Credits and Debits and Habits, Plumbing the Rabbit Hole of Memory
EACH INSTANT AS RECOLLECTION & ACTION COMBINED
“Best laid plans of mice and men go aft aglee” is close to Donne’s original quotation. A lithe lass with whom I shared some sweet, hot, wet interactions recently left a red rose and paper containing two words---“THANK YOU!”---on the pillow we shared, my unusual somnolence allowing her quiet escape to Miami. She paid me a marvelous compliment, just before she fled forever into the night. As we stared into each other’s eyes by the guttering light of candles, she whispered to me, “I can see that you would become really habit forming.”
I find myself feeling the same way about BLOGging. Goodness! The opportunity to share the word of the day with the world is almost overwhelmingly seductive. Today, for example, just the tiniest sliver of what there is to convey would include a remembrance of the eighty fifth anniversary of “THE LYNCHING OF FIVE UNKNOWN NEGROES” in Millen, the seat of Jenkins County, Georgia. The idea of these men, dismembered and burned in similar fashion as recent victims in Iraq, being unremembered is of course absurd.
The families from Jenkins County with whom I’m now working know kin of these long ago victims, two of whom still remain in the area. My compadres have more concern just now with the Millen Sheriff, Bobby Womack, who is a psychopathic killer, a brilliant thief, and one of the funniest and trickiest politicians in the history of a region replete with such men. “He could charm a cobra out of its fangs and put the snake’s eyes out before it knew what hit him,” says Richard Evans, a lifelong law-enforcement officer who quit the Millen County force in order to stay alive. Evans continues to implore the FBI and the Justice Department to look at the situation here, although he too remembers April 14th as an historic day of infamy, that not one White person outside of this room where I type, recalls.
The stories from Jenkins County, from Swainsboro, from Savannah(DOES ANYONE SEE?)from across the South really---where White supremacist thinking is about to face an unstoppable comeuppance as Blacks find themselves with little choice but to stand and fight---are about to explode onto the world stage. Very few people are aware of this profound social tension, just as the people living downstream from a decrepit dam may not see the signs of its pending collapse and their inevitable inundation. Readers can say, “I read about it in that madman’s BLOG” a while back.
But that’s not what I wanted to mention today, as three of my colleagues, lacking insurance, are nursing abscesses and other dental problems, and I’m wondering when my turn at the ‘can’t-afford-the-necessities game’ will arrive again. The Southern Appalachians have more variety of species than anywhere else on earth, and the variety of humans has begun to reflect that diversity too. Thus, here I sit, stories from every continent swirling into my life, and this calling is about as easy to make manifest as quantum physics is to teach to pre-calculus pre-schoolers.
I could post a hundred pages a day, time could agree to a time-out, a million year hiatus in which all I would do is chronicle what has come to me during the span of my puny life, and were I to keep the pace I would still barely scratch the surface of the combination of hilarious, nefarious, ludicrous, generous marvelosity that has spun me around like a leaf in a hurricane.
That’s what I wanted to say today. And goodness, goddess, gracious bless me, all praise to the great and unknowable Ran-Dom that has let all this come to pass, thanks to God and thanks to you who read and thanks to those who pass like ships in the night. I’m betting on life, come what may.
And, of course, correspondence is welcome!