Northwest Georgia

Whoever designed the house I grew up in must not have taken into consideration that by having a twenty foot ceiling in the living room would make the house difficult to heat, so for the most part of every weekend, my dad and I would scour lots in North West Georgia downing trees, hauling them home or else splitting firewood by the truckload in the back lots of church friends so that we could keep the great cast iron stove running all winter. The few twenty acres or so we had at our place were divided almost grid-like by hoary tree-lines laced with barbed wire. We thinned some of these back and stacked cordwood along the lines, we had cordwood piled under the back porch. We had wood stacked under the open sided shed roof where the tractor lived, which is where one day, loading with my brother I threw a quartered log clean through the back window of the old black Chevy we used to haul it all with and I’ve never been sure if I did it by accident or not. I remember the smell of fresh cut oak, I remember the bark of the saw, the smell of chainsaw exhaust. I remember loading wood into the truck and keeping track of the figure of my father from a distance so that I could get out of the way should he bring a tree down. I remember working hard and nobody talking, driving hours along curving nameless two-lane county roads through rubbed down Georgia hills and nobody saying anything.

The mountains of Georgia are the oldest in Appalachia, worn down almost to nothing. Something that ancient has an inherent weirdness to it, I believe. Down the road were woods several acres thick behind my friend Jeff’s house which nobody seemed to own. We’d get into them a day at a time, tell each other lies and smoke his dad’s cigarettes. They had stands of lower pines there and open areas with rock and sand for some reason, and in one clearing him and his sister and two brother’s had made a stone ring lined with stone chairs in the middle of which they would burn things. We found cars in his woods and farm equipment in mine. He showed me a fox-hole under a cedar one time and we dared each other to scramble down into the walls hung with roots yet neither of us would go. The hole was still too thick with the smell of wild animal.

Next to my house was a stand of tall loblolly pines, planted originally in rows but then grown to dark vine-twisted wildness. I had to cut an entrance with my buck knife just to get in them. I would spend afternoons laying quiet in big piles of pine needles, sometimes reading, sometimes daydreaming. Once, from nowhere a great wind rushed along the roof, shoving it all back and forth till I realized it was a low flying cloud of blackbirds. A pestilence flying so thick they almost obliterated what little sky showed through. I used to think it was normal for a twelve year old boy to spend all day getting lost in the woods, now I’m not so sure. I used to try and force my wrists to grow retractable claws, like Wolverine. Sometimes I would pretend I was Grizzly Adams and my only friends were deer, rabbits, birds and snakes and they could talk to me.

At the end of one summer my dad thought we should clear out one tree-line divider between fields, the one that ran away from the back of the house into the state park. Hacking at one end we found what seemed to be a cave entrance, a passage through the wild brush with childrens tin toys scattered along the floor and pieces of fabric nailed to the underbelly of low branches. It ran about fifty feet, had two or three entrances and in five years or more, none of us had discovered it. We named it the “Rabbit Hole." I think that was the summer I first read Watership Down.

Adjacent to that was where we kept our usual stack of seasoned material ready after a year or two to be brought into the house. It was here once that my dad, my brother and I finally got down to the lowest layers or soft and rotted timber and rolling over a log, I uncovered something, an animal of some sort that turned its small head and hissed in rage at me and then disappeared. It wasn’t a snake and it wasn’t a cat, but maybe some sort of large insect only about a foot or two away from my face. When I saw it, my entire perception seemed to go blurry, I only remember eyes and a mouth. I paused and turned to my brother and my dad, but nobody seemed to have noticed anything as they kept working. I’m not even sure now if it really happened or if I dreamt it.

Many years later, either in a dream or in a blackout, I returned and climbed down into that fox hole behind Jeff’s house. It was tight and dark but after a distance opened up into a large tall cavern. The walls were made of clay and lined with hundreds of small animals embedded into the red mud, rabbits or something like them, horrified wide-eyed and screaming. In the dream I scrambled back out as fast as I could, tripped and fell breathlessly, laying among scattered piles of shale and gnarled, whispering cedars with the sky above cloudless and mercilessly blue.

Last Stanza

We all know sometimes life hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet your lifetimes that and twice it's double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed
So make sure when you say you're in it, but not of it
You're not helpin' to make this earth
A place sometimes called hell
Change your words into truths
And then change that truth into love
And maybe our children's grandchildren
And their great grandchildren will tell
I'll be loving you until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky

Stevie Wonder- AS
Songs in the Key of Life 1976

or maybe you ought to re-familiarize yourself with it.

Mostly for the Guitar Solos

FTW

I am right now skipping meetings, drawing rhinoceroses and listening to Led Zeppelin with absolutely no shame.

"Hollow Bone" Theory

Every night before lights out, we stood in a circle grasping each other, arms over shoulders and said the following prayer:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
Amen.

1,738

With my current job with the City of Richmond, I make three hundred and fifty dollars a week. After I pay rent and utilities on my six hundred square foot house I have roughly sixty dollars to work with any given month. Half of this goes to the laundromat.

As of last week I have been turned down for ten different positions with CSX and eight different positions with the City. There are rumors about trash-collector positions coming up but nothing's materialized. Couldn't get a call-back from friggin Starbucks. I have approximately fifteen years experience as a carpenter and woodworker. I am under the belief that my trade is dying. I stopped blaming the Mexicans for this just last week.

Also last week I quit what has been my year and a half commitment to opening up the Al-anon meeting I helped found. I'm not sure if it will keep going or not. I decided I needed to get out of it's way so that it could either grow up on it's own or else die a tragic lonely death. Of course now I'm in a panic to find other meetings.

I've been reading this book at work as I bounce around in the boom truck. It, as well as it's predecessor, have been an absolute miracle to me.

As of today I have been clean for one thousand seven hundred and thirty eight days.

I've been watching youtube footage of the tsunami in Japan all week and listening to Tool's album Lateralus in the truck or while washing dishes. I decided earlier today that neither of these things have been very helpful. The main reason I haven't been able to write is I feel that everything I have to say right now is bitchy. However I know for a fact that I've never been healthier or stronger in my life. I also suspect I might just be insanely happy on some level.

So that I don't wake up Ruth, I shower in the dark each morning where I often find myself deep into "fox-hole" prayer. However today I woke up to the thought that I have absolutely no time right now to entertain fear, bitterness or resentment. I got too much going on, too much at stake and I need to be able to travel fast and light.

DPU 2

"Urban Forestry"


















"Loner"


















"Broke Down Agin"


















"Landfill"


















"Oakwood Cemetery"


















"Collards, I Think"


















"Rocky"


















"Self-Portrait"

Been Having a Hard Time Writing Lately

However Ruth wrote something for me.

She is my champion.

O Rly

Eowyn

Got an Idea just now

My friend Alex in New Orleans offered me a show in his gallery again. I called him this weekend to work out some details as I've only made a couple of things since last summer. We decided on August at the earliest. I had hoped to get back to doing more writing, but something he said a while back struck a note with me. May and Henry are getting older, and probably not going to want to fuck around with me and my drawings when they're surly pre-teens. So the clock is ticking on this particular body of work. I figured I'd start writing something long here, broken up into sections, that later could be presented in between whatever drawings I'm able to come up with between now and then.

Self-Portrait

It’s as easy to become a father as it is difficult to be one.
—German proverb