virginia Tech, South Carolina and Georgia Tech did not compensate for heartbreaking losses to Florida (damn Gators), Tennessee and, er, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. Even prior to last year I can recall more than one occasion which I had invited friends (Alex, Nathan, Jason, Casey, etc.) to share my joy in watching my beloved Dawgs play one of their big rivals and without fail they would lose. These exercises were a lot of fun, watching football is always better with friends. I remember one game, Georgia-Alabama, when my friend Alex showed up to watch the game in full Tide regalia, including an Alabama cowboy hat. As I recall, the Dawgs actually won that game, huh Alex? Perhaps the most painful thing for a Dawg fan to deal with, however, is the Florida problem. This is particularly difficult for a Floridian like myself who has friends who call University of Florida their alma mater. Georgia has lost 13 of their last 14-ish to their nemesis, the aforementioned Florida Gators.

But I’m a true fan, a glass half full fan. Last year was an anomaly. Prior to the 2006 season, the Dawgs had won at least 10 games for four consecutive seasons, had two SEC crowns. They’ve owned perennial rivals the Tennessee Volunteers, South Carolina Gamecocks and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. The last time the Dawgs missed a bowl appearance was 1996. Under coach Mark Richt we’re 61-17 and after the rebuilding year of 2006, it’s only going to get better.

So, from September 1 through early December on Saturdays you can find me in my study. I’ll be listening to the radio broadcasts of the Georgia football games on the internet. We’ve got one of the best radio announcers in the business in Larry Munson. The legendary voice of the Georgia Bulldogs is an old school radio commentator, one who makes listening to the game more exciting than watching it could ever be. I used to watch the games on the TV with the sound down and listen to the play-by-play on the radio. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, they don’t show a lot of college football on British television. Last year they started to offer video of some of the games on the internet – but it was small and pixellated and stopped all the time – basically more frustrating than it was worth. So I spent my Saturdays listening to Larry and his sidekicks over the internet. It’s better that way.

Larry’s 87 years old and will only announce home games this season. Things change, but I will miss hearing him call the games. Here’s one of my favorites from the Georgia-Tennessee game in 2003. Go Dawgs!