In the Pines

I had something good in mind to write today, but now I can't recall what it was.  I need to begin making notes, maybe, when I think of things.  It will come to me, but not until I finish writing this, I'm sure.  I can remember only two ideas right now.  I was brought up in the "Pepsi Generation."  That was the ad campaign for the soft drink company that put its emphasis on youth and fun.  

Oh, yea. . . that was it!  Good.  We didn't want to grow up to be old and stodgy like our parents had.  We didn't want to work our lives away and miss out on the "beauty of life."  We wanted to travel and see things our parents hadn't, so we hit the road.  The road was freedom, and that is what we cherished above all.  

Yup, I'm remembering now.  Didn't want the nine to five.  And so we went to college.  Not all of us, of course, but those who didn't were choosing to be like their parents.  We were mostly working class kids going to state colleges, but there seemed to us at the time to be a merger between the classes.  What was happening on the campus at Yale was like what was happening at Berkeley which was something like what was happening where we were, too.  

When we left college, of course, things had to change.  Still, we didn't want to be old, so we were excited by every new idea.  We championed them.  And the older we got, the more liberal we became.  "Isms."  We had turned our backs on the bad old past.  History was a patriarchal tale told by fascists.  

That's it.  That's as far as I got thinking through that one.  It's just nonsense, of course, just the inside of my noggin reflecting on my own life.  I was just thinking we made a pretty good mess of things.  

But what generation hasn't?  Or won't?  

I took the photo at the top. Messed it up somewhere along the line, either in loading the film or in processing.  Can't be sure.  I didn't take this one.  I just think it is a good reflection of human history.  She is what Trump waves before the MAGA crowd.  It is simple and easy because "the fools we are as men," etc.  I thought about using an A.I. image instead.  

That Dixie's Gentleman's Club was on a lonely stretch of rural highway I was driving on an early Sunday morning.  Even then, I was a little nervous parking in the lot and getting out of the car to make the pictures.  I know these people better than you do, and things can get real weird real fast.  

An old pickup truck with a couple old boys see me as they pass and pull into the lot.  Just us.  No one else around.  

"What are you doin', boy?"

Uh-oh.  Been there my whole life.  

"The county sent me out to make some pictures of the property."  

That usually gives them pause.  I've used that one before.  

"What for?"

"Beats me, man.  They just sent me out.  You'd have to call the county office to find out."  

I've learned to keep the motor running.  

Back in time, for years I got grant money from the state to do video projects.  It was called "The Governor's Grant."  That was a nice shield.  I took a lot of liberties with that one.  

Q worked on one.  Which reminds me.  He texted me yesterday pissed off.  

"I have TWO houses, motherfucker!"

Yea, he does.  

I took my mother around the town yesterday.  We got her hearing aids adjusted.  She still can't hear, but it is better.  We went to the cardiologist's to see if her glasses were there.  Nope.  

"Yes they are," my mother told me back in the car.  

Then we went to a very strange bank in a small stucco building connected to another, unusual business on what once was the outskirts of town but what is now that endless stretch of development that extends far into the distance.

After that, I took across town to another shitty part where she likes to get her glasses.  Sure, she saves a couple bucks at Eyeglass World, but. . . . 

After posting those faux pictures of the man with the camera yesterday, I've been wounded by the idea of it, and everywhere we went, I looked at the hoi-polloi with an eye for description.  I would write them in my head.  Oy.  Cheap, meretricious clothing.  Bad hair.  Blobs for bodies.  I saw my reflection in a store window.  Maybe, I thought, I should live my life out in one of those Florida Keys trailer parks like Nordstrom, the protagonist of Jim Harrison's novella, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name." Hell, I'm already mistaken for Captain Keith Fitzpatrick played by my friend Tom Nowicki in the tv show, "Bad Monkey."  Just yesterday, coming out of the grocery store, a man yelled to me, "Hi, Tom."  I simply and wearily waved.  

O.K.  Just another stumbling journey through the bucket of snakes in my head a bit after rising.  I'm trying really hard to jump the track I've been riding on.  I'm trying to find some joy in my miserable little life.  Yesterday bringing my mother home from the day's journey, as we pulled into her neighborhood, we passed the sign that announced we were entering The Pines.  That's the name of the country club golf course where she lives.  The Pines.  And the course is lovely, one of the few places left that has those beautiful tall pines I grew up with in Pine Hills.  No shit, I broke out in song.  

"Do you know that one?" I asked my mother.  She did not, so I asked Siri to play it for her.  I sang it through about a dozen times for her amusement.  

Not the Lead Belly version.  Too bleak.  No, it was a take on the old Bill Monroe version.  I love hillbilly music.  It is the poor white trash version of jazz.  So close.  

But I doubt these kids are true hillbillies.