I raise a drink to life and thought and

Fear of life of fear of death

Wondering

the same things other people have wondered

This time

My head doing the thinking

My doubt, my soul at stake

Something is clearly wrong but

Supposed to be right

Or vice versa

Love and care

But not in the wrong order

Or direction

Thanks for everything or

Should it be nothing

So confusing is salvation

Right. So, lately I’ve been reading a lot. It’s become a hobby of mine. I mentioned before how I’ve never been a recreational reader, then BOOM! I became one. One of the books I’ve been reading is the Holy Bible. Now, before you decide to go off to another website looking for something interesting to read, don’t. I’m not gonna preach to anyone about how great religion is and how we should all thank God for what we have. In fact, I think it’s odd to thank God for what I have while not blaming Him for what I don’t have. I’m not saying I blame Him for anything, though. I’m thankful to God for His creations: the Earth and planets, animals, nature, etc. but, why do God-fearing people suffer at all? It’s not like Heaven’s any better for the people who suffer more here. Back on track: I do want to talk a little about what I’ve read though – and it ain’t all good.

I grew up in a small southern town. On Sunday morning I went to the Gainesville Baptist Church and on Sunday evenings (and some Wednesdays) I went to the Livingston Church of God. Southern Baptist and Pentecostal – yeah, I did that. Anyway, I never took the time to read the Bible. Nor did I read any religious texts, apart from what I was given in Sunday School or what have you. At 36 years old, I decided it was time.

I started with a book about the Bible called Holy Enigma! Bible Verses You’ll Never Hear in Sunday School by Steve Ward. Well, kids, I can tell you; this book didn’t paint a pretty picture of the religion I have spent so many years calling my own. There were several (approving) references to rape, slavery, genocide, and infanticide, among other quality bedtime story fodder.

Ward used several translations of the text to prove his points and, in the end, the religion was merely propped up on faith. He spent hundreds of pages going over inaccuracies and hypocrisies only to say, they didn’t matter. To someone like me, who’s been trying to make sense of faith and religion, it did matter.

So, I broke out the old King James. Before long, I decided I wanted to go with a more modern translation – something more easily understandable. The translation I went with was the English Standard Version. The exact version is an iOS app that has cross references to other translations and other places in the text where each story or subject is mentioned. Pretty cool, right? Anyway, I started with the book of Genesis, in the Old Testament. Page one.

I developed a style and rhythm that made things easy for the reader to enjoy. Truth be told (God I hate using cliches) I was good at writing about myself. I had even made a semi-successful attempt at writing fiction, but I couldn’t recreate that success. A couple of times I wrote readable bits of short fiction, but what I really wanted, and still want, to do is to write a book. I tried to get one off the ground recently, but based on the lack of reader response to the first section/chapter, I failed miserably. Descriptions came and I was able to put them to digital paper, but I had no concept of how to move the story along.

So I started reading.

Now, these weren’t the first books I’d ever read. In fact, I’ve read a good many books as requirements for classes throughout my educational career. High school followed by undergraduate and graduate studies brought increasingly rigorous reading lists. But I’d yet to read for fun. I’ll let you in on a little secret; one of the biggest reasons I didn’t enjoy reading for fun was that I was/am a slow reader. Edification. That had been the name of my reading game. It was time to start reading for… fun – and also to learn how to be a better writer. See how I managed to sneak that bit of comfort in there?

The first book on my list was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I was amazed at how quickly I was sucked into the world of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. The Games demanded my attention and the first person telling of the story forced me to be involved in everything that was going on. The entire series, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay were consumed within a week.

I had almost immediately become a recreational reader. It was fun. I flipped .epub pages as quickly as I could. Levar Burton would be proud.

As I was reading The Hunger Games trilogy, my wife Beth was reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. She kept telling me how much she thought I’d enjoy it. Within a day or two of finishing the games I dove into Gone Girl. I was not disappointed. Flynn’s writing style is more in line with the type of thing I will write. Gritty, dirty, unpredictable, and of questionable morals. The characters are complex and situations are dark and winding. The book is written, like The Hunger Games, in first person; but from more than one person’s point of view. This was quite a welcomed and well played change. I’ll likely read more Flynn.

Just a couple of weeks after reading the first words of Collins’ trilogy I had completed four books and I was eager for more. I’ve been struggling with faith and religion as you may have noticed, so my next book was one I’d hoped would enlighten me a bit. Holy Enigma! Bible Verses You’ll Never Hear in Sunday School by Steve Ward had potential. It seemed he may hold the key to which parts of the Holy Bible could be tossed aside to make for a more compelling and believable story. There were a number of points made with which I strongly agreed, but in the end all he managed to do was confuse me even more. There was no real congruity to his selection. Many aspects of the good book he chose to espouse as faith warranting fact were as asinine as those he’d chucked aside. Blech.

Right now, well not right now, but when I’m not working or writing this blog entry to get you caught up with what’s going on, I’m reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. This Pulitzer Prize winning book is unquestionably my favorite so far. I will certainly read The Neon Bible, also by Toole. His character development, dialogue, descriptions, and flow have made Confederacy a series of smiles, chuckles, and guffaws. I hate that Toole committed suicide. It seems my favorite artists are almost always mentally troubled and the cause of their own demise.

Coming up on my reading list are Fay by Larry Brown – strongly recommended by a friend – and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I’m developing a plot for more than one book as I read these and piece together memories, both real and imagined. If you’ve read any of these books, or if you have any recommendations, sound off in the comments. Check me out on Facebook and Twitter if you want to say hi on those venues. I’m there.

“Thomas!” I called to the bartender, forgetting it was the middle of the week and Thomas was off work. “Shit. You, another.”

He came over to pour another drink. “Another… whatever you’ve got in your hand, Washington”. I had no idea what his name was, but Washington seemed a fitting name for a nigger in a white suite pouring drinks. I didn’t care anyway. It was the first time I’d seen him working. Thomas, my usual bartender, took really good care of me. An empty glass and a full ashtray; in better days he’d have been hanged. I lit a cigarette, keeping a careful eye on him.

I stirred my drink with my index finger while pulling deeply on the cig. A quick gulp and I exhaled the smoke. It was like pat on the back from the inside, warm and lingering.

“An appletini, please.” A faggy voice from the other end of the bar spoke. Appletini? Who the fuck ordered an appletini in my bar? This certainly was not the same place I visited on weekends. My head bobbed as my eyes slowly closed and then opened. It felt like my brain was a strobe light. On and off, the world flashed. I turned to see who had spoken. I saw a neatly dressed man holding a cigarette and a glass. He smiled at Washington as he raised his hand and nodded. He was surrounded by other neatly dressed men smoking cigarettes and laughing.

“They’ll get theirs when Jesus comes.” I muttered into my drink.

My focus was broken when I realized I’d forgotten what had been said or why I’d cast my gaze in their direction. Something about those guys was unsettling. I finished my drink and crushed out the cigarette. “Washington, another drink – and empty this damn ashtray while you’re at it.”

I could see everything in the bar from my perch. The mirrored backdrop, though partially obscured by liquor bottles, provided quick reference to my surroundings. I like to know what is going on around me; never can know who to trust. There were very few people to be seen which, I supposed normal for mid-week. The neatly dressed men were still laughing and drinking. Next to them was a woman. How had I not noticed her before right then? Her short, dark hair framed her face. Her pale skin seemed to be its own source of light, smooth and delicate. She was dressed in a very bohemian way. Thin shoulder straps held her loose fitting dress just higher than the perk of her nipples. She rested her chin in the palm of her left hand which was holding an unlit cigarette. In her right hand, a glass of dark wine. She looked defeated. I looked for too long.

I lit another cigarette and stood to move closer to her. There was a quick change in air pressure and ambient noise. My balance was off, but I was standing. As I passed the neatly dressed men, I tripped. On the way to the floor I heard laughter and saw a retreating leg, clad in dark jeans, cuffed at the ankle, resting atop a freshly polished shoe.

The floor was cool. Without warning, I slept.

It was dark when I awoke. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I woke up my entire lower body felt numb, like it was still sleeping. I was lying on my back and my body felt as though it were tethered to the surface of whatever it was I was lying on. The sound of an oscillating fan and the slow drip of liquid filled my ears. My head was pounding.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness all I could see was more darkness. I reached my hand toward my face to rub my eyes, hoping it would help. To my surprise, I actually was tethered to the bed. Terror filled my naked body. This was not my home and I had no idea how I’d gotten here. I had to go.

I struggled to free my hands from the bindings, but it was no use. A door opened. It sounded heavy, old, and industrial. I heard a high-pitched sound, similar to the hum of an old cathode ray television. The sound grew louder as the footfalls approached. Leather soled shoes on a sandy, damp concrete floor came nearer and nearer. With each step, my heart raced, pounding with the same desire to leave my chest as I had to leave that room.

“Hello? What do you want with me?” I pleaded. “Huh? What do you want? What are you gonna do to me?”

Louder and closer the footfalls grew until they stopped at the head of my platform. I heard the sound of the cathode ray, humming strongly in my ear; then, the squeak of rubber against rubber.

“Please, tell me what you want.” I cried. A gloved hand covered my mouth.

My captor leaned in. “Shh.” It whispered, inches from my face. I could smell blood on its breath, hot in my nose. I felt a warm rush come over me as it rubbed my hair and then turned away. Footfalls and the cathode ray sound became quieter until the door opened and closed again.

In the darkness, again I slept.

He never was very eloquent with his speech. For that matter, he never was very eloquent with much of anything. He’d wake up in the morning, put on the first thing he found in the floor, pull his boots on, light up a cigarette, and get in the truck to go do whatever it was that he was doing that day.

Ed was a carpenter by trade. Well, not actually a carpenter, but he was handy with a hammer and folks around town knew they could count on him to get their manual laboring done. The missing tip of his left index finger told everyone he wasn’t quite as handy with a saw.

I gave him the lighter. “Here. I know you’re gonna do something stupid though.” He always did something stupid when fireworks were involved. One time, when we were kids, he emptied an entire gross of firecrackers into a toilet paper tube and set it on fire. When nothing happened, he knelt down to have a closer look. He thought he was making dynamite, but what he actually made was a mess of his face. It took all summer for his eyebrows to grow back and he never recovered full use of his right eye.

“No I ain’t.” as he snatched the Bic from my hand. The big guy sat his beer on the ground near me, then as casually as he could, he moved toward the brush pile in the middle of the field. We had a bonfire planned. Ten or fifteen of our friends were coming out to celebrate America’s birthday with us and Ed wanted to get the fire going. I didn’t realize it, but he’d doused that pile of dried limbs and leaves in gasoline. “Watch ‘is shit.”

From ten feet away, that dumb bastard lit a roman candle and let two balls of fire shoot off into the air as he hollered like a drunken redneck. Ok, as he hollered like himself. Then he aimed it at the pile – holding it like a rifle.

Ba-BOOM!

He must have poured five gallons of gas or more on that scraggly pile of nothing when I wasn’t looking, ‘cause when that little green – I think it was green – ball of burning hit it there was an explosion like Fat Man and Little Boy – or at least the rural Alabama version of it. It really was something to see, truly amazing. Just like in video games, but hotter and a lot more dangerous. I looked toward my friend. He was on the ground.

“What the fuck?!” I dropped my beer as I ran toward him. He was on his back. He wasn’t breathing. “Ed. Ed! Are you alright? Damn it, Ed!”

I didn’t know what to do, so I smacked him in the face. Nothing.

“Alright, I’ve seen this on TV before.” I tilted his head back, checked inside his mouth, pinched his nose and blew as much air into his fat cake hole as I could. His chest rose like the timer in a Thanksgiving turkey, then fell. I banged on his chest, right between his moobs, and then blew into his mouth again. He coughed as he opened his eyes.

“Gawdamn! Wasn’t expectin’ that shit.” Half chuckling, half shaking in terror, he sat up with a groan. “Reckon I won’t be doin’ that again.”

“No, Ed, I reckon you won’t. Are you alright?” I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. Hell, I couldn’t believe I’d just saved my friend’s life. Truth be told, I was glad I didn’t have to lift him. He was easily twice my weight. If he hadn’t come to, I’m pretty sure I would have watched him die, right there in the middle of that pasture.

“I’m fine. Just got the wind knocked outta me. Didja see that? That was the biggest gawdamn ball of fire I ever seen.” He was shaken, but I knew he’d be alright.

We cracked a pair of fresh beers, sat on the tailgate of his pickup truck, and laughed at my friend’s stupidity. Our guests would arrive soon and we had a lot of beer to drink.

That, my friends, is why I don’t do fireworks anymore.

Have a safe and happy 4^th.

I’ve come to terms with a lot of things simply by putting fingers to keyboard and pecking out words to express how I feel on the inside. Maybe I’ll still be able to connect with you on some level, the same way I did when I was writing about my dad and my journey to accepting his death. Perhaps I’ll be able to get a conversation going similar to the one we had when I wrote about the litigious atheists who I felt were just trying to cause a row – to get a rise out of believers. Will you read if I write, again, about how I have doubts regarding religion; if I make up a story about snowmen and candy canes?

The topics I’ve covered here have been varied, but one thing has been true throughout; I only point fingers at myself…or anonymous groups of people. I don’t want to single anyone out or name names. If I have a beef with you, I’ll say so…to you.

Sure, I’ve not published anything here recently, but I write just about every day. “Yes, I’ll write in your voice and connect with your audience.” There are little bits of every writer’s story hidden among everything he writes. The piece may be about ways to look your best, but that one sentence about how to avoid an embarrassing moment makes me cry because I’ve been there. And I didn’t know about the embarrassment avoidance part.

It’s in my nature to be something I’m not. If you’ve read much of what’s here, you know I’ve done a lot of hiding and pretending. Most of my adolescence was spent trying to fit in with a group of people who didn’t want me, but some variation of me may have been acceptable. I did all I could to find the right version.

The term two-faced has gotten a bad rap. We all have a face we keep in the drawer in case of emergency. Its smile is a bit askew and the eyes are just a little bit darker than normal, but casual onlookers can’t tell the difference. There are myriad reasons we may dust this face off and wear it. Every day I get up, put my best face forward, and greet the world. Sometimes it is my own, but others it’s the one from the second drawer.

“I’m left handed and I’m offended. If something offends me, it was designed to be offensive. You should be ashamed of yourself for making fun of southpaws. When you joked about gingers and fake boobs I laughed with you, but this time you’ve gone too far. I’m going to rally all of my lefty friends to boycott your lemonade, even though it is great. I’m also going to contact the news and tell them how insensitive you are.”

To let you know a bit about The Lemonade Stand, their demographic is all over the place. No matter the day job, age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, the customers all have something in common; an open minded sense of humor. If something isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it’s not. The stand knows and embraces this. Their tongue in cheek online persona provides updates about lemonade flavors, specials, fresh cookies, and stand locations interspersed with jokes and silly facts. The audience loves it.

Millions of people are left handed. It’s not a death sentence. So, why would someone be so cheesed? Do they just have to be angry about something? Maybe, being a left hander, the person is having trouble dealing with the uncertainty of things like: “Will they have lefty scissors? Why do people call us southpaws?” and “Is this person wondering if I washed my hands properly after the last time did number two?”

To show my support for The Lemonade Stand, I posted something positive about their use of social media and lighthearted status updates. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the left handed person’s friends brought their hate speak to my post. And then another, and another, and another. They called me names and insulted me…all without provocation.

To these people and anyone who is happiest when they’re angry I say these things:

Just because something offends doesn’t make it offensive. If you’re not comfortable enough with something to laugh at it, maybe you’re afraid of it.

Have something to say or add? Leave a comment or get in touch on Facebook or Twitter.

A little back story – last summer my family went to Disney World. I did so before I got a prescription for the aforementioned medication. There are people everywhere at Disney World, and sometimes the lines cross back on themselves there’s nothing to be seen but people. Standing in line for my son to meet Mickey and Minnie Mouse felt like the entire room was closing in on me. About halfway through the line, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to leave Beth, my son, and the rest of our group inside. Everyone in there was breathing and I was certain there wasn’t enough air for them and me. Did I mention I hate crowds?

I’ve been having headaches. They linger in the top of my head for days. Sometimes dull, sometimes sharp, but always present. I mentioned in my last post that I’ve had a lot of stuff on my mind lately, so Beth and I thought maybe the headaches are because of stress and/or tension. She suggested, and I agreed, going out for Gallery Night might do me well. After a long bit of texting with friends and trying to find someone to hang out with while stumbling the streets, I ended up alone. “Fuck it. I’m doing this.” I said to myself.

I got downtown, went to my office to get our growler, and headed to Hopjacks to get it filled with a really good craft beer. Then I remembered I was doing this on a tight, tight budget and opted for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Growler filled, I set out to hear what I could see. There was good music everywhere, but it was kind of overwhelming. It wasn’t long before I was in my office, warming my hands and contemplating going home. It was just past 10:00. I put the rest of the growler in the fridge and went downstairs to cash out my tab.

James Adkins

When I got downstairs I heard James Adkins playing. That dude’s got a lot of heart, soul, and energy. Just him, a guitar, and a broad repertoire of music…I decided to stay a little longer. I ordered a Pensacola Bay Brewery Sawgrass and made my way through the crowd to the other end of the restaurant near the stage.

While standing there, listening to James play, a man came up to me and said “You’re out late.” I told him I’d gotten the go-ahead to hang out. He smiled and offered to buy my next beer. A few songs later, it was time for that beer. When he came back, he handed it to me and toasted “It’s good to see you after dark.” There was something special in his smile and words. I felt connected and appreciated. I felt good. Relaxed. I stood and chatted with him and his girlfriend for an hour or more.  We talked about music, people, advertising, and moonshine.

Eventually, the couple disappeared. I stayed until the end of James’ set. How did 1:30 am find me? I didn’t care. I’d been having great conversation, listening to good music, and drinking good beer. It was late. The time had come to head home. Though I’d considered leaving early, it had turned out to be a great and relaxing evening. The only way it could have been any better would be if my best friend, Beth, had been with me. Maybe next time.

(I only had 4 beers over several hours, I wasn’t drunk. Don’t drink and drive, kids.)