Can't Tear It Down? Legislate It Away.

Growing up I lived in four places: Brunswick, GA; Atlanta, GA; Macon, GA; and Ellijay, GA.
Brunswick, Macon, and Atlanta were all majority African-American. (And still are.) But there are Confederate memorials on public property in all of them. Atlanta has the most wide-spread of these things. I mean, hell...the entire freaking city is a Confederate Memorial. My home town, Brunswick, has the least presence of such memorials. There is one that I know of, and it's really obscure and isolated...so isolated that it's not really very objectionable. As far as I know it's the single such memorial in the city.
Ellijay was not merely majority white--it was 100% white. And as I recall they also merely had a single Confederate memorial; which is really weird because that part of GA refused to support the Confederacy and instead sided with the Union. But it's also the most virulently racist place I ever lived so I reckon they figured they'd best have a monument to the Confederacy.
At any rate, I wonder why any city with a majority of black voters would put up with this shit.
And here is Stone Mountain, GA. It is not technically Atlanta, but is nearby, and is home to the most vile of the Confederate Monuments. It should be scrubbed off of the mountain. I'm sure it could be accomplished without blasting.

Fresh Air Barbecue.

When I was a kid I would often ride with my parents on trips between Macon GA and Atlanta GA and sometimes to points north such as Ellijay GA. All places where my parents had homes or businesses or both.

To keep from traveling on the boring Interstate all of the time my parents would often jump off to ride a state highway. Because, face it--Interstate highways are not known for beauty and variety. If you ride the backroads you get to see isolated parks and rivers and lakes and encounter quirky villages tucked away in the country.

One spot that would always cause us to pause in our journeys was a restaurant called Fresh Air Barbecue in Jackson, Georgia. The place was legendary by the time I was a kid. We'd pull over into their big parking lot, go in and usually order sandwiches and chips to go, with drink. I know everyone says this a lot, and everyone has their favorite barbecue joint...but the barbecued pork at Fresh Air is the best I have ever tasted. It is indescribably delicious in every way. No barbecue I have ever tasted comes close.

So, when Carole and I were staying at Indian Springs State Park, we made sure to ride up to the old Fresh Air Barbecue and order a couple of meals. Carole was dubious about my stories concerning the unmatched quality of the barbecue, but she was soon singing their praises, too.

I had not been there in decades, and the flavor of their food was everything I had remembered.

Seriously. If you ever get even the slightest chance to eat at this place, do it. The world's best barbecue.

The place hadn't changed! Pretty much as I recalled it.

Fresh Air Barbecue. The best 'cue I've ever tasted.

I love it when something remains much the same as it has existed since my youth.

The same sawdust floors at the outdoor benches and tables.

Even the interior was the same.

Do yerself a favor: get you some barbecue here.

Ocmulgee National Monument

We had decided to cruise up through Georgia on the way home to see a few places from my youth where I had not been for decades. These were places that I just wanted to view once more, and which Carole wanted to see for the first time.

When I was a kid I lived in Macon, Georgia for--I think--three years. One of the few nice things that I recalled about Macon was the Ocmulgee National Monument located just across the Ocmulgee River from downtown Macon. I was both pleased and surprised that the skyline of my one-time town had not changed one iota since I was a kid. It's rare to see a town the size of Macon not raise a single large building over the course of four decades.

I think I visited the Ocmulgee mound complex about five times or so during the three years we lived there. As I recalled from my childhood, it is indeed an impressive display of Native American culture and engineering. The large temple mound there is impressive by any standards of earthen mound construction by the people who lived here first. That mound, and several others in the monument, are vast. The society that built it was obviously complex and cohesive to have been able to undertake a public works project such as the one that left us with these amazing structures.

We had the good fortune to arrive at Ocmulgee during an outdoor class session for one of the local public schools. It was being taught by a Native American couple. I didn't get there in time to hear from which tribe they hailed, but their teaching process and personalities were sharp. They explained the long history of the native peoples of the Americas and showed the steady development of stone-age technology among the nations that were here before the Europeans.

Like the Wright Brothers Memorial at the Outer Banks, this is one of the National Monuments that Americans should visit. It impressed me at the same level as that one at Kill Devil Hill and is both inspirational and educational.

The museum and visitor's center building. I really dig this style of architecture.

The Earth Lodge. One has to duckwalk to enter it. The doorway is (maybe) three feet high. This lodge is over 1,000 years old.

Hallway to the meeting room in the Earth Lodge.

Interior shot. The raised platform is where three speakers/moderators/chiefs would have sat. Other seats radiated out from the central platform which seemed to me something like the bema.

The interior of the Earth Lodge.

After a half-mile hike, Carole and I approach the main temple mound.

The view from atop the main temple mound. You could play a football game up there. That's the skyline of downtown Macon across the river in the distance. There were likely various lodges constructed on the flat plateau of the mound.

To give you a good scale of the main temple mound, this is part of the staircase leading to the top. Carole is about halfway down, descending.

O'Jays

When I was in junior high school I was just about the only white kid there. This was right after segregation was enforced by the courts and most white parents--even the poor ones--figured a way to send their kids to private schools of one type or another. My parents weren't racist assholes and I was kept in public schools. So, all of my pals were black kids and they turned me onto a world of music I might not have otherwise encountered. First and foremost and of lingering attraction to me is the music created by The O'Jays. Their popularity started when I still attended Central in Macon GA and I continued to listen to their music after we moved to the 100% white community of Ellijay GA where my parents owned 120 acres of land tucked way the hell back in the middle of the forested mountains. A far cry from Macon, for sure. But the music I learned to love in Macon followed me up there.

For whatever reason, "Love Train" remains my all-time favorite pop tune. (And "Back Stabbers" ain't far behind.)

My favorite.

The O'Jays, circa my youth.

Vacated Childhood

Sometimes I happen to drive through towns or cities where I lived with my parents when I was growing up. These days there is absolutely nothing whatsoever in those places that is welcoming to me or which resembles in any way the comforts of--as they used to say--home and hearth.

It's strange to travel through these spots, now. What were once areas where I could count on something approaching welcome there is now only coldness and a lurking fear. These days I don't even have photographs of these old homes and neighborhoods. The houses that my parents either owned or rented are mainly gone. I used to joke that wherever I lived was later leveled.

There's nothing quite like the iciness of traveling through a town that once held the promise of a safe place to lay one's head, and a warm home where you could retreat from the rain with the security of four walls and supportive allies. Now, when I move through these towns and cities all I see are buildings and streets and strangers and no hope of any finer emotion.

I never lived in this house. But this wreck isn't far from where I did live when I was a kid in the hell-hole known as Brunswick, Georgia. When I was a child, Brunswick had an economy based on industry of various types. Chemical companies, pulp mills, industrial fabricators, and other such ongoing concerns. One by one those places closed up shop, some of them leaving hideously polluted superfund sites. This crappy shell is typical of the structures still standing in Brunswick. My skin crawls whenever I do happen to travel through this horrid little burg, but I sometimes force myself to go back there to take photographs of places I recall. I have one single friend who still lives there, but mainly I stay the HELL away from it, zipping past at the speed limit on the rare occasions when I do travel nearby. I once took my wife to see Brunswick, and after about 30 minutes she started begging me to get her out of there as fast as I could. I complied.

This is Decatur, Georgia. I rather liked Decatur when I was living there as a kid. Some of the happiest memories of my life are from that time. The town was pretty cool in those days, and it's pretty cool now. But there is no one there for me and if I go back, the only thing in the way of a welcome is what I can buy from a lodging establishment and a restaurant.

My parents' first bookstore was somewhere around this area (North Highland Avenue), circa 1966. It was a great bookstore and I loved being in it. It's where my dad began to accumulate the vast stock of old comics I was able to rummage through during my childhood. It's rare that I encounter a comic book that was published after 1955 or so that I haven't at least held in my hands.

This is Macon, Georgia. Another town that holds absolutely nothing for me. This was on Poplar Street where my parents' bookstore was located. Also known as "the Avenue of Flags" because of the state flags project. My parents funded one of them--the flag for the US Virgin Islands. That was a place they longed to visit, but which they never got to see. I did visit the

Islands, partly because of their fascination with that part of the Caribbeans. As for Macon...the only thing that could entice me to visit it again would be to see the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds.

This is part of downtown Ellijay, Georgia. When I lived in the county it was 100% white and was easily the most virulently racist spot I ever lived. You learned to keep your fucking mouth shut there. One of my teachers was a supporter of a well-known neo-Nazi (JB Stoner) and the school system would bring in Christian evangelists to regale the student body with messages from Christ (against the law and all that, but who was going to complain?). Ironically, I had pretty fun teenage years and developed my love of the outdoors there and learned to hike and backpack. I was also active in sports--football, track, and wrestling. We were rarely in the town itself because we lived on 120 acres of forest on the other side of the county on a chunk of wilderness where our nearest neighbor lived 2.5 miles away and the nearest paved road was more than four miles distant and our driveway was exactly one mile long. I miss the land, but not the ignorant, hateful, racist folk who lived in Ellijay. There is nothing there for me, now.

Trunk Fiction and Surrender

I tried for many years to become a professional writer. Now, there are lots of different definitions for "professional writer". Most writers organizations have settled on a definition that essentially says that a person has made a certain amount of sales at a rate that has been agreed upon by its members as being "professional rates". It's all a matter of coming to an agreement among the founding members and, perhaps, amendments by officers at a later date. Many set a rate of, say, five cents per word as a professional rate. Or fifty dollars per page for some kind of script. Or one thousand dollars for a novel advance. (These numbers are all arbitrary on my part...don't hold any group to them.)

I considered myself having become a professional writer when I had sold stories and scripts to national publications for money that made a difference to me. But I never felt that I had reached my actual goal until I sold my first novel which was published by Five Star Books in 2006. That was when I felt I'd crossed a certain threshold.

This year, I stand to make as much or more through writing than I do in my regular 40-hour a week job as a government employee. For the first time in my writing life I feel that I've really surpassed most definitions for being a pro writer. Save one, of course.

The last wall to breach would be to be able to make my living writing full time. That's a really tough nut to crack. Writers rarely have enough money to kick the day job, and they rarely are in a position to be able to afford health care and such on the money they earn from their prose. I'd like to hit that point, but it's going to be the most difficult goal for me to reach. It's possible that I could do it, and for the first time in my life I feel that there is a good possibility for me to be able to do that. Nothing would make me happier than being able to walk away from the daily grind to create art full time.

One reason that I've been able to get this far is that I never quite gave up. I got really discouraged all along the way. In fact, a couple of times I actually did give up. These surrenders lasted a few months each time, but I always got over my depression and started writing again, and started submitting work again, and kept trying to locate a good agent or squeeze my way into the next market at which I was aiming.

I tend to look back at a story I wrote as an example of why it's good never to give up and never to lie down and let the bad guys win.

When I was 26 years old I wrote a story based on some notes I'd jotted in a notebook when I was 16 years old. I kept that notebook around and kept seeing those notes every so often when I'd go through my plots and scribblings. It was a good idea but I never could quite figure out how to turn it into a complete story. Finally, by the time I was 26 I had written it down as good prose and started submitting it.

Back then, I had no name among editors at all. No one really knew me, but now and again I'd sell a short story or a comic script. So when "Visitation" started making its rounds I had a hard time selling it. Most editors seemed to like it, but not enough to accept it and pay me professional rates. I made a huge list of all of the magazines and anthologies that might be in the least bit interested in such a horror story and mailed it out time and again. This was in the days of submitting via the post office with return postage affixed. So the story kept going out and back and out again incessantly. I had a lot of faith in that story and I just didn't want to give up on it.

Finally, after several years of trying to sell it, I decided that enough was enough and I filed it away as a "trunk" story. That is, I put it in that dusty bin with the other stories that I'd written that just weren't good enough or lucky enough to move. But I put it on the top of the stack.

Years would pass, and I'd take it up and send it out. Not very often, of course, but now and again. Three times a year. Twice a year. Once a year. A year or two came when I didn't send it out at all. Then, in 2001 I got word that editors were reading for an anthology that I figured the story would fit. So I hauled out "Visitation" and dusted it off, altered it a tad, and sent it out. It sold. Eighteen years after I'd written it I was paid very well for that short story. It appeared in the Pocket Books anthology CHILDREN OF CTHULHU edited by Benjamin Adams and John Pelan. The story had sold, and finally saw print in a fine anthology in hardback and in mass market paperback.

I had just not given up on that story. It took me almost eighteen years, but I sold it.

Just like I never (really) gave up on becoming a novelist.

My dad used to keep a little poem in his wallet. It was called "Just Keep On Keepin' On". I've heard this poem attributed to Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers and other recording artists. But my dad had that poem on a tattered page that he kept in his wallet years before any of those guys got going (the Allman Brothers, in fact, lived down the street from us in Macon GA--I used to hear them jam every once in a while). My dad liked that poem and he'd read it aloud from time to time. It must have stuck with me.

Keep On Keepin' On

By Anonymous

If the day looks kinder gloomy
And your chances kinder slim,
If the situation's puzzlin'
And the prospect's awful grim,
If perplexities keep pressin'
Till hope is nearly gone,
Just bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

Frettin' never wins a fight
And fumin' never pays;
There ain't no use in broodin'
In these pessimistic ways;
Smile just kinder cheerfully
Though hope is nearly gone,
And bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

There ain't no use in growlin'
And grumblin' all the time,
When music's ringin' everywhere
And everything's a rhyme.
Just keep on smilin' cheerfully
If hope is nearly gone,
And bristle up and grit your teeth
And keep on keepin' on.

Maybe not the highest peak, but it's pretty darned good.