The Bi-Centennial Post

This is the tractor we use on the farm. I say "we," though I've never driven it and probably won't be driving it any time soon. I like tractors. Not as much as trains, but they certainly have their own special merits, the greatest of which, I'd say, is versatility.

On my best days I'm at least as versatile as a tractor. This is my 200th blog, by the way. Wait, what was I saying?

I just got back from the A-T-L, where I once again dropped off Janelle & Eleanor at the airport. I'll be seeing them again this weekend, when they return from St. Augustine. While I was in Atlanta, I took the opportunity to drive to a coffee shop and do a little aimless wandering, followed by some light stream of consciousness journaling:

What a disgrace Little Five Points has become, worse than most malls. This is punk's Southern deathbed. Nothing happening but name brands & upscale resale stores. A Capella Books, Criminal Records, & Sevananda still exist, but for who? Even the old school on Euclid has been remodeled into luxury urban lofts, full of NO TRESPASSING NO LOITERING NO LITTERING signs. In its own way, though, Inman Park is heaven. Especially on a radiant morning like this one. Octagon-tiled sidewalks, shade of magnolia, & opulent homes I can't even afford to rightly look at. Antebellum, Victorian, the Unclassifiable Anciently Vacant But Newly Remodeled With Care By A Master Carpenter. They all gleam quietly behind hedges of musky boxwood. Walking around this neighborhood, I hear the gentle, collective trill of fountains in the unseen backyards, sculpted and lush. It lulls me. In this quiet trance, I touch the po' white Southerner's dream, which is that one day I'll be Elvis enough to live in one a them fancy Virgina Highland homes. As I continue, jet pilots & web designers pull up and parallel-park their Escalades and Mini-Coops, get out, and start tapping keypads to unlock electric security gates. As I pass on foot, I glance over and see tangles of honeysuckle building their fortress on Grecian urns of various types and shapes. The wandering pheromones of a tea olive temporarily blinds me. I can't see her but she's out here. Gaia's perfume. She wants me. I want her back. Oh, holy mama. Inman girds Little Five Points, though, which is some kind of shore for Atlanta's social detritus. Lost boys and girls. Derelicts and hard-luck orphans, some of whom land here hoping to get high, kicks, spange the yuppies and suburban high school kids on holiday, spend that on meth, et al, and maybe eat a slice or so every couple of days to maintain a human thread to this plane of existence. And so you see little signs of malfeasance like the empty bottles of Robitussin I spy underneath a truly majestic beech tree, which lives in the Edenesque front yard of a homestead that rivals Anne Rice's New Orleans digs. "Somebody tripped under this tree last night," I reckon, at the same time that I discover an empty Trojan's wrapper in the mondo grass. A slight, nervous-looking older man walks past me and gives me the ol' homosexual eye. "Good morning," I say to him, all hetero- and square. He doesn't respond. He walks up the driveway of the Robitussin house and notices the trash. He starts picking it up and my heart breaks... "Suppose I got rich all of a sudden, somehow. How would the money change me?" I wonder this as I head to the coffee shop. It's a funny question, so I laugh at it and shake my head, which earns me the attention of a middle-aged woman on her front porch, watering a fern with a plastic bucket. "Good morning," I holler up at her, in a boisterous, rural way. No answer. What am I doing out here, anyway? ...at the coffee shop, the baristas are playing the Beach Boys, which means that I can't stay here, for I am allergic to the neutered twang of jangling guitars, affected harmonies, and school, girl, and car lyrics that mark their offensive sound. Neither Brian Wilson's crazee theramin nor Chuck Berry's stolen intros can impart anything worthy to this awful mess. It really couldn't get any weirder than the Beach Boys. They are an anti-septic nightmare, a chemical agent. "Be True To Your School" is devil worship, plain and simple. The fact that nearly every one of the original Beach Boys has morphed into a new member and that they nonetheless still tour and sell out arenas proves that they are nothing but a horrific hologram of some kind. I make my egress with the quickness, while they croon "Surfer Girl," like a watch winding down to their own psychological annihilation. (How could a man in his sixties want to sing these lyrics?) The Beach Boys - they are eternal, but why? I'm back out in the sunlight now, where I need to be. It's a beautiful day. My gals are somewhere up in the sky...