Corey Michael Smithson

"IN SEARCH OF SPACIOUS SKIES"

[coreymichaelsmithson]

More Songs of Main Street

2025 began inauspiciously enough, with midnight striking right as I finished refilling the water bowls for our four handicapped dogs. My partner Daniel and I had just gotten back from walking our pack through the quiet streets of McEwen, Tennessee, having thoughtfully adopted the old party poopers’ strategy of leaving a New Year’s dinner hours before the ball dropped. This meant that we were safely tucked inside our home well before the cacophony of woohoos and gunshots and fireworks that typically mark a backwater holiday could begin. Now, if our luck holds out a while longer, and the stars are still smiling upon our lopsided little farmhouse on Main Street, the year might end in a similar way.

I celebrated my thirteenth year of sobriety, Daniel marked his sixth, and together we marked our fourth anniversary as a team. We further strengthened our connections to the local recovery community, even driving through a tornado outbreak to attend our friends’ wedding at a rehab facility. My brother and his wife breezed through Tennessee on their big road trip, and we got to share a brief but delightful reunion during a chilly downpour. Another soul sister and I finally got to hug in a dog park after a ten-year gap. Because my actual address lies in a notably charm-free locale (offering little more than a Dollar General, frequent meth arrests, yards full of junked-out cars, and a dozen churches), I generally ask visitors to meet instead in the nearby town of Dickson, which features a historic downtown of sufficient density and quirk. This has been my go-to solution for out-of-towners: give ‘em a nice dose of cute small-town Americana, in lieu of roadkill and hillbillies who burn their trash.

I sparked several new friendships of note. I chauffeured a high school student to and from campus every day, and got to hear about life from the perspective of a young person on the cusp of early adulthood. I went on a few woodland hikes with one of the most talented artists I’ve ever met in my life, an angelic painter possessing a dazzling facility with gouache. I found an unexpected kinship with a sporty dude-bro, whose innate joviality and warmth did much to rejuvenate my flagging spirits; together we chilled out on the floating dock of his family’s pond, listening to cattle mooing in nearby pastures and watching ducks flap off of sunlit waters. On one of our recent walks we discovered the beautifully preserved skull of a buck. Daniel and I joined an artists’ guild, where we got to befriend some truly amazing local creators, and add to our extended family some of the loveliest people imaginable: tattoo artists, jewelers, sculptors, illustrators, photographers, collagists, painters, artsy weirdos and rabble-rousers, a spelunker, a nature educator, a museum director. A few of us had the privilege of gathering sometimes at an “art farm”, a homey hang hidden way out in the boonies. There’s zero cell reception out there, and the road bringing us through the woods feels pretty dicey in places ... but there’s plenty of wonderful found-object sculptures everywhere, a natural spring that erupts from a hill cave, and a big house crammed to the rafters with masterpieces. Our host at these get-togethers is a creative powerhouse, a congenial and life-affirming soul who is perhaps the very model of the man I’d like to become someday. Several of us also attended a bizarre meeting about a potential “fashion show” at a car dealership, an experience that left the attendees in a state of utter bewilderment.

This was a busy year in terms of work projects. I designed a CD cover for a Massachusetts musician, a very cute logo for a new marketing company, and website icons for an international pagan organization. I made a mini-documentary for a Korean artist and music videos for two different Jamaican musicians. After being given the opportunity to offer constructive feedback on friend’s memoir, I was then hired to edit the manuscript. I continued writing personal injury narratives for my lawyer client, and did hundreds of painstaking photo edits for a solar energy corporation.

I finished six painting commissions: “NORTHWEST”, “MAYA”, “FERRELL FAMILY PORTRAIT”, “LISA”, “GENTLEMEN”, and “CLOUDSCAPE”. In addition, I painted “HARD CANDY”, “CEREMONY”, “GOOD BOY”, “TINY KINGDOMS I-III”, and “UNCLEAN”. The last of these proved to be the quickest sale I ever made, with the canvas finding its home less than fifteen minutes after the big online reveal. I also made a few dozen small gouache pieces for an art vending machine.

I firebombed a bunch of my online readership with my most incendiary essay, “SMEAR THE QUEER”, and followed this with an unapologetic blast against the new America, “HORSESHIT AND GLITTER”. I also posted a smaller but no less heartfelt work, “LOST PARCELS”, and started in on a few other pieces. My collaborative partner and I resumed work on our screenplay “THE LAST BONANZA”, and started strategizing our submissions to festivals and competitions. By far, my most significant achievement of the year was the completion of my fourth novel, “THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW”. I prepared the manuscript for publication and launched my promotional campaign; to that end, I made a book trailer, edited two featurettes, made a few dozen teaser videos. Part of this marketing blitz involved exploring AI video generation for the first time, learning the surprisingly tricky business of writing effective prompts and understanding how different models will interpret them.

There were many professional disappointments. I applied for a residency at Long Meadow, but didn’t get in. I made it to the third round of interviews for a killer copyediting position, but was passed over for somebody who had been to more dog shows. A few potential clients ghosted me, several commissions fell through, and I couldn’t seem to regain traction in any of the sectors I had performed well in before.

I lost a number of friends and family members this year. Three were figures from the Memphis College of Art, my undergrad alma mater: Alonzo, the former dean; Veda, a dazzingly sophisticated lady who taught for decades and served on the school’s board; and Bob, a painter with an impish sense of humor who gave many of us a strong foundation in composition. Ernie, an extraordinarily talented and charming singer/songwriter, was taken from the world by a massive heart attack. Our sobriety community mourned the passing of two friends, Tim and Riccardo, while my extended family grieved the death of my aunt Kathy, who was a vivid presence in my early childhood. The strangest story of all was that of my long-estranged cousin, Danny Boy, who met his end jumping into a lonely stretch of industrial road on the outskirts of Houston.

Our deepest bereavement as a household happened in early June. We finally had to say goodbye to our Edison, the deaf pit bull who had pretty much held my heart between his paws for the last three years. Edison and I had a very deep, very rich, and utterly irreplaceable bond. We slept curled up together every night, and I often whispered secrets into his unresponsive ears that nobody else will ever hear. The last half year of his life was challenging for all of us ... he had become quite infirm and incontinent, and as his dementia worsened he needed constant supervision to avoid injury. But our devotion to him demanded nothing less than total surrender. Some of the most meaningful moments of our time together occurred in the quietest hours, when he felt well enough to snuggle up against me and rest his muzzle on my lap. He passed very peacefully on his soft dog bed, nestled safely between his two favorite humans, and the last sensations he had on earth were of praise and reassurance.

We had some close calls with disaster. Sirens were a frequent soundtrack in our lives this year. In early spring, a twister touched down in McEwen, less than four miles from our home. One of our neighbors blew up his hand with a firework, and an explosives factory was instantaneously vaporized seventeen miles to our south. I saw utility poles on our block get taken out on two separate occasions by speeding vehicles.

Living in the country does have its perks, in terms of wildlife encounters. I saw a broad-winged hawk, a falcon, an owl, two bald eagles, a fox, plenty of deer and armadillos, several skunks, committees of vultures. I crooned some Cole Porter to a herd of cows. On one of our nightly walks, Daniel and I discovered a noisy colony of bats roosting in a tree. Courtesy of some good pals, I got a little farm time in: I held a baby chick, petted some goats, and was viciously attacked by an asshole rooster named Cagney. Our dog Bear accidentally bit me during a traumatic vet visit, and now I carry a new scar on my thumb.

I honored my commitment to read more, and took in books by Graham Greene, Joan Didion, Jack London, Terry Brooks, Edith Wharton, Stephen King, Blair Ryker, and Cortnie Delaney. I read a spectacular history of spiritualism and its relationship to suffragettes, and B.D. Hyman’s trashy exposé about her mother Bette Davis.

During an extremely expensive mechanic visit, I found out that my second car, Scout, has an irreplaceable part, and thus will eventually crap out on me for good. Thus, my travel this year has pretty much been confined to my immediate environs, keeping to within a reasonable towing distance. I did make a point of visiting the site of Patsy Cline’s plane crash, a few towns over in Camden, and attended a Beltane festival on a former plantation, now owned by a wealthy gay couple. I waxed nostalgically about Columbia’s picturesque town square before realizing that it had been the site of a famous lynching.

Given the small size of our “town” (population 1700), our household in the rural South can seem somewhat removed from the hurly-burly of global politics ... but that is only an illusion borne upon a cresting wave of denial and privilege. Terrifying realities are piling upon our doorstep, and they cannot be ignored. Though we have many wonderful friends living close by, and we enjoy the cordiality of our local cops, postal employees, bank tellers, business owners, and grocers, it is painfully obvious that Daniel and I are really outliers here. For most of 2025 we clung to each other and watched in open-mouthed horror as our nation plunged into a chaos of mismanagement, suppression, erasure, fear, blame, suspicion, bigotry, mendacity, and brazen grift ... and after a certain point, we simply became overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all. The saddest and most demoralizing thing was that none of it came as a surprise. Eventually I turned my attention inwards, and focused more on what good works I could create with my remaining time on the planet. Rather than engaging in pointless online “debates” with transphobes, homophobes, racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, antisemites, white supremacists, nationalists, incels, neo-Nazis, fascists, narcs, ICE apologists, bootlickers, and all the other benighted turdgurglers that make up a large part of the MAGA cult, I decided that I’d rather devote my energy to looking after the people I actually care about.

It often seems like this is a pretty uneventful chapter of our life here on Main Street, but that’s only on the surface of things. Daniel keeps busy in his recording studio in the rear half of the house, while my painting studio anchors the front half. With Edison gone, I’ve finally been able to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time for my work, and so my productivity (always the yardstick of my fulfillment) has shot way up. The three remaining dogs keep me company throughout the day, passing out on the floor or taking up two-thirds of the studio sofa. Their paws twitch as they dream, and their godawful farts stink up my workspace, and the quotidian requirements of their care provide a loose lattice of routine for our days.

The house buzzes with creative energy and laughter, and it’s full of music. Daniel and I compose messages to one another on the fridge with alphabet magnets, including snarky quotes from “All About Eve” or “Mommie Dearest” or “Valley of the Dolls”. Our private jokes would sound nonsensical to others (“I’M SORRY THAT YOU FAILED LIMERICK SCHOOL ON WIMPY ISLAND” or “I DON’T WANT TO BURDEN YOU WITH MY LUPUS”) but for the two of us they represent the load-bearing amusements of our couplehood, and they help prevent us from hurling dishes.

Every summer, our front porch gets overtaken by Virginia creeper, an aggressive vine that can envelope an entire house in a single season. We should be hacking away at the stuff, like responsible home owners ... but we both love the green curtains that cascade from the soffits and crevices. The way in which the tendrils engulf our rocking chairs and weird sculptures gives the place an impression of untrammeled, riotous fecundity. On some evenings, when the sunset turns the towering cumulonimbi into scoops of sherbet, and the town’s white water tower stands like a guardian atop its hill, and the crickets and chickadees offer up their best songs, and there’s a blessed lull in the parade of flatbeds and Fords, a soft romantic spell seems to fall over the scene ... and for a brief glimmering moment, it’s all okay. Everything’s okay. The world may be falling apart around us, but our house is still standing, if perhaps a little crookedly. We’re making do with what we have, still forging art within the crucibles of middle age, and for the most part we’re holding up all right. We’re leaning into our roles as artists, translators, and witnesses of a strange era, and striving to maintain an attitude of gratitude. We’re both sending you lots of love from Main Street.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Horseshit and Glitter

I need to talk about unreal things that have real effects.

You might not guess it to look at me, but I'm a huge fan of the Disney theme park experience. Not so much because I give a damn about Mickey Mouse or Snow White or any of the other characters traipsing around the topiary ... but rather because I admire the astonishingly detailed scenic design, and because I'm fascinated by simulated environments. One of the things that impresses me the most about the park is how its engineers (the "Imagineers", as they're called) have employed various architectural and theatrical tricks to guide each guest's gaze from point to point, artfully hiding certain things from view while placing emphasis where it's needed most. You're never trusted with reality in Disneyland; you're always presented with a tableau. After all ... artifice is the American way.

They call the various areas of the park "lands" — Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland — and each is as distinct from its neighbors as a panel in a patchwork quilt. False fronts, tromp-l'oeil painting, careful landscaping, and precise plantings work in concert to create a composite sensory experience, and they collectively evoke faraway — yet strangely familiar — places. You can't quite place where you've seen Adventureland before, but that's because it's less a reproduction of any actual country than a hokey collage of colonial references and cultural reductivism. The stenciled cargo boxes and rope netting evoke British-occupied Africa during World War II, while the thatched roofs conjure Polynesia. The "jungle" fonts on the signage seem vaguely African, I guess, though the bamboo cages come from Asia and the tiki totems are straight out of a '60s Sausalito swinger's pad. But it doesn't matter, really ... why shouldn't the tigers of West Bengal share a manmade waterway with the hippos of Uganda and the boas of Brazil? Adventureland is a cartoon of the exotic. The pastiche is the point.

For all of Disney's "foreign" splendors, though, the section that intrigues me the most is the first place you encounter when you enter the park ... the thoroughfare known as "Main Street USA". It hearkens back to an America that never really existed, except in our collective imagination. There are many clever deceptions at work here: forced perspective and dramatic scale changes between stories make its buildings seem taller, the vanishing point implied by the convergence of receding façades disappears behind the spectacle of the central castle. But more pointedly, everything is keyed to a long-gone era, 1910 or thereabouts. As you walk below Queen Anne mansards packed with dormers and gingerbread detailing, you see peppermint striped awnings, and employees wearing straw boaters and bow ties, and shops with grand titles like "emporium" and "confectionery", all rendered in a yummy palette of candy colors. You could gag on the old-timey ice-cream parlor tweeness of it all, were it not for the disturbing realization that this vision of America is just a symbolic exposition, a sham stage built upon a sham mythos, and as such it is a perfect metaphor for how the real America envisions itself.

To put it another way: we Americans have all been "art directed" within an inch of our lives. We've become so accustomed to passively viewing re-creations of our history that real life, when we are suddenly faced with it, often comes as a confusing and badly lit disappointment.

I live on a Main Street, but it's not the Main Street of musicals and dalmatians riding firetrucks and "aww-shucks" homilies. No, I live in a bleak southern hamlet devoid of charm or curb appeal or much in the way of cultural possibility. My town has no real downtown to speak of, other than a handful of gas stations and other businesses lining the highway. The yards are littered with junk and busted trampolines, the porches (including our own) display not flowerboxes or rocking chairs but broken appliances and rusty grills. "Going shopping" means a trip to Dollar General or Walmart, not visiting some bougie dry goods store with wooden floors and jars of sarsaparilla candy. There's little here to look at but dilapidated mobile homes and bad teeth, though the arrival of jonquils and phlox every March provides a burst of seasonal joy. It'd be easier to overlook the depressed and depressing scenery if we had a cute town center that suggested the "Main Street" experience that movies or television shows had led us to expect.

But there's the problem: Main Street USA is only a concept. In reality, many small towns are abattoirs disguised as cakeshops. Every scenic dreamland has its occulted reserve of horror.

My partner and I recently joined a friend on a weekend jaunt to Columbia, Tennessee. On the surface, it all seemed to correspond with my long-held mental picture of small-town Americana ... one of those old-fashioned "town squares" you hardly ever see anymore, with appealingly aged textures and lots of ornate hand-lettered signage. At first, I was enchanted by its historic downtown ... but as I continued to explore the square, taking in the little boutiques and cool record shop, I kept having this strange and increasingly unpleasant sense of déjà vu. Dominating the scene was the Maury County Courthouse, an imposing (if somewhat stodgy) Classical Revival box, and every time I looked it, this bad feeling kept creeping up on me. Why did I know that building? Was it famous for something?

And then I remembered: it had been the site of a lynching.

On November 13th, 1927, an eighteen-year-old black man named Henry Choate was pulled out of the courthouse by a mob, bludgeoned by a hammer, dragged behind a truck, and hanged in the square. He had been arrested on suspicion of assaulting a white girl, though she could not identify him, and he never even made it to trial. Afterwards, a grand jury declined to file any chargers against his assailants. Choate's murder was one of five recorded lynchings in the town. The fact that his extrajudicial killing took place before a courthouse makes for a sickening mockery of justice ... but such subtleties are lost on the good ole boys who whoo-hoo at passerby and flap Confederate flags from their trucks. A conservative country musician recently made headlines by filming his music video at this location, while singing thinly veiled lyrics about vigilante violence. The lynchers aren't even bothering to camouflage their threats anymore, emboldened as they are by a racist federal administration and the prevailing mood of suspicion. A place which had seemed so charming now sported its most hideous bloodstain in plain view.

Upon discovering this atrocity, I felt gutpunched. Further research revealed that Tennessee's history is littered with former "sundown towns", places where black lives stood in mortal jeopardy after dark. Given the overt xenophobia of American conservatives and their systematic dismantling of civil rights protections, it's possible that such places will regress soon to their more primitive states. The protective umbrella of "small town safety" apparently doesn't cover everybody ... especially if you're a person of color, an immigrant, Muslim, queer, trans. Decency and acceptance don't apply if you're too dark, too fey, too foreign, too educated, too complex, too "urban".

None of this should come as a shock, if you've been paying any attention. America was built on stolen land, on the backs of slaves, and its wealth endures only at the expense of poorer and more easily exploited nations. Its supposed era of "greatness" can't be conclusively identified ... but if the "Make America Great Again" crowd are to be believed, it's probably sometime before women demanded equal pay and access to reproductive healthcare, before people of color expected fair treatment in housing and employment, before same-sex couples were allowed to get married, before those pesky environmentalists demanded clean air and drinkable water, before child labor laws lifted kids out of coal mines, before laborers bled for the weekend, before OSHA held companies accountable for safety violations, before the godless commie libtards took hold, before war was declared on Christmas, before drag queens held story hour, before people could pick their own pronouns, before the robber barons got hamstrung by unions and anti-trust laws, before vaccines, before housewives could get credit cards in their own name, before there was such a thing as being "woke".

Politicians entreat us to remember “the good old days,” though none of us ever lived in them. Many of us already feel that we've been cheated somehow by living long after the époque of our interest. At various points in our lives we might have played dress-up using costumes from more colorful times — the pirate, the aristocrat, the flapper — without considering their attendant realities. Was the Jazz Age really that fizzy and fun, or just a hard slog of hunger threaded with overt racism, chaotic criminality, poisonous gin, and syphilis? Squalor in the Edwardian era seems almost quaint to modern eyes because it can easily be aestheticized; just give a pretty gal some fingerless gloves, a motheaten shawl, a little soot, and a cartful of wilted flowers and she'll turn into Eliza fucking Doolittle.

In my mind, the first truly modern American artist was the nineteenth century showman P.T. Barnum, who saw a through-line from mythology to the Feejee Mermaid to the dime museum to the circus, a continuum spanning hokum and entertainment. He knew that the future of art lay in advertisement, so he made sure that the advertisement itself became the spectacle. It was the anticipation of wonders that became the real attraction. Even he would say that the halcyon days of yesteryear were just pictures on a poster.

Truth be told, we probably owe our image of small-town life to Hollywood's studio craftsmen and designers. Consider "Meet Me In St. Louis", a masterpiece of manufactured nostalgia, a valentine to a time that never was. Its outdoor street set stood on the MGM backlot for decades after filming wrapped in 1944, and was repurposed for many films and television shows, including "Cheaper By The Dozen", "Till the Clouds Roll By", "In The Good Old Summertime", "North by Northwest", and "The Twilight Zone". Likewise, the set of Bedford Falls in 1946's "It's A Wonderful Life" was partially recycled from the 1931 shoot of "Cimarron". The dusty town of any movie western is made up of false fronts, with wooden braces and air-conditioned trailers just out of view.

We sometimes even base our expectations of entertainment itself on facsimiles of past glories. Musicals of the '30s and '40s often centered around Broadway, the Great White Way ... but they depicted a version of Broadway that could exist only onscreen, with impossibly large stage sets and special effects specific to the language of film, with choreography that couldn't be understood from anything other than a bird's eye view. Busby Berkeley's geometry of leggy chorines worked great for the swooping overhead camera, but it would have been a senseless jumble onstage. Hollywood cannibalized the theater, which was itself a heightened portrayal of a non-existent reality, and it tweaked the glitz to phantasmal levels.

And that's the thing ... a sizeable part of the American experience is like this, imitations built upon imitations. We have a gnawing anxiety that our lives are being reduced to pale copies, moment by moment. Every non-native secretly fears that they arrived on the scene a moment too late. The people who never saw the other side of Studio 54's velvet ropes wonder what they missed out on; it's now just a fancy cabaret, and anybody with enough money can get a reservation. The tourists who came to New York after 2006 saw not the famed CBGB itself, but an overpriced boutique with laminae of punk posters preserved behind glass. You either saw Van Gogh's "Starry Night" in person, or you saw the fridge magnet.

Like so many things in our world, significance is something that can be commodified. It can be drained from ritual like sap from a maple, mined from history like ore, or shaved from family gatherings like slices off a turkey. Sentiment gets collected and reconstituted in the form of advertising campaigns or promotional materials. Entire industries have been built upon the associations drawn between emotions and products. Companies co-opt the language of community and connection, using phrases like "loyalty" when they mean "consistent purchasing", or "values" when they mean "boilerplate". I worked for many years in the realm of marketing ... and let me tell you, there is scant sincerity behind the "heart to heart" tone of consumer messaging.

I think of the holidays now in terms of their mercantile cues. Walk through the glass doors of any big chain store ... Walmart, Target, CVS, it doesn't matter ... and you'll immediately be surrounded by shoddy merchandise for whatever holiday is on its way down the chute. The origins of each festival or ritual have been so heavily diluted by the solvents of capitalism that the merchandising itself becomes the chief experience. Where we once had Samhain and Yule and Saturnalia, we now have Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Valentine's Day means pink and red, truckloads of shitty chocolates. If you're fancy, you might spring for a card or a gift bag that features a few Gilded Age illustrations ... but it will still be a collage of signifiers borrowed from a bygone époque. And what does "romance" even mean to the average American anymore? Heart-shaped boxes? Teddy bears mass-produced in China, with cutesy sayings embroidered on their bellies? There will be roses, of course, roses upon roses, heaps of 'em in the grocery coolers, chilled like corpses in a morgue. The roses you buy these days don't have any scent ... it's been bred out of them in favor of disease resistance and longevity. The business of sprinkling petals on the duvet has lost its reward: the intoxication of fragrance. All you're left with is cellophane and mortality and a few sad sprigs of baby's breath poking from the wastebasket.

Easter is pastels, plastic grass that will never biodegrade, cartoony chicks and rabbits as harbingers of spring renewal. Christmas is a flood of red and green, a great smothering wave of bathos sloshing between the isles, mawkish appeals to "home" and "family" and "tradition". Americans cough up over $154 billion dollars for Christmas every year, with most of the décor being manufactured overseas. Foil tinsel has gone out of vogue, which is perhaps a good thing for the environment ... but it still symbolizes how I feel about the holiday as a whole: fake icicles on a dead tree, useful for only a season and then consigned to the dump.

Every day, I fear that the final record of human achievement will not be written in the stars, but in the landfill.

Take a good whiff of our trash heaps and you'll sense the turbulent chaos below the orderly surface of things. The tranquility and stability we take for granted is but a gossamer veil floating above a much starker reality. All it would take to snap everything into sharp focus is a substantial power grid failure. Even a big enough solar flare would do the trick. We'd be suddenly all too aware of absences: the heretofore steady hum of the refrigerator, the hot water on demand, the lamps that lent form to our rooms, the invitation of the bright porch light, the internet. When the power finally goes out for good ... and mark my words, it probably will sooner than we think ... perhaps we'll go back to making cave paintings. We might once again use art for specific purposes, and we'll form new rituals to bind us back together after our fragmentation. Maybe it will be up to the dreamers to restore meaning to images.

Preppers love getting ready for Armageddon. Preparedness is their highest form of art. I think about this sort of thing all the time ... but since I have no money, it's mostly just a mental exercise, a somewhat masturbatic fantasy of agency. I imagine winning the lottery and/or somehow surviving the first wave of deaths, then building the ultimate survivalist bunker. Whenever I walk into a Lowe's or a Home Depot, I daydream about equipping my compound with every imaginable tool, being ready for every conceivable need. Every item would be in its rightful place, neatly pegged or shelved or sorted, clearly labeled, backed up with a library of instruction manuals and replacement parts. Middle age finds me forming a fetishistic obsession with visual order, a pornography comprising neither titties nor dongs but rather organizational schemata and storage totes. Lately I've been buying up quantities of bottled water and canned goods, dried rice, iodine tablets. My partner rolls his eyes and gently mocks my fretfulness, and we get a good laugh out of it, mostly because we both recognize the absurd inadequacy of such efforts. Then we snuggle on the studio sofa with our four farting dogs and watch episodes of "The Walking Dead".

Boy, do we love our zombie wipeouts. It's fun to watch survivors make shitty decisions, and we take a weird delight in judging them. But it begs the question: just how well would we ourselves do in such a scenario?

I think this is why people have been gobbling up so much post-apocalyptic media in recent years. When faced with the end of civilization, and what comes after, we think about what's truly important. We strip away all of the holiday frippery and get down to brass tacks. We like to imagine ourselves in a truly free world ... free of clutter, free of taxes and credit scores, free of corporate hierarchies and middle management and the thankless scramble of interoffice ambition. No more Netflix or Hobby Lobby "LIVE LAUGH LOVE" bric-a-brac. From here on out it's all about meeting the core needs: food, water, shelter, medicine, and weaponry.

We get a thrill out of imagining a world in which everything is reduced to the simplest binary: live or die. We wonder what role we would play in the new reality, how many of our loved ones or enemies would make it, what kind of communities we could form, what sort of skills we'd put to good use. The initial cataclysm will be a winnowing ... but then there will be a mass exodus, an emigration not of geography but of purpose. We will move from the world of artifice into the world of harsh exigencies, one in which the essential needs of survival will govern all choices, and there will be no room for Hallmark cards and schmaltz.

With a growing sense of dismay, I wonder what value I could possibly offer in the aftermath of societal collapse. My only training is in art, something that once existed at the core of the human experience but is seen now as perhaps frivolous and expendable, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has seemingly rendered many of us artists obsolete, as more and more people are prioritizing convenience over process, symbol over significance, merchandise over meaning, convenience over integrity, characters over character. AI is the inevitable result of capitalism: remove the human from the machinery, and the machinery will operate more efficiently. With the sudden proliferation of AI "solutions" we may even be putting the future of our species in jeopardy. Misinformation proliferates when large language models start consuming their own unverified outputs, leading to inaccurate, nonsensical, or even dangerous confabulations. The current term in automation parlance is "hallucination". A series of such hallucinations could result in very real catastrophes.

Once upon a time, the true value of art was in the communication of what it meant to be human ... exalting the gift of perception, the ability to apprehend beauty in its myriad forms, the distillation and translation of experience. As we surrender the instruments of cultural exchange to machines ... effectively making these instruments themselves the artmakers rather than merely tools ... we strip art of its humanity and prioritize the image over the message.

But that's what Americans have always tended to choose: images instead of messages. It doesn't matter anymore that Main Street USA is only a bunch of ersatz façades and that Christmas has come to mean big sales at a box-store. We've become so tuned to the appearance of things that we have confused appearances for the things themselves, and thus have embraced the most superficial and immediate gratifications of social media, such as AI deepfakes and memes. Americans like ideas that are digestible to the point of being pre-digested. When I hear the word "American" now, I think about slices of American cheese: bland, over-processed, cheaply made, artless.

The appeal of Main Street USA lies in the elusive concept of civic harmony. The civilizations that exchanged goods or services flourished. Humans have co-created things like the Renaissance and space travel and the Olympic Games. Why, then, do we still have war? The usual reasons, I suppose ... competition for diminishing resources, a scarcity of space ... and, of course, the ever-lengthening catalogue of insults, slights, thefts, encroachments, broken oaths, aggressions, tariffs, debts. Revenge, it seems, will never go out of style. The human thirst for conflict cannot be quenched without a complete overhaul of our social contract. Perhaps such niceties as neighborliness and charity will not be sustainable under a different set of environmental stressors. Kindness and cooperation evolved out of necessity, but they still require effort and concentration to maintain. Hate, on the other hand, is comparatively easy and always accessible. It either spills out of us with little resistance or gets spat out with great enthusiasm. We Americans love to fetishize our hate. We nurture it, we apply our imagination to it, we use every available artistic tool to refine it. Nothing gives us as much satisfaction as outrage or judgment.

Main Street is just as much about paranoia as it is about apple pie.

We've become far too gullible as a culture. We'll fall for anything if it's packaged attractively enough, even outright fascism. In fact, we have gotten so accustomed to packaging that we often mistake the container for content. "Facts" become meaningless in a world accustomed to falsehoods. Scientific inquiry is quickly being corroded by ignorance, denials, and fanciful claims. An insufficient educational system compounds the problem. Zealous religious instruction and isolationist homeschooling may encourage the generational transfer of misinformation or prejudices, glossing over or rewriting uncomfortable truths of our history, pressuring children to accept their parents' beliefs without question or challenge, presenting doctrine as "fact". The state of Texas recently passed legislation restricting the discussion of slavery in schoolroom, rewriting curricula to use toothless euphemisms like "involuntary relocation".

This whitewashing will get much worse in the years to come. Manifest destiny, the Trail of Tears, the Japanese-American internment camps, the mistreatment of Chinese railroad workers, chain gangs, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tulsa massacre of 1921, the burning of Rosewood, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, broken treaties, the unchecked greed of the gold rush ... all of the really ugly stuff will be reimagined and softened and made more palatable for impressionable young minds.

We shouldn't be surprised that the bellicose little king currently occupying the highest seat of power in our nation has a hunger for gold. He's redecorated the Oval Office to his liking, slapping gold-plating on every possible surface, including the TV remote and the framed portraits of his (white) predecessors. The gilt nameplate sitting prominently on the Resolute desk is more than just a brazen declaration of ownership ... it's an entire philosophy of gimcrackery, distilled into a one-man brand.

Nothing is more influential in America than the illusion of prosperity.

This country sometimes feels like a long-running gold rush, bolstered by artful styling and a penchant for mythmaking. And like all speculative bubbles it is likely to collapse upon itself without a global intervention. Nobody should be clutching their pearls over the recent displays of chicanery and grift, for the American Dream has always been a counterfeit prize dangled in front of the hopeful. It's taken an execrable mountebank hawking sneakers and spurious patriotism to yank back the final curtain on Main Street USA, and his self-proclaimed "success" serves to illustrate a sad maxim: you can cover a pile of horseshit with a pound of glitter, but you won't end up with treasure.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Smear The Queer

On May 6th, 1933, the Nazis burned the library and archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a research facility which had collected enormous volumes of data on gender, reproductive health, and sexuality. Its founder, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, was among the first scholars to recognize the essential humanity and dignity of LGBTQ people, and he was an early advocate for gender-affirming care. His detailed and broad-reaching analysis offered substantial insight into the spectrum of identity and expression. Just as Alfred Kinsey would later attest with his groundbreaking studies in the 1940s, Hirschfeld believed that the artificial binaries of gender and sexual orientation were unhelpful constructs, and that each of us actually occupied an unfixed position on an ever-evolving continuum. The clinical branch of the institute offered surgeries, hormone treatments, gynecological services, and nonjudgmental counseling, while his team presented educational lectures to the public on topics like contraception, anatomy, disease transmission, marriage, and the staggering diversity of human sexual experiences. Hirschfeld dedicated his entire career to deepening our understanding and dismantling bigotry ... but in the course of a single night, his life's work was dragged out into the street and reduced to ashes by barbarians. It's estimated that something between 12,000 and 20,000 books were destroyed, along with countless studies, interviews, artifacts, and artworks. We will never know the full scale of the disaster, though we are still seeing its echoes today ... for the same thing is happening in America right now, whether you realize it or not.

At the municipal, state, and federal levels, our community is once again being erased from view. Government web pages on LGBTQ topics are vanishing, data sets and archives are being wiped clean, essential services are going dark, passport applications with gender-neutral markers are being held in limbo, bathrooms are being policed by self-appointed vigilantes, anti-trans “snitch" hotlines are being opened in several states, vital healthcare systems are being shut down, necessary hormone treatments are being banned, HIV medicines are becoming inaccessible, support for trans youth is being criminalized, gay and lesbian authors are being removed from libraries, trans members of the military are on the verge of being discharged without legal recourse, and major social media platforms are rolling back hate-speech protections ... specifically to permit slurs against trans and gay people. School teachers are being threatened with unemployment or arrest for even acknowledging the existence of trans folk. There are bills being put forth in several states to make discussion of transgender topics with students a felony, with convicted teachers or counselors being put on the sexual offender registry. Most tellingly, our artwork, literature, records, research, and historical documents are being branded as "pornography" ... just as they were by the Nazis.

The expunging of LGBTQ history is a very real thing, and it's happening now at a horrifying rate. The National Parks Service was just forced by the new administration to remove all mention of trans people from the Stonewall National Monument website, and to reduce all instances of "LGBTQ" to "LGB". In order to fathom the depth of this outrage, it's important to understand that transwomen, butch dykes, and street queens were the first ones to fight back and lob the bricks of our liberation during the Stonewall riots in June of 1969. This latest move is an affront to the courageous rebels who led the public struggle for LGBTQ rights. They are the reason why we celebrate Pride when we do.

This administration has been exceptionally vocal about trans people, painting them as mentally ill perverts or predators, and making an inaccurate and unnecessary executive declaration that “there are only two genders”. Ridiculous and unfounded claims about "elementary school sex changes" and "recruiting" trans youth are being used to justify ugly and unconstitutional treatment of citizens who are already facing extraordinary societal pressures. Trans prisoners throughout our correctional system are now being pressured to chemically de-transition — a medically dangerous and humiliating process that ignores an inmate's emotional or psychological welfare — and they are being reassigned to prison units that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. This subjects them to extreme physical and verbal abuse, coercion, and the likelihood of "corrective" rape.

The pattern of suppression we're seeing now closely mirrors what happened so suddenly in the mid-1930s. Back then, the crackdown started with the purging of historical information, the scapegoating of a vulnerable population, the tilting of public opinion through slander and fearmongering, the removal of the press, and then an abrupt and under-reported shift into criminalization. It took only a year after the ransacking of Hirschfeld's institute for the mass arrests of gay people to begin. The first transport of gay prisoners into Dachau followed in 1935.

Right now, the searchlight of the American public seems to be primarily trained on undocumented immigrants, and the so-called "detention centers" that are being established to hold them ... but the indiscriminate sweeps are also terrorizing naturalized citizens, foreigners with valid work visas, and Native Americans. As usual, the burden of unjust scrutiny and harassment first falls on people of color, a longstanding reality that is being dismissed by the condescending use of the word "woke".

But it won't stop there. Mark my words, "friends": the queers are next.

My people are already on the docket, you see. The Supreme Court has indicated that it will hear arguments to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision that guaranteed the right for same-sex couples to marry. I remember the moment in June of 2015 when that case was decided. On that beautiful, celebratory evening, I joined thousands of jubilant people gathered outside of the Stonewall Inn in New York's West Village ... the very site where we first fought back forty-six years earlier. Together we all sang "Over The Rainbow", a nod to one of our cultural touchstones, whose death in '69 had dropped another spark onto the powder keg. I'll never forget the giddy elation of that night. We'd finally achieved a vital measure of equality. We had proof, in writing, that we had earned our rightful place as full citizens under the law. We knew that our love was being acknowledged and recognized for what it was. We had arrived.

You should know that we will likely lose that right sometime in the next four years, thanks to the increasingly conservative slant of the courts and an openly hostile Congress. But the damage is more far-reaching and insidious than something so high-profile as the rescinding of our civil rights. The little king's followers are being emboldened to harass us, assault us in public, fire us from our jobs, prevent us from getting housing or social services, and even murder us. Major corporations, in their haste to kiss the ring, are already rolling back their anti-discrimination protocols. Hate crimes will skyrocket under his watch, and he will gleefully egg on our assailants from his podium. Here's an apt illustration of how he has treated us thus far: during his 2016 campaign, he posed for a photo op with some of his supporters. After scribbling his name on our Pride flag with a Sharpie, he smirked for the cameras as he held it upside down. He then tried in his first term, unsuccessfully, to oust trans servicemembers from the military; he is coming back to this aim again with his mind bent on vengeance and a galvanized support base.

It's far worse this time around, and we're only a few weeks in. One of his first official acts since assuming the office was to rescind seven previous protective executive orders specifically meant to protect LGBTQ people. He then immediately issued new executive orders that defied Bostock v. Clayton County (a Title VII decision that protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity), denied the official use of trans pronouns, limited capitol bathroom use to correspond with "assigned sex at birth", prevented trans people from applying for passports under their new gender identity, halted federal funding for gender studies, and reversed "equal access rule" protections for LGBTQ people in housing. On the same day, he froze all funding to PEPFAR, the largest HIV treatment program in the world, leaving over 20 million people without access to lifesaving medicines. Since then, he's gone on to gut medical research, halt global aid, silence the organizations meant to ensure public safety, fire tens of thousands of government employees, and hand over the reins of our nation to soulless profiteers.

When I was a kid, one of the most popular playground games was called "Smear the Queer". On the surface, it seemed harmless enough: basically a variation on tag, not even as dangerous as dodgeball. One kid would get picked to carry a ball, and everybody else would chase after them until they surrendered. It may sound like innocent horseplay, and I suppose it was ... but the mere mention of this game used to fill me with the blackest dread. Whenever I overheard somebody suggesting it, I'd hurry away, looking desperately for any place to hide. My go-to getaway was a section of large concrete pipe that doubled as play equipment, and I'd cower in there, clutching my stomach in terror and trying to become invisible. Somehow, I knew that I'd inevitably be picked to be "it", because sissies always seemed to have fingers pointing at them in those days. Back then, I couldn't quite put a name to this feeling, so it remained just a swirling and inchoate terror, a sense that something was about to go terribly wrong ... wrong for me, or wrong for the world, or both. I know now why I was so frightened; for even at that age, I understood that I was secretly one of THEM, one of those dirty awful queers who everybody wanted to smudge out of existence.

It got progressively worse from there. I had the mixed fortune of coming out during the Reagan/Bush years, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and I watched with dismay as elected officials, televangelists, teachers, and news anchors described people like me as immoral monsters who summoned a plague through our grotesque desires and godless debauchery. People died by the millions while our government continued to demonize the homos. I was bullied all throughout junior high and high school, my house was toilet-papered and my locker vandalized, I was screamed at by skinheads and sneered at by jocks and regularly threatened with beatings. When I was seventeen, I was denied a summer job for being queer, and fired from another for the same reason.

There were perks to being an outsider, though. From this slight remove, I had a sideways view of society that revealed the interleaved strata of aspiration, greed, and horseshit that made up the American Dream. My real friends showed themselves for the heroes and allies they were. My lesbian soul sister and I skipped school and hung out in Seattle's gay ghetto, making our first tentative forays into a brave new world. It was an exciting, overwhelming, bewildering time. I watched with growing awe and admiration as organizations like Act Up and Queer Nation mobilized in the streets and clamored loudly for justice. Even doing drag became a revolutionary act.

I didn't really begin to feel safe until I fled to New York City at the age of 18 and was embraced by its enormous, active, vibrant, politically savvy community. But even then, even when I was surrounded by members of my tribe, I felt compelled to join an anti-violence watchguard group who patrolled the streets, because fagbashing was still a popular sport in 1992. Right before I arrived, the beloved Stonewall veteran and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson was murdered, her body dumped in the Hudson River like a piece of trash. A shockwave of fury roared through the city, and I saw firsthand how angry queers can get when riled.

For all the forward progress we've made in the last few decades, we're tumbling right back to the ugly place where we started. It's disheartening to know that half of America threw its support behind a gang of hateful bullies. There's some perverse pride the little king's followers seem to take in denigrating the defenseless, mocking the disabled, discrediting the educated. Somehow Mr. and Mrs. Joe Lunchbox have been duped into believing that ignorance, intimidation, and intolerance are American values.

Why does this administration see only enemies around it? Why is its language so focused on blame, confrontation, disparaging remarks, vengeance? Where is the empathy, the dignity, the integrity, the honesty? Why is bigotry the defining feature of America?

The government in George Orwell's prophetic novel "1984" used disorienting topsy-turvy phrases like "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". In a similar vein, the gate to Auschwitz read "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free"). Future generations will not know these things if books like "1984" are banned and the white Christian nationalists behind Project 2025 are allowed to rewrite school curricula.

To those of you who voted for this ... I have so many urgent messages for you. You need to know that my friends and family members are being actively dehumanized as a direct result of your choice. Me and my people are being hurt by the administration that you decided to put your support behind. You may not be aware that this happening, because the press is quickly being muzzled ... just as it was in the 1930s ... and the official mouthpieces of the little king are deliberately poisoning your minds with suspicion, fear, outright fallacies, outrageous claims, and empty promises. You are being steered towards hatred and paranoia, because those are always the easiest routes for a nation to take. The real power players are exploiting whatever prejudices and anxieties they can in order to distract you from the lawless coup that is well underway.

This culture war is just the tip of the iceberg.

We are witnessing the merciless dismantling of our nation at the hands of robber barons. While they decry the evils of "diversity" and scream at transwomen using public bathrooms, they are openly hamstringing federal services, robbing the Treasury, weakening our infrastructure, reversing course on environmental protections, silencing scientists and doctors, removing us from international cooperative efforts, making enemies of other nations, lowering our guard against malicious foreign interference, bankrupting farmers, imprisoning the innocent, and hobbling non-profit organizations. Worst of all, they are turning us against one another, so that they can build their evil works without interruption or resistance.

If any of you still don’t understand why your LGBTQ “friends” — and I use that term with every drop of scorn I can muster — are terrified, you need to change your news sources and start listening to what we're reporting instead of believing your administration’s mouthpieces. You are being lied to by unscrupulous media, you are being manipulated by grifting jackals, and we're all suffering together as a result.

Bear in mind that any reportage critical of this administration's actions is already being dismissed as "fake news". The popular media has been so badly compromised that Americans have lost the ability to discern fact from fiction, validated research from opinion, hard science from conjecture, journalism from propaganda. If you're getting your "news" from Fox, Breitbart, InfoWars, Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk's X platform, major television networks, or flagwaving "patriot" videos on YouTube, you are being fed a highly distorted and extremely dangerous diet of misinformation ... and you are not receiving reports about what is actually happening to us right now. Look instead to more neutral, verifiable, and international sources of news. Get first-person accounts from LGBTQ people on the ground, people who are reporting on the department closures, firings, funding freezes, discriminatory practices, escalating violence, smear campaigns, and intimidation that they themselves are watching happen. Avoid anything that includes inflammatory phrases like "liberal" and "woke" and "Dems" and "gender ideology", the use of which immediately signals that you are not looking at actual journalism but rather some form of editorialization. Choose objective media that adheres to rigorous ethical standards. Change your news intake for one month, and I guarantee that you will see a starkly different reality presented to you. You will see the things that your little king and his handlers do not want you to see. You will recognize the evil that has been wrought with the powers you entrusted to them.

Things are bad, and about to get much worse for LGBTQ people. But what wounds us most — even more deeply than the executive orders, the hateful defamation, the looming threat of violence — is the knowledge that too many of our "friends" voted for this.

If you still support this administration after knowing these things, then you willingly chose this route and there is little I can do to sway your opinion. Perhaps you didn't know that it would do real harm to people like me, or you didn't care, or you were just gullible enough to blindly follow a pack of villains, no matter what collateral damage occurred. Either way, it's a moral failing of the darkest sort. We trusted you to do right by us, and you didn't. The road your choice has set us upon begins with falsehoods and ends in flames.

Most German citizens did not know about the horrors of Buchenwald until they were forced to view the aftermath of the camp's liberation. We are telling you now that it is happening again, and if you turn away now you are just as complicit as they were then. Don't be surprised if I cannot look you in the eye anymore. I feel the same way that I did as a little kid ... except now my fear has been compounded with an admixture of rage and disgust. Your choice has put me right back on the playground again, hiding from the bullies, hearing the taunts and jeers of everyone who wants to smear the queer. I thought we were all past this.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Lost Parcels

On September 5th, 1996, FedEx Flight 1406 caught fire on its way to Boston. The pilot managed to land the plane safely at Stewart International Airport, and its crew evacuated with minimal injuries, but the cargo was completely destroyed. Insurance companies later pegged the ashes as having an estimated value of $300 million. I remember this accident well, as it happened right around the time I moved to Memphis, where the flight had originated. For some reason, this particular disaster both horrified and fascinated me. I kept focusing not on the details of the fire itself but rather on the aggregate tragedy of all those burnt packages, which had been entrusted to the carrier by hundreds of customers. I fretted obsessively about all that had been lost ... gifts, prototypes, medicines, toys, samples, books, business documents, letters, mementos, photographs, artworks, heirlooms, et cetera. Of course, many of these items had been insured, in one form or another. But what of the things which had been irreplaceable? Each material loss was accompanied by more amorphous deficits: temporal, emotional, cultural.

When I find myself frustrated by shipping delays or an unexpected lapse in communication, I'll sometimes think back to the era of wooden ships, and then I'll be grateful once more for the relative speed and certainty of modern logistics. Back in those days, long before telephones or internet or even transoceanic telegraph cables, delivering mail was an iffy business. A letter might take months to arrive, if it arrived at all. I can't even imagine the number of critical dispatches that were lost to storms, fires, reefs, piracy. How many hearts were broken by unanswered proposals, how many enterprises were hamstrung by missing reports?

The package that never arrives still changes the course of history. Victory may be thwarted by a tardy bulletin, a detained courier might prove just as deadly as a fusillade. Absences are just as consequential as arrivals.

As I look down the road towards my own mortality and that of my loved ones, I spend more and more time dwelling on the subject of loss. Strangely enough, it's not the end of any human life (including my own) that keeps me tossing and turning at night. The nine days I spent at the burning ghats of Varanasi, where I witnessed dozens of open-air cremations, gave me a certain serenity about death, and I accept its inevitability in the way that I accept supernovae and grey hair and cancelled sitcoms. No ... what bothers me is the failed transmission, the loss of important information. An undelivered letter or ruined document pains me much more deeply than the neutral and necessary fact of death itself.

I worry about the coming digital dark age. Our overreliance on the internet will soon show its terrible cost. Media that has been stored in online vaults and platforms will someday vanish. After all, none of it is permanent: formats become obsolete, hardware becomes irreplaceable or unrepairable, software is discontinued, codecs are deprecated, hard drives fail, networks fall victim to viruses or cyberterrorism. We trust the evidence of our lives to media conglomerates, whose data servers are not public utilities but rather corporate holdings. When a social platform flames out, as all eventually must, it takes with it the millions of social transactions and images that people contributed. Unless you possess a physical print of a photograph, its longevity cannot be assured. Even the "ownership" of an image is somewhat open to legal interpretation, depending on the fine print of any user agreements you may have signed.

It's astonishing to realize just how easily history can be lost to indifference, executive myopia, or deliberate eradication. Nearly three-fifths of Georges Méliès' cinematic oeuvre was melted down for its celluloid and silver content by the French Army in World War I. For decades, television networks would recycle tapes of outdated programs, figuring that they had no value beyond the air date. MTV News recently deleted its entire journalistic archive, tossing twenty years of reportage into the dustbin. The firebombing of Dresden took out Courbet's masterpiece “The Stone Breakers”, vandals defaced Cherokee petroglyphs in Georgia. The vault fire at Universal Studios incinerated the original masters and creative materials of countless musical artists. Both the ancient library of Alexandria and the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka were lost to acts of political arson. Nazis torched some 25,000 books and artworks of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf. Book burning occurs often enough that there's even a word for this barbarity: biblioclasm.

On September 2nd, 2018, a fire started in The National Museum of Brazil. The cause is uncertain, perhaps faulty electrical wiring ... or, as has been suggested by the Cultural Minister, an errant sky lantern landing on the roof. Regardless of its origin, though, the outcome was catastrophic: within a few hours of the initial spark some 20 million cultural artifacts were reduced to cinders. Over 90% of the collection was lost forever. The tragedy is compounded when we see what went up in smoke: rare recordings of extinct indigenous languages, unique relics, maps, papers, photos, negatives, fossils, a Pompeiian fresco that had survived the eruption of Vesuvius, artworks, vessels, the only preserved evidence of several vanished tribes. The fire claimed not only objects, but entire histories. It's as if those people had never existed; their records have been completely wiped out.

Cargo planes are crashing around us, figuratively speaking, every day. Libraries are always on fire. Civilizations smolder in the skulls of madmen, poets wither in nursing homes, geniuses die unheralded. So many essential missives never reach their destination.

Everywhere, losses will pile upon losses. There will be more wars, wildfires, famines, revolutions, genocides, climate-related crises, regimes that place a special emphasis on de-education and revisionism. We march closer every day towards the horizon of some terrible cataclysm, a holocaust not of the flesh but of the human intellect. I fear most the obliteration of art, history, literature. I fear the zealous erasure of ideas or data or even entire language systems. Religion has been weaponizing ignorance for millennia, and it shows no signs of backing down now. Scientific rigor will again fall to suspicion, reason will be crushed beneath dogma, just as it was during the Middle Ages. Who will fight to preserve knowledge in a world so determined to eradicate it?

Like everybody, I will have to make peace with the fleeting nature of all things and learn to let go of my attachments ... either by adopting some Buddhism-adjacent spiritual practice or finding a simpler form of surrender. But such equanimity does not come easily to me. As an artist, all of my deepest fears center around the loss of my art. I'm no longer scared of dying, but I'm definitely terrified of disappearing. I fear that the tatters of my "estate" will be considered worthless, that my outputs will gradually disappear and be left unseen, that my books will collect dust and my photographs will be deleted and my paintings will end up in landfills, that my life's work will have amounted to nothing of value. I will have spent my entire existence trying to communicate something urgent, to convey some cosmic or divine message that I did not fully understand myself, and despite my best efforts it may all have come to naught.

But I constantly have to remind myself: it's not about me or my name, it's about faithfully delivering what's been put in my hands. I need to forget about fame or riches or a glamorous lifestyle, forget about popularity, followers, reviews, accolades, the elusive metrics of success. I need to give up on the gold stars and just deliver the goddamned package.

Maybe it doesn't matter, anyway. Perhaps each loss is itself a sort of message. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of existence that we must learn to accept is its ephemerality. Our achievements and stories and plans are beautiful in the way of fireworks ... just glittering bursts in a darkened sky, there and gone, existing for only a moment, perceived and then quickly forgotten, appearing only as flashes in an unceasing barrage of stimuli, patterns opening and falling away, so brief and lovely to behold.

On a pretty spring day last year, I took a walk to one of our town's two cemeteries. I generally like to do this around sunset, as the slanting rays bestow a favorable glow upon the details of our little town. On this particular afternoon, memorable only for its lambency and quietude, the graves were painted with phlox and clover. Patches of pink and purple lay against the green, bright as Impressionist brushstrokes. It was the time for violets, time for tulips, jonquils trumpeting the arrival of spring ... all those frilly little heralds standing in their beds and shouting, exultant, blooming for only an instant before browning and drooping into the dirt. I sat on a sawed-off stump and looked towards the setting sun. Crane flies rose and fell like drunkards among the bluets. Shining strands of spider silk hung from spikes of deadnettle, like little telephone wires drooping from point to point.

From the edge of the cemetery rose thin clouds of smoke ... greyish-white, tinged with a dull yellow. Somebody had clear-cut the small plot of undeveloped greenbelt abutting the southwestern side of the boneyard and set fire to the timber. The pocket forest that had stood there wasn't very large, only about the size of two average plots, but it had effectively screened the prettiest part of the landscape from the nearby cluster of houses, and helped create a pleasing sense of pastoral isolation. Now all that remained was two giant piles of charred debris. Soon there would be a pair of hastily built duplexes, and small domestic narratives would unfold over what was once a woodland. Children would open Christmas presents on a rug. Couples would argue over dirty dishes. There would be dinners, fights, makeups, homework, hobbies, clandestine sex, experiments with drugs, discoveries, reunions, vigils.

Until now, the woods had sheltered a family of deer. I watched sadly as the doe and her two yearlings huddled in the greensward, regarding the smoking space that had been their home. The sprawling forest to the east is privately owned ... and judging from the frequent rifle shots I've heard it's probably prime hunting ground. The deer will come and go, leaving only bones to poke from the buckthorn. The duplexes will surrender someday to ivy and gravity, and the gravestones will be eroded to nameless nubs ... but by then the human narratives that they represented will have been long gone anyway.

And that's what struck me most on that visit to the cemetery ... I wondered what histories had also been interred there. What words had been left unsaid, what songs stayed unrecorded, what codes had been forgotten, what news remained undelivered? Each of these people existed for such a short span of time, barely a blip on the geological clock, blazing into view like a meteor only to vanish again. And now they were occulted underground, these message-bearers ... attended only by worms and beetles, rendered still and silent by the impartial mechanisms of death, their good works and memories crumbling into dust, their memorabilia yielding to time and neglect and the merciless elements ... each corpse a captured envoy, a foiled Hermes, each voyager holding something precious in their mouth: a clue, a key, a parcel.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

2024: A Blue Dispatch From Main Street

Social media encourages us to curate our lives, to offer up for public exhibition only the most favorable and relatable versions of ourselves. We make increasingly unsubtle adjustments to our photographs, buff our tarnished veneers, blur our frown lines to seem younger or healthier or more at ease. Rarely do we publicly report on the nagging doubts of the wee hours, the quagmires of professional or spiritual stagnation, the thousand tiny humiliations of the day that accumulate until the thankful oblivion of bedtime. When we stop and look back upon the landscape of our years, we want it all to make sense ... for our trials to acquire meaning, for our suffering to impart some moral lesson, for our labors to leave behind a treasury of dazzling talismans. Middle age speeds the passage of hours and lends to each anxiety a whistling intensity that does not lessen with time. That rising whine in one's ear is not the drone of an insistent mosquito but rather the sound of time accelerating, the ineluctable quickening towards death which we interpret as an imperative: hurry, hurry, hurry, the clock is ticking, make something of yourself, make good before it's too late. We fear that when we reach our final shore it will resemble a deadfall of squandered opportunities, regrets piled upon the berm of consciousness like so much driftwood.

To put it another way: it's late December, and I'm confessing to you that I haven't been doing so good.

I have nothing to lose here by being honest ... though I'll concede that anybody else's crisis can make for a tiresome slog if it lacks gravitas or punchy verbs, and there is little on this Earth as eyerollingly indulgent as the malaise of an aging artist. But please bear with me for a little while longer, and walk alongside me through this valley, and perhaps by the end of this letter we shall both feel a bit better about things.

I rarely post to social media these days, so the intermittent reports on my circumstances have been somewhat misleading. Judging only from my online activity, one might think that I'd finally found happiness and fulfillment in some bucolic country hamlet ... thriving far from the madding crowd, keeping musical company with woodland animals, skipping with a wicker basket towards the farmer's market, dreaming of gingham and blueberry pie. Viewers have been seeing only the sunniest snapshots of my life here: napping dogs, warm smiles shared over brunch, my irresistibly handsome boyfriend, a picturesque porch overtaken by Virginia Creeper. As a result, well-meaning commentators will blithely chirp, "So happy to see you living your best life!"

I'm sorry to report that the true picture has been much starker. All smiling photographic evidence to the contrary, 2024 was one of the bleakest and most frustrating years of my career. I've rarely been so unhappy, rudderless, or demoralized, and at many points I've been perilously close to giving up altogether. It seems I have already accepted some kind of defeat, though I cannot with any real specificity identify what battle it is that I've lost, or what I stand to regain by plunging once more into the fray.

There's been a reason for my relative invisibility of late. In the interest of sparing my loved ones any worry I've just started shelving rather than sharing my most alarming thoughts, writing then deleting vaguely ominous posts, avoiding the phone. I simply stay quiet during the quiet nights. Rather than reaching out to sympathetic girlfriends at 4:am, I'll just cry while standing at the fridge in my underwear and spoon cake frosting straight from the can. As Daniel and I often like to say, "Frosting thinks I'm pretty."

Let me back up and start again.

I rang in the New Year scooping dog poop. This is not in itself remarkable ... every single night, without fail, my partner Daniel and I walk our four handicapped dogs through the quiet streets of McEwen, Tennessee, a hilly country hamlet without stoplights or quaint storefronts or much in the way of charm. There are two kinds of rural Southern poverty ... the photogenic kind, with tilting barns and rocking chairs and an antiquey patina on its surfaces, and then the dismal kind, with dimly-lit Dollar Generals and tweakers who steal catalytic converters. We live amongst the latter. Anyway, we'd just spent the earlier part of the evening celebrating with some friends, but we went home long before the official countdown, something which would have seemed impossible to the fun-loving partiers we once were. Bailing on a New Year's Eve party was the kind of thing that Boring Old Farts did, not Cool Punk Kids like us. But, as it happened, the stroke of midnight found Edison, our deaf and elderly pit bull, copping a squat on the neighbor's yard, and thus the first meaningful action I performed this year was to clean up a steaming pile of shit with a plastic bag from Walmart.

In the dreariest stretch of February, I turned fifty. I can't remember doing anything of consequence on the day itself ... but right around that time I began to develop this intense melancholy, the realization that I was no longer living with the adventurous and productive pluck by which I had heretofore defined myself.  Perhaps my best days were behind me, and all I had to show for my life was a landfill's worth of ignored artworks and unsold books. I had somehow maneuvered myself into an inescapable oubliette.

Nonetheless, I kept working. I finally finished my fourth novel, “THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW”, a project that took over 34 years to complete. With great pride and enthusiasm, I dove headfirst into the challenge of trying to find professional representation, and I queried some 200 literary agents ... but despite a few promising nibbles, and a top-to-bottom six-week rewrite, I just couldn't get my manuscript past the gatekeepers of the industry. I sank back into the most intense despair, and nearly quit writing altogether. This defeat stung deeply, as the novel includes some of my most vivid and imaginative passages to date. For an artist, there is no pain quite like that of being unseen.

I licked my wounds and began again. I started previsualization on my fifth, sixth, and seventh novels (“THE ROAD TO VINEGAR HOUSE”, “THE GIRL WITH THE SHUTTERED LAMP”, and “TRAFARR”, respectively), and collated the first few essays of my fourth memoir, “HORSESHIT AND GLITTER”. Perhaps none of these efforts will gain any traction in an indifferent and impenetrable industry, but I will work hard to finish them anyway, on faith of their essential merit.

Overall, it was a year of too many rejections. I didn’t get into any of the residencies I applied to ... Yaddo, Bemis, Headlands. I was waitlisted for the Crosstown program in Memphis ... but that still effectively amounts to a "no", as I probably won't be able to fundraise on short notice or free up three whole months of 2025 for a "maybe".

As always, the studio has been my salvation. 2024 was exceptionally fruitful in terms of painting commissions, and my easel has never been empty.  I sold out a limited edition run of prints in half a day. In a burst of activity, I executed "PARKER MEMORIAL", "IGGY I & II", "PHANTOM, "BEAR", "CHEEZ-IT', "EDISON", "AURORA", "PEACHES", "GIFT OF THE CROWS", "G IS FOR GAVIN", and began work on "NORTHWEST VIEW". I finished "INVITATION", "JEWELBOX", and "CRIMSON AND CLOVER OVER AND OVER" and started on two new canvases, "SNOOKIE OOKEMS" and "HARD CANDY". The latter is proving to be one of the most technically difficult oil paintings of my career, but it's off to a terrific start, and its luminous color is already signaling a major shift in my glazing technique.

I made a point of dedicating more time to reading, an activity which had taken a hard hit in busier years. I took in John Updike's "THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK", John Irving's "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP", Joan Didion's "SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM", Cormac McCarthy's "BLOOD MERIDIAN", Susanna Clarke's "JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL", Joseph Campbell's "HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES", Andrea Stewart's "THE BONE SHARD DAUGHTER", Walter Miller's "A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ", and I re-read Henry Miller's "TROPIC OF CANCER", which blew my mind back in high school. I'm still trying to trudge my way through my dusty fourth volume of Proust, though I've admittedly lost some steam after three years.

Volunteering at a friend's farm, I planted two rows of heirloom tomatoes and helped set up a beehive. While there, I watched a pair of chickens fucking, a sight which looks as frantic and unromantic as one might imagine. I saw a partial solar eclipse while returning spoiled cheese.

I went to a high school musical production of “GREASE”, which brought back fond memories of my theater department friends, many of whom are still with me today. I tried studying Russian again for about five minutes, but had to throw in the towel when I realized that I wouldn't get anywhere without a structured curriculum, grammatical diagrams, cultural insight, uninterrupted study time, or real-life conversational partners. On a warm winter night, I snuck over to a bro's house to share in a clandestine bit of nookie; this seemed, however, to take us into some morally grey territory, leaving me unsatisfied and my would-be paramour wrestling with a guilty conscience.

I tried to get outdoors occasionally, and made use of a great local resource: Montgomery Bell State Park, a sprawling WPA-era gem comprising 3,850 acres of hiking trails, meadows, and rustic mid-century facilities. I've enjoyed several day hikes there, including one memorable afternoon when a friend and I tripped together on mail-order mushroom gummies. Deep inside the park's woodland lies the half-buried Laurel Furnace Cemetery, almost invisible now but for a small wooden sign and a few nameless markers leaning this way and that along a slope. Once, while waiting on a hiking buddy near the park's visitor's center, I got a friendly wave and a “Yeah, man!” from the indestructible Steve-O of "JACKASS" fame, marking my only celebrity encounter of 2024.

I rode as a passenger in a truck that hit a deer, and felt it die in my hands as I dragged it off the road. My fifty-year streak of avoiding poison ivy came to an end during an ill-advised hike at dusk, and I spent two miserable weeks scratching at blisters and wondering what I ever did to make nature hate me so much.

I resumed my therapeutic use of psilocybin, microdosing to alleviate the worst symptoms of my mental illness and to gain some perspective on the big picture. I'm hoping to get on a regular psychedelic regimen next year, one which might provide an ameliorating (if temporary) latticework to support my collapsing psyche.

While out walking the dogs one night, I witnessed the most astonishing meteor. Its white-hot line of fire crossed directly overhead, blazing in the indigo night with an undeniable message ... that vast cosmic forces beyond all reckoning are at work here, that the fragile planet we occupy is subject to sudden and cataclysmic change — whether it be by asteroid bombardment, celestial storm, or some such accident of galactic mayhem — and that none of our schemes, hopes, or expectations matter one goddamned bit in the grand scheme of things.

As will be true in any year, there were many losses.

My favorite pub in Boston, which was something of an unofficial campus annex during grad school, was gutted at the hands of a crazed arsonist. Here in McEwen, a neighbor's house caught fire under suspicious circumstances, and for the past few weeks its charred roof has been slowly collapsing in on itself. The ruin groans creepily at night, like something left wounded on the side of the road.

Three of my friends died in 2024, and I watched from afar as other loved ones mourned their own bereavements. April was a funny and sweetnatured coworker of mine from my short stint in aerospace manufacturing. John was a brilliant musician, a sparkling conversationalist, and a generous mentor to thousands of artists worldwide. Dudley was a pillar of the Dickson sobriety community, a man whose bright-eyed geniality could light up a room. A quote of his is repeated often among our circle: "I was really worried about something last year, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was."

Scams proliferated. I bailed out of the flaming wreck of Twitter, joined BlueSky, and was almost immediately catfished by an account supposedly belonging to an award-winning author. A lot of hot Japanese women on Instagram seemed very eager to date me, and my voicemail was suddenly swarmed by "book industry insiders" with Filipino accents and restricted call-center numbers who wanted to promote the books I self-published over two years ago. In a single day, dozens of malevolent actors with IP addresses originating in China, Russia, Mexico, and Poland tried to hack into my email.

My car, Scout, is beginning to rattle apart, and he needs more work than I can possibly afford. He's still getting me around, but I'm scared of taking him much further away than Dickson, twenty miles to our east, or Waverly, ten miles to our west, for fear of him giving out beyond the towing radius offered by my AAA membership.

Professionally and financially, this was my worst year on record, marking an even more precipitous decline than what I went through the prior year. I've never earned so little in my entire working life, and it's frankly embarrassing to look at the figures. The slump of 2024 was fundamentally tied to two major losses of 2023. First, my longest-term client relationship, with the Bank of America, came to a mysterious and deeply disappointing end. There was no explanation, no formal dismissal, no finality or closure, not even a termination email ... just a bewildering and sustained silence from the producer who I had faithfully served for fifteen years. Even after a few politely worded nudges, I never got any answers from her. Later that year, I lost another client, this time a friend who had brought me into the energy sector under the wing of his agency. As both breakups happened in 2023, it seems that this should all be considered stale news, with no bearing on the present ... but truth be told, the foundering of these two partnerships sapped what little professional confidence I had, so much so that I felt pretty much unhirable throughout all of 2024. I had somehow steered my ship into the horse latitudes, and its sails hung slack for lack of wind. This may seem to some like an extreme emotional overreaction, and on the surface my underemployment might appear to be nothing more than the most egregious kind of sloth ... but I assure you, this was most decidedly NOT the case.

Depression is an insidious thief, you see, and it will quietly rob you of the will to reach for anything. You can't just haul yourself up by the bootstraps if you've lost all sense of self-worth. You won't apply for a job if you believe deep down that you really don't deserve it.

Despite these setbacks, I did land a new client based in Brazil, and at their request I did some ghostwriting about the use of AI in business automation and workflow optimization. This presented an opportunity to learn a great deal about a growth area I'd known very little about, but it also illuminated some sobering realities about the changing corporate landscape. Unfortunately, this assignment turned out to be yet another brief tango ... the entire marketing department (including my awesome boss) got laid off with no warning two months after I came on board, and I got thrown out with the bathwater. It wasn't such a big deal ... I sensed that my role would soon be made redundant by AI anyway, as more and more boardrooms are prioritizing "content creation" over "writing" in the traditional sense, and the work itself was grossly regurgitative.

I got tasked with writing a few more legal essays for the plaintiffs of a personal injury lawyer. At present, this work occurs only infrequently ... but the experience of crafting each of these essays is highly rewarding, as it allows me to use my skills to help people in their time of need, and I'm hoping to turn this side-hustle into a real business sometime next year.

I moved furniture for a friend's home staging company, got hired to perform a major edit on young adult fantasy novel, and animated a Christmas-themed music video for a Massachusetts-based musician. One of the most unexpectedly taxing gigs came during a rainy weekend in Franklin, when I worked at a soggy taco stand for the Pilgrimage Festival, standing in ankle-deep mud and slinging overpriced nachos until my entire lumbar region throbbed. One entitled twenty-something princess refused to accept the "NO SPECIAL ORDERS" mandate from our line cooks, and she continued to snippily escalate the situation until I had to be restrained from leaping over the counter with a ladleful of piping hot pork hash.

The undisputed highlight of my year was a short trip back to Washington State, my homeland, to attend my brother's wedding and our father's 74th birthday. My brother and his bride put on a perfect wedding: simple, sincere, uncluttered by ostentation but featuring all the best components. They had recently purchased a vacation home on Hat Island, a small and insular community blessed by a commanding view of Possession Sound, and it was in this setting that our family experienced one of its finest moments.

While there, I didn't get to see nearly as many people as I wanted to, and I had to miss out on some visits farther afield, but the few reunions that did happen were truly restorative. I hiked past old haunts and childhood homes, watched salmon leap up the rapids of Granite Falls, and drank a cup of delicious clam nectar from Ivar's on the waterfront. I visited the famous mummies ("Sylvester" and "Sylvia") of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, two macabre but fascinating fixtures of my childhood. My father and stepmother took me up to the Big Four ice caves, an amazing (and dangerously fragile) natural feature of the Cascades. I took a deep dive into debauchery at my very favorite sex club, the sacred red lights of which did much to bolster my flagging self-esteem.

Back in Tennessee, the nearby town of Dickson held its second annual LGBTQ+ Pride festival, a surprisingly colorful and bustling affair that put an especially timely emphasis on trans visibility. Equally well-attended were the Mystic Maker's Market (a hotspot for witches, fortune-tellers, and the crystal pendant crowd) and Art In The Alley (a street fair for local artists and crafters). Seeing these things happen came as a heartening reminder that progress does eventually make its way to Smalltown USA ... even if it arrives in the form of rainbow swag, ren faire corsets, and palm-readers sporting shawls in the style of Stevie Nicks.

I attended two different campfires with two different sets of friends and ate rabbit stew in a house that my boyfriend had remodeled and sold long ago. We helped a trans neighbor file a police report after she had been harassed in a grocery store. I reconnected with a close pal whom I had insulted very badly; after a long and sad estrangement, she showed the courage and grace to extend an olive branch, and we gleefully resumed our conversation.

Along with half of America, I watched with horror as our nation once again showed its true face: gullible, mean-spirited, greedy, racist, undereducated, misogynistic, xenophobic, fearful, and foolish. While I have been very hesitant to "unfriend" people due to their differing political views, I've come to realize that I can no longer respect the opinion or judgment of those Americans who've demonstrated such a glaring lack of discernment with their vote. I've been having a hard time looking certain people in the eye. I even had to jettison a former patron after he posted a homophobic political meme that made me want to punch a hole in my studio wall.

Meanwhile, the picture in the bathroom mirror isn't so pretty. I no longer bother to suck in my gut or keep my clothes in good repair. I do manage to bathe, floss, and do my laundry ... but other than an occasional evening walk to the cemetery I don't get any real exercise, and as a result I look terrible. I've abandoned the local gym altogether, though it is open twenty-four hours a day and stands only two blocks from our house. I've come to feel that there is no joy to be found among its dumbbells and sweat-slicked pleather benches, and I discovered that even with adjustable speeds the treadmill still goes nowhere. My friends and family have noticed the resulting weight gain, and I cannot help but recognize in their eyes a strange alarm, something bordering on dismay or perhaps even disgust. People show surprisingly little tact when one has gained or lost a great deal of weight, though they may couch their judgments in terms like "concern" or "care".

It's strange how one can be fat and feel like they're starving to death at the same time.

To disguise the evidence of my physical deterioration, I've perfected the art of the flattering self-portrait ... a cheeky closed-mouth smile that delivers good dimples, a 3/4 view that is taken from slightly above the eyeline so as to hide my sinking jowls and double chin, a jaunty cap to cover my thinning hair, some judicious use of Photoshop to restore a little vibrance to my skin. Sometimes I affect a defiant insouciance about my lost beauty. "Fuck it," I sneer to the shampoo bottle, "I'm fifty years old and I've got nothing left to prove. Besides, I've gotten laid more often than any of you could possibly imagine. Who cares if I stopped being hot?"

I am now a quarter million dollars in debt, with no clear path to solvency. Because of the federal taxes that I owe, and the complicated tangle of my finances, I cannot receive any assistive credit from the Healthcare Marketplace. Thus, I will have no health insurance whatsoever for 2025. This lack of a safety net came into sharp focus one late night, when I suffered a devastatingly painful asthma attack and couldn't go to the emergency room.

I celebrated my twelfth year of sobriety without much fanfare. I am deeply grateful to be free from my dependencies on alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational drugs, but lately I've distanced myself from the recovery scene. For the most part, I've stopped going to AA meetings. AA has never been a real necessity for me, as maintaining my sobriety has become a fairly effortless thing, so I went mostly to support my partner, and to spend quality time with some of our favorite mutual friends. I realized, though, that these meetings were providing my ONLY source of real-world social interaction, and that I was pretty much going just to alleviate my loneliness and boredom. These don't seem like valid reasons to hang around the periphery of a twelve-step community, no matter how much I love the attendees.

So without the minimal interaction provided by those meetings, I've become completely isolated, and now rarely have much reason to leave the house. For the most part, I no longer go out to do things, other than making an occasional shopping run to Walmart, drying my laundry at the laundromat (our home's dryer crapped out), or maybe taking Daniel to a lunch date at the local greasy spoon. This, above all else, is why I've felt like I've been slowly dying since I moved here. The stormchasing derring-do of earlier years has been replaced by a life of startlingly small proportions and almost no variation from day to day. I wake up at noon, feed the dogs their breakfast, shower, make Daniel lunch, shepherd an increasingly incontinent pit bull outside every twenty minutes, try to do something productive with the non-contiguous scraps of the day, feed the dogs their dinner, struggle to move the needle forward on various studio projects, walk the dogs around midnight, eat supper and watch TV with Daniel at 1:am, then go to bed at 3:am. Rinse and repeat.

To be fair, though, things aren't all terrible on Main Street. Our home, which was built sometime before 1899, has a bird nest that sits atop a drainspout below the eaves, and this seems to function as something of an avian flophouse; we've seen both robins and house sparrows setting up shop on the same spot for the past three years. On foggy spring mornings I'd hover by the fake French door with its broken plastic mullions and sip coffee as the hatchlings strained towards their mother. Spring also brings the threat of severe weather; I still thrill to green skies and the sound of tornado sirens, though this crooked old shitbox would probably provide about as much protection from the wind as a chicken coop.

Daniel and I like to sit on our front porch and wave as the Homecoming and Christmas parades go by. These annual events are rather modest affairs ... little more than a handful of decorated jalopies and pickups, the high school marching band, a few floats covered in flapping crêpe and handwritten signs, smiling kids throwing fistfuls of candy, all of this pomp sandwiched between slow-rolling police cruisers ... but they bring to our life a warm measure of Americana, a feeling of neighborliness and tradition.

Weather permitting, I'll take a late afternoon walk to either of McEwen's two historic cemeteries. Along the way, I'll look to everyday details that appeal to my eye, accidental compositions that I've taken to calling "my little treasures": a pile of forgotten scaffolding rusting against a carport; an antique dinner bell hanging unrung on a garden post; hooded signal lamps on a crossbuck; a fallen Spanish oak, the limbs of which spear the soil like a sculpture by Calder; a grain elevator rusting at the edge of a field; a reflective pond nestled in a copse; a tool shed with two empty windows, through which one can glimpse a framed picture of lawn and sky. From far away, the train whistle sounds mournful and romantic. Deer forage between the graves of 19th Century Irish immigrants, turkey vultures flap from carrion on the tracks. The town's water tower stands gleaming and bold against the cumulonimbi, and it looks especially heroic when backlit by the setting sun. Encounters like these provide a few lifesaving morsels of beauty, just enough glory to survive on.

The one constant in my life over the past year, the one thing that has kept me going despite all my swiftly piling grievances, has been the love of a good man. Daniel is the best partner I could ever ask for ... smart, funny, talented, generous, loyal, easy on the eyes. He's a brilliant artist, a spectacularly gifted and soulful musician, a great cook. All day long we laugh and hug and hang off each other's shoulders. We understand one another so thoroughly, so intuitively, that we can speak in a shorthand of campy movie quotes, references to sitcom stars of yesteryear, faggoty bon mots, nonsensical non sequiturs. We use alphabetic fridge magnets to spell out love letters in the form of dialogue from "ALL ABOUT EVE" or "MOMMIE DEAREST" or "CARRIE". There is something about our shared sense of humor that seems to belong to a much earlier generation of homosexuals, the one that existed before the unfashionable version of AIDS wiped out so much of our tribe. We seem oddly anachronistic, he and I, a bit removed from the era in which we live. Our easy camaraderie brings us much comfort in troubling times. I can tell that the harsh daily reality of living with a suicidal boyfriend has been grinding against his optimism, but he tries his best to keep a cheerful demeanor. I'm so grateful for his companionship and patience, and am impressed every day by his wisdom, his work ethic, his strength. He's still my favorite human being.

Daniel is deeply beloved in his community. Because of his many tattoos and gregarious nature, everyone here knows who he is ... but in a good way. The ladies at the bank and post office adore him, especially because he bakes holiday fudge for them every year. The police officers all wave to us, and the sheriff cheekily calls our block "Rainbow Hill". The neighbors bring over extra produce and bags of snacks.

Our dogs remain at the center of our lives. It's their safety and comfort we worry about, not our own. They're constantly being showered with attention and praise, and they want for nothing. Edison, the deaf pit bull whose Number Two Special unceremoniously inaugurated 2024, is in the twilight of his life, and so I spend nearly every minute of the day with him by my side. Phantom, the blind and deaf Australian Shepherd, continually bashes butt-first into the furniture and is an utterly graceless goof ... but his happiness is infectious. My habit of sneaking him bits of lunch meat throughout the day results in the most eyewateringly abhorrent dog farts, but I don't care ... a dog this cheerful deserves to be spoiled. Cheez-It, the border collie born without eyeballs, is the most brazen of the bunch, and she fearlessly leads our pack on our nightly walks. Bear, the neurotic hound, is the caretaker and peacekeeper among us all. He won't finish eating until he knows that everybody else has been gotten their fill.

If I've achieved nothing else in my year, I know that I've helped to give these dogs a good life. They won't ever know the hardships of the street, the sadness and stresses of a shelter, the boredom of a crate. Somehow the devotion I've showed them has made me feel a bit better about myself. My reward comes in the form of their unconditional and uncomplicated affection, their constant proximity, their nuzzles, their tongue baths, their wagging tails, their spazzy and perfect loveliness. Their presence reminds me that any time spent in the selfless service of others is never wasted. They remind me that life doesn't cease being miraculous just because it is inconvenient, stressful, unmanageable, expensive, boring, or disappointing.

I worried all year long about how I wasn't going anywhere, feeling guilty about all this immobility. But even if I were to be sitting perfectly still — which in truth I haven't been — the planet I've planted my ass upon would still be racing around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. On a more macrocosmic scale, our solar system has been hurtling along the galactic plane at 448,000 miles per hour, and the entire Milky Way itself has been screaming through the Virgo Supercluster at roughly 1.3 million miles per hour. Everything is in motion, and that motion is made relative by the scale of observation. In five billion years, our sun will burn through its stock of hydrogen, leaving its main sequence phase and bloating into a red giant, and after it blasts away Earth's crust there will be no more mention of tax liens or hemorrhoids or Cool Ranch Doritos.

For all of its disappointments, 2024 was only a short chapter in a very long story, and plenty of miracles have occurred in those 365 days. Many more epiphanies await us in the days ahead, as long as we don't allow ourselves to give up. For a little while longer, at least, we get to live in a world with pickled okra and Prokofiev and penicillin. There's so much left to live for, so much left to see: auroras in Norway, Atlas moths in Borneo, the great white sharks of Gansbaai, restored '57 Chevys prowling the streets of Havana. As for myself, I want to get lost in the souks of Marrakesh, I want to get lost in Prague. I want to photograph the vine-choked temples of Angkor Wat and stand at the gates of Auschwitz and ride a camel to Erg Chigaga. Everybody has places they want to go, and many of us feel that we're running out of time ... but we're always exactly where we're supposed to be, and the time we've got left is the time we've got left. Fate is only the simultaneity of past and future. One may just as easily achieve enlightenment in Dunkin' Donuts as in Dharamshala.

Sometimes there's nowhere to go but inwards, and that's okay.

As I write this, Daniel and I are facing each other in a pair of ratty old armchairs, tapping on our laptops and drinking coffee as rain pummels the tin roof. We just had the fireplace fixed, and now two of our dogs lay in peaceful repose before it, the very picture of domestic tranquility. Nag Champa smoke rises from the mantel. And for a moment, just one quietly shimmering moment, all is well. I'm fine. Daniel and the dogs and I are fine. Existence is unutterably beautiful. Main Street sends its regards.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

The Balance of A Year

Every December, I relish the chance to look back upon the course of the last year and reflect upon all that has happened, all that has changed, all that I've learned, all the ground I've lost and gained. 2023 offered me many moments of deep fulfillment and happiness, but it also brought along a number of profound struggles ... for it seems that in order to experience joy, one must also be willing to endure a commensurate amount of sorrow. The waveforms of life may arrive with extreme amplitudes or in seemingly relentless frequencies, sometimes bringing the crests and troughs of fortune too closely together for comfort.

Midnight at January 1st of 2023 found me standing in precisely the same place as I had stood at the previous New Year's Eve: making crap coffee for an AA meeting in a badly lit kitchen in Dickson, Tennessee. I was not yet a local, still visiting from Florida ... but a few days prior, on Christmas Day, my soulmate Daniel had invited me to come live with him, with a handwritten note that read, simply, "Welcome home." And thus, it became clear that my time in St. Augustine, wonderful as it was, would soon be drawing to a close. So I resolved to savor every last bit of it.

In earnest, I hurled myself into the final three months of my life as a Floridian. I walked each sunset along the beach of Anastasia Island, trying to soak up every detail, studying the textures of sand and surf as if I would never see either again. There, on the First Coast's splendid and dynamic shores, I witnessed three rocket launches, discovered a sunken sailboat, found a drowned raccoon, and tripped over a dead pelican that had been half-buried in a dune. I caught an electrifying performance of Stravinsky’s "Petruska" at the Jacksonville Symphony, gobbled up as much sushi and Indian food as I could afford, and barely slept. I continued my therapeutic use of psilocybin, taking threshold-level mushroom trips on the beach ... sometimes accompanied by a close friend, sometimes alone, often barefoot. I hung out with terrific pals, swam in the Atlantic, burned a bunch of old artworks, and painted my fingers to nubs. To offset some of my overdue rent, I pulled weeds, hauled mulch, sprayed fungicide on fruit trees, cleaned the pool, and sweated through a lot of yardwork.

Knowing that the all-you-can-eat buffet of casual hanky-panky I'd gorged myself on in Florida was bound to dry up in rural Tennessee, I nonetheless managed to have a few meaningful liaisons with various men. I enjoyed a very sweet encounter with a professional male model, whose jawdropping pulchritude was eclipsed by his inner kindness. I had a soothing late-night reunion with an itinerant Turkish healer, whose hands were still gentle and sure, and whose voice was a balm for the spirit.

In March, I finally wrapped up one of the most ambitious artistic projects of my entire career ... The [C] Paintings, a collection of one hundred 12"x12" oils, all executed using only Titanium White and Ivory Black. This series of metaphoric illustrations, which took four years to complete, pushed me further (stylistically, technically, and conceptually) than I had ever gone before as a painter. I sold signed prints of these works, and eventually published a hardcover book.

In addition, I finished four fine art commissions: “WARRIORS”, “CARDINALS”, “OWL”, “MICHIGAN SNOW”, and an abstract diptych, “FROST KING I & II”. I pushed the needle forward on "BIG TOP" and "JEWELS", two large and intricate canvases. I created a music video for Daniel's gorgeous charity single, “SOUL ON A CHAIN”, did some pre-viz on an upcoming animation, and had the great honor of being interviewed about my writing for a podcast.

I published my book of “COLLECTED POEMS” and the short story cycle "SOUVENIRS". I released the long-overdue paperback edition of my first novel, "YOUNG PIM AND THE GOBLINS". I brought the first draft of my fourth novel, "THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW", to the 95% mark. I wrote five essays: "MESSAGE FROM AN INJURED BIRD", "SIMULATIONS OF TENNESSEE", "EDISON'S MEDICINE", "DEBUSSY IN THE BONEYARD", and "I GAVE MY HEART TO THE JUNKMAN", which was inserted as a sad but fitting coda in a new edition of "THE PAMELA DIARIES".

Productive as it was, my year was marred by a few heartrending losses. The most distressing of all happened in early January, when I had to say goodbye to my beloved soccer-mom minivan, Pamela. My poor old hooptie finally shat the mattress. We had shared 99,700 miles in the course of six years, driving through every conceivable landscape and weather condition, through tornadic thunderstorms and forest fires and mountain snows, through godawful jobs and traffic jams, through countless sunsets and twisting wilderness roads and ghost towns. If you hadn't followed any accounts of our many adventures, you simply wouldn't believe the things we had gone through. It boggles my mind, to recall all of our close calls and spiritual victories and hair-raising rides. Pamela framed some of the most beautiful and terrifying things I've ever seen with her windshield. I'll never have another friend quite like her again, and it still hurts every day to think about how much I miss her.

2023 claimed the lives of several other loved ones. One of my very favorite teachers, a vibrant woman who taught me more about the process of mark-making than any other artist, finally folded after a long decline. A handsome musical theater singer, on whom I harbored a bit of a crush, widowed his lovely husband after suffering from a late-onset neurodegenerative disease. An extraordinarily gifted sculptor and very generous instructor left behind a sprawling artistic and educational legacy.

But good things came along, too, as they always do. The most significant shift this year, of course, was that I left Florida and moved to the middle of Tennessee, so that I could be with my Daniel, that goofy tattooed carny with a heart of gold and the voice of a '50s crooner. I traded my sandy stretch of coastal paradise for McEwen, a hamlet of maybe 1700 people, a place with no stoplights but a dozen churches, two cemeteries, and a Dollar General. 

Getting here, however, would prove to be no mean feat. I had no money at the beginning of the year, no job ... and with the loss of Pamela, no transportation. My printer also died, right when I needed it most. Luckily, though, I managed to rake in a few grand by selling prints of The [C] Paintings, enough to get a new printer and fund my move. I was able to purchase another car, "Scout", from my housemate and his family, under an extremely generous contract on their part and with the help of my dad. I rented my first U-Haul, one outfitted with a vehicle towing rig, and I drove the 700-mile distance in a state of utter disbelief. Seven years ago, I didn't even know how to turn on a car. Now here I was, driving a moving van through the winding hills of Appalachia, towing my second car behind me.

Tennessee welcomed me with a major tornado outbreak on the day after my arrival, which seemed somewhat auspicious. Worse storms would follow.

2023 was a terrible year in terms of monetizing my time. Both of my primary client relationships ended abruptly, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, for no clear reason. Afterward, I could not find sufficient or sustainable work, no matter how hard I tried, and thus I spent the latter half of the year in the worst financial shape of my life, basically living at or below the poverty line for months on end. Being so broke meant that I missed yet another wedding, one that I had been looking forward to attending for months. I went without health insurance for most of the year. This marks the lowest income level I've ever recorded in my adult life, a shockingly meager amount that I cannot even bring myself to type here. On paper, at least, I've never been this poor ... and I've been pretty goddamned poor.

This led to one of the deepest depressions I've faced in a long while, a valley of extreme self-doubt, defeat, and demoralization. There were times in which the train tracks that bisect our town seemed to offer two equally grim solutions: hop a boxcar and escape my woes like an old-timey hobo, or just throw myself under the groaning wheels and be done with it.

But I stayed alive and kept hustling. I beat the shit out of my laptop's keyboard, as I grabbed whatever writing assignments I could get. I ghostwrote brand messaging for an open-source monitoring application, cleaned up the text for a book on gut biome health, laid out the paperback for a theologian's analysis of biblical systems, proofread a veteran's memoir, and performed a grinding edit on a client's sci-fi novel. I helped make some didactic signage for MoMA and other arts institutions, dipping my toe into AI imaging for the first time.

Tennessee brought some unexpected work my way. My first gig was for a good friend's home staging company, hauling furniture and décor into and out of listed real estate properties, making fake "homes" out of empty houses. The two of us camped it up while fluffing throw pillows and tossing plastic houseplants into a truck, and it came as a great relief to have another gay pal with whom I could be as swishy and fey and arch as I liked. I helped build a golf simulator, did construction site cleanup at two different apartment complexes, and packaged vehicle springs for a defense contractor. I learned two things during my brief stint in the military industrial sector: I have a pathological need to keep my workspaces in order, and the Pentagon is getting fleeced on plastic toilet seats.

I did an 11-hour photo assistant gig at the CMA Fest in Nashville, lugging gear for a boss nearly two decades younger than myself, and a 14-hour personal assistant gig for an NBC television series. During the latter assignment, I ferried passengers in an enormous yacht of an SUV through rush-hour traffic in downtown Nashville, some of the most nerve-wracking time I've ever spent behind a wheel. I busted my hump in a sooty warehouse for an ornamental door company, where I learned how to use a strapping tensioner to band crates. I also narrowly avoided being crushed by falling iron jambs. I shoveled sodden insulation and charred debris from the burnt ruins of a cabin on the grounds of a nineteenth-century grist mill, getting stung three times by wasps in the process. I hauled hundreds of furniture boxes into a ridiculously bougie preschool, while flirting with one of my coworkers. Unfortunately, the gruff little sexpot got in a fight with a fellow mover, and he fled the scene before I got the chance to seduce him in one of the empty coatrooms.

I also had a few abortive bromances with confused dudes. I canceled my dalliance with a smoking hot lifeguard when his misogyny reared its ugly head. I stepped away from two different bisexual guys I'd once lusted after, when it became clear that they themselves did not know what they really wanted from me.

I dropped out of a few friendships that had clearly passed their expiration dates. I had to leave behind a former coworker, a gal who I had once adored, when she proudly admitted that she was using online scams, credit card theft, and food stamp fraud to fund her way of life. Nope.

My phone headset crapped out. My computer monitor, shimmied by the vibrations from a passing freight train, toppled from my desktop, missing the head of our napping pit bull by inches.

In October, I flew up to Minneapolis, where a long-time collaborator and I completed our screenplay, “THE LAST BONANZA”. While there, I spent a week exploring one of the city's most beautiful and eclectic neighborhoods, happily tits-deep in orange leaves and Halloween décor, spellbound by Minnesota's autumnal glory. I discovered Tiny Tim’s crypt, toured a formal rose garden, and watched a pair of squirrels mate. I went to a boisterous backyard party, where I sat on a bench and comforted a bereaved mother who had recently lost her daughter. My friend and her spazzy but sweet little rescue dog did so much to soothe my soul ... so much laughter, so much barking, so much firmly-established trust.

Over a long weekend, I headed over to Memphis, where I met up with several of my oldest and dearest friends from my former life there. One of my soul sisters and I explored a muscle car museum in the Edge District, checked out the lobby of Sun Studios, and wandered over many of our old stomping grounds ... including my "field of ghosts", the empty lot where my home once stood, where I spent five years with my poor mad beautiful William, where he finally lost his struggle with addiction and mental illness and rotted away into the floorboards. The building itself burned down a few years ago, clearing away the last physical remnants of a very sad tale.

Happily, though, The Volunteer State balanced things by continuing to yield oddball delights. I checked out the Dickson County Fair, where I fed sheep, a cow, and an alpaca, watched my first teen beauty pageant, eyeballed some prize-winning pies, and stuffed my face with funnel cake while taking in the dirt-kicking splendor of a Jump n’ Run. I toured Nashville’s Parthenon, hand-fed a peacock named "Peter", petted several goats and pigs, held a chicken in my arms, encountered a camel in a church parking lot, took second place in a Spades tournament, befriended one of the NEA Four, and sat on the sidelines of a swim class for special needs kids. Scout and I drove up some scary-ass country roads, sometimes narrowly avoiding armadillos or deer, and crossed some of the prettiest scenery that Central Tennessee has to offer. I helped a buddy unload his moving truck of heavy shop tools, crates of ammo, and massive furniture. I mashed 15 pounds of potatoes for an AA potluck, and startled a committee of vultures lurking by the railroad tracks. I bounced around a bed with a fun pair of good ole boys, right across the street from a cemetery. On a starry autumn night, a bunch of cool folks and I gathered round a campfire on a friend's farm, where Daniel played the ukulele and our hostess thumped on her hammered steel handpan. It was a magical evening, blemished only by the dozens of fire ant bites Daniel suffered while sitting on the ground.

It's a simple life we lead here in McEwen. My sunset walks now take place in a boneyard, rather than a beach. Our town sheriff is a cordial hunk, and he always waves at us whenever he happens to drive by. Our house, which sits on pilings and sketchy cairns of brick, is crooked and drafty and crammed with sentimental bric-a-brac. This spring, Daniel and I strung up chandelier pendants in our windows, so we could see rainbows every afternoon.

From our front porch on Main Street we watched McEwen’s homecoming parade ... complete with marching band, pom squad, firetruck, and beribboned princesses throwing candy. Daniel told me that a few years ago he saw a plump little pre-teen go by on one of these floats, eating all the candy herself and tossing empty wrappers at the passerby.

Nobody says "bless her heart" like a Tennessean.

We share our home with four handicapped dogs: one blind, one deaf, one blind and deaf, and one neurotic. Our nightly routine is firmly established at this point ... we walk the mutts through the quiet streets of our town, playing Twenty Questions while they bark and tug and play Maypole with their leashes. It's our own wackadoodle Iditarod, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Afterwards, Daniel will cook us a scrumptious dinner (usually something with goat cheese, pork loin, sweet potatoes, couscous, and a shit-ton of cilantro) while I edit my manuscripts. Then we sit down on the recording studio sofa to watch reruns and eat out of mismatched bowls.

In January we celebrated Daniel's fourth year of sobriety, and in November I marked my eleventh. Much of the social life that we share is centered around the local recovery community. Honestly, I haven't missed booze one bit, and I do find myself getting a little bored by the topic of addiction. There really isn't a lot else for us to do here, it seems, besides attend these meetings. But that's okay ... it's been my privilege to befriend so many remarkable people, many of whom are rebuilding their lives after unimaginable cataclysms. There is a strong feeling of family among the sober, and I love our tribe. Our "heading to town" events these days are usually speaker talks or functions or festivals. We'll sometimes pop into to a rehab facility just to hang out with our buddies.

Daniel and I are planning to break our glut of AA holidays by spending this New Year Eve among friends, at a little get-together hosted by some lovely lady friends from our LGBTQ group. For the third time in my adult life, I'm thinking of making some potato salad for a holiday party. Lesbians still like potato salad, right? Strange as it may sound, this quotidian harbinger of middle age — hatching a plan to spring my best potato salad on partygoers — seems like the most joyous thing imaginable. It sounds absurd, I know ... but I actually choked up at the supermarket when I tossed a shaker of dill weed into my shopping cart. Sometimes being a grown-up is about acknowledging the plenitude represented by the smallest of acquisitions. For those of us who are constantly toeing the precipice of despair, even the task of selecting a kitchen spice is a luxury.

I am so lucky to be alive, unfathomably so. The more I think about it, the less probable it feels. I feel blessed ... blessed to be allowed to wave off another year marked by upheaval and goodbyes and emotional earthquakes, to push a cart through Walmart in a state of Zen mindfulness, to transform dullness into bliss by the alchemy of gratitude, to sanctify the gift of uneventful days, to value any hour devoid of catastrophe, to appreciate stillness, to savor the quiet country life, to share a sofa with one or more dogs, to curl against my sleeping boyfriend and murmur "I love you" into his neck, to have made it this far with limbs and eyes intact, to have exactly enough money left in my bank account to buy a tube of toothpaste, to see rainbows cast upon crooked walls, to cherish so many beautiful and brave friends, to give thanks, to survive another trip around the sun, to be here, to be here with you.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Debussy in the Boneyard

I've always been drawn to the gardens of the dead.

McEwen, the town I live in, has two cemeteries. The smaller one, technically speaking, is a graveyard, as the property belongs to a nearby Irish Catholic church. Its oldest section holds parishioners born in the early 1800s, emigrants from Kilkenny or Galway or Cork who might have fled the '40s famine and the crushing poverty that ensued, or those who followed the promise of work on the Nashville and Northwestern railroads. I imagine that many of the second wave who arrived in the '90s endured the traumatizing queues of Ellis Island, maybe even squeezing through the inoculating bottleneck of quarantine on Swinburne. All of them died as Americans in Tennessee.

The graveyard is just a few blocks from my house on Main Street, and I often go there when I need to take long phone calls or clear my head. The stones dating back to the 1850s are attractively mossy and worn, with many words eroded into illegibility, while the ones from this century feature elaborate etchings, embedded photographs, or even mounted souvenirs. There are a few shade trees, some benches to sit upon, and a surprising number of memorials with only a single date. The most touching grave belongs to Beau, stillborn on Valentine's Day, now attended by toy trucks and a teddy bear. Children's graves often bear gifts.

The younger and grander of the two boneyards is McEwen Cemetery. The walk there is also fairly short, but it's a far more satisfying journey, especially during the late afternoon. I like the cross-section of town it provides, its string of small but evocative details. Most of my route follows Railroad Street ... which, as you might imagine, runs alongside the train tracks, rising and falling for less than a mile before terminating in the cemetery. The road takes me past a few plain little prefabs, an ancient tupelo tree, a pink crêpe myrtle as gay as a spray of confetti, a mildewy white trailer, some crooked toolsheds, signs reading WELCOME in wooden letters, and hooded signal lamps hanging from the crossbucks.

Autumn is here, and the maples are the first to announce themselves. Throughout the town, people are lighting the fires of fall: leaves, trash, burn pits. The smell of their smoke seems specific to autumn ... perhaps it's the first snap of cool air, that quality people describe as "crisp", that lends these odors such vividness. You have a sense of things being taken in, the harvest nearing completion, a withdrawal into the warmth of home. Even the tacky décor of Halloween ... the orange wreaths, the faux skeletons, the polythene witches ... somehow hints at the shift towards winter and its gelid quietude, the annual death that is not really death but rather dormancy, of the inevitable cyclic renewal that requires some form of sacrifice from all living things. If you were to live long enough, for millennia rather than decades, you'd see everything sped up, as if you were holding the fast-forward button on a remote ... the rails obscured by ivy, the ravine choked with thistle, the lawns conquered by sumac, the asphalt shattered by dandelions, the road blocked by blackberry, the houses darkening with mold and falling inwards. At such a scale all human concerns would shrink to the busyness of ants, while the sun and moon chased each other through the flickering sky.

The plants along the railroad embankment are engaged in a battle for supremacy, with kudzu emerging as the obvious winner. I see long seedpods drooping from catalpas, a forgotten tire swing, a ramshackle trampoline. I hear the high school's marching band, and distant gunshots, and that insistent cricket song which sounds like power lines. There is one last yard, a pair of rusted tractors, a joyless swing set, some hollowed gourds meant for martins and wrens, a row of fruit trees, and then an empty field that somehow suggests Elysium. Finally, the narrowing and now nameless lane lifts above a long pond in a copse. I've come to think of this puddle as McEwen's version of the river Styx ... for as soon as we cross it, we'll be wandering among the departed.

While exploring the cemetery, I'll connect my phone to its earpiece, while keeping the other ear free for birdsong and barking dogs. Lately, I've been playing a few of my favorite pieces by Debussy ... "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune", "La fille aux cheveux de lin", and especially his "Danse profane". The lilting strings and rippling harp create a soft but stirring soundtrack for my communion with the dead.

Strangely, though, this place doesn't feel funereal. In fact, the cemetery throbs with life. I watch as a monarch lifts from the knotweed. A pit bull from the nearby farm trots over, tail wagging, to greet me. Behind a fence, a swaybacked mare nibbles on some fescue. Caterpillar nests gleam like silver on the elms, and poison ivy stamps its scarlet on the undergrowth. The orderly rows of monuments get disrupted here and there by natural features, such as hills or trees, and the ground settles unevenly, revealing the mounds of coffins. A few families elect to delineate their plots with low blocks of masonry or ornamental gates ... though the worms and beetles and mycelia will observe no such borders. Flags and plastic flowers abound. I visit a man who died on his 29th birthday, and a mother who perished on the same day as her two toddlers. A lone tombstone leans against a Spanish oak. Some of the smallest markers say, simply, "DADDY" or "MAMA" or "WIFE". As the sun sinks lower and drops behind trees, the remaining alleys of light grow narrower, until only the tallest obelisks stand bright and orange in the beams.

I look to the sky, at a froth of cirrus blown sideways, and think of how thin our atmosphere actually is. All that protects us from the chilling vacuum of space is this fragile blue blanket of vapors, doomed to disappear in the next 2-3 billion years. We'll be long gone by then, along with the oceans and plants.

I consider the blip we represent in the galactic timeline ... and of the ecologies that must be thriving elsewhere in the cosmos. I think of the countless beasts on distant planets that are swimming or flying or fighting the peculiar battles of their biomes, beings as ignorant of us as we are of them, each creature obeying its native imperatives, each destined to its private oblivion. I think of asteroids and rogue proto-planets and unfortunate trajectories. On some ill-fated world somewhere, ruminants will stop grazing and lift their shaggy heads, blinking with incomprehension as the conclusive comet plunges and ignites in their atmosphere. But their nullification will not be for naught. The atoms that fashioned them will still exist. Heat and electricity and magnetism will still exist. All their matter will be recycled, each molecule being torn asunder so that new and more exotic configurations may be born, each particle playing but a bit part in an endless continuum. Death is only a singularity, a point through which life contracts and expands again. Dying stars seed space with carbon, magnesium, calcium, zinc. The hare surrenders to the grass, and the mushroom heralds a miracle, and bone meal betters our roses.

Meanwhile, I keep tapping on my phone to repeat the Debussy. Something about his music in this setting feels both melancholy and warming, plaintive and romantic. The word that comes to mind is "bittersweet". Claude Debussy has been dead for over a century ... yet he accompanies me now, on this fine autumn evening, chaperoning me as I consider the illusory boundary between life and death. His ghost makes for good company.

As I stroll among the graves, it occurs to me that the lives buried between these markers are not just a bunch of discrete units, self-contained and aloof from the stirrings of the world, but rather they form an occulted plexus of connection: families, businesses, churches, catastrophes, commencements, picnics, reunions, love affairs, scandals, marriages, maladies, baptisms ... and, of course, funerals.  The space between the stones seems at first to be measured by the standard span of coffins ... but in truth the cemetery chronicles a cumulative tale, a ceaseless and bewildering concurrence of human narratives, forever bubbling and piling and collapsing upon itself like foam on the surf. There is a message to be found in the muster of plots.

One of the best things you can do for your spirit is to spend some time in the presence of the deceased ... so I suggest that you avail yourself, at the next available opportunity, of the boneyard's splendid gifts, preferably during the golden hour that leads to dusk, and as you pass through the gate please make a point of turning towards the setting sun, and watch as its last slanting ray sets fire to the trees and outlines the edges of leaves and lights the Brownian dance of gnats ... and in this one enormous expanding instant, you may apprehend, in its entirety, life itself, life ever surging, ever swarming, proliferating, bursting free of rocks and ponds, rising from the loam in long unfurling gestures, clutching at the sky, vying for sunlight, and in all likelihood you will fall in love with the naked face of existence all over again, even with its grim chaotic terrors, even with its throttling vines, its tumors, its housefires, and you will find every process to be in order, every animate thing to be in perfect alignment with its purpose, and your mind will assign equal merit to the acorn and the oak that opens from it, and you will consider with an untroubled eye the upended armadillo, the ruined document, the torturous divorce, the smoke that curls into the sky, the vulture with clotted blood on its beak, the limping dog, the sagging porch, the leaning fence, and you will find mirth in the collapsing leer of the Jack O' Lantern, and you will see the world for all of its punctual cycles, its fecundity and decay, its apparent tumult and hidden patterns ... and you'll understand that one day, a day not very far from now, your newly unfettered consciousness will be at liberty to roam, to go further, to fly far from the shore towards the middle of the ocean, and that your mind may arrive at a calm expanse, a place with only one horizon, and there you will be truly free, free to explore, free to swim without the need for body or breath, to plunge beneath the surface and zip among the wriggling fish, to go below the bloated whale, to praise the cetacean that falls in soft white clumps towards the benthic midnight, to descend the cold column of dark that spans from blue to indigo to black, to sink amid the snowy detritus of plankton and hake scales twirling into the depths, to be gobbled by hagfish and crabs or lost among the fronds of sessile things, to be broken by worms, to molder into bare and quiescent motes, to become a carbonate slush on the sea floor ... and then you will know, know for certain, that nothing ever ends without beginning anew, and that you have always been and will always be, and you shall find yourself satisfied once again by the transitional nature of death, pleased to greet yet another death in a long unbroken line of them, and you will await with serenity all the deaths to come, and you will treasure the fleeting lives between them, and you will be at peace, assured that nothing dies forever, for life is forever, and forever is forever, amen.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Simulations of Tennessee

It's been a hard slog over the past half-year, trying to find enough paying work to keep my lights on. My largest corporate client moved most of their projects to internal resources, and several other potential opportunities seemed to evaporate at the last minute, leaving me high and dry. Bit by bit, whatever economic gain I've made in the past few years has disappeared. I'm back to being perpetually broke, living without health insurance, driving another old car that needs more work than I can afford, and struggling to compete in an increasingly flooded marketplace. So, in the spirit of resourcefulness (and with a throat-closing feeling of desperation) I've taken on some odd jobs since starting my second stint in the Volunteer State ... and that's "odd" in two senses of the word, meaning both "occasional" and "unexpected".

My first hired gig was helping to build a golf simulator on the country estate of an extremely rich client. I had no idea who this important muckety-muck was, or what their line of work might be ... but within a few minutes of pulling up to the gate the extent of their wealth became quite apparent. My escort (who carried a walkie-talkie and a bit of a paramilitary vibe) arrived in a souped-up golf-cart, and he led me some distance away to the work site. Their land sprawled over hundreds of acres, and encompassed woods, meadows, ponds, and hills, all of which served as a private game reserve.

The simulator booth was being installed in a large barn-like structure. I say "barn-like" because it looked vaguely like a barn, though it had a gable rather than a gambrel roof. The interior was pretty damn lux: it had this expensive epoxy floor covering, with embedded flecks of mica, and the walls had been clad with immaculate blond wood planks. Pricey, pricey. One side of the main hall featured a game larder and dressing station, with stainless steel sinks, spray nozzles, raised tables, and a dedicated drainage system. A stuffed beaver rested atop a fuse box, its face frozen in perpetual surprise, and a single pair of antlers decorated an otherwise bare section of paneling. The whole thing seemed oddly sterile, harshly lit, and it kind of gave me the willies. Somebody could easily enjoy a long career as a serial killer with a setup like this.

A massive refrigerated trailer, wrapped with a photomural of autumnal trees, stood at the end of a wooden ramp. The grounds supervisor explained that the locked room was crammed with taxidermy, heaps of dead animals in varying states of preservation. As my team scrambled to assemble the housing of the golf simulator, my gaze kept returning to the mysterious chamber. I tried to imagine its shadowy interior, full of mute birds and glass eyes. None of these animals were alive, yet they each presented a tableau of life. Life in stasis, death simulating life.

In fact, the whole thing seemed like a simulation of sorts. The barn was not really a barn, but an oversized rec room. The golf course I was helping to build did not actually exist, but was instead a sophisticated computer rendering for the purpose of virtual play. The estate itself was a giant private park, one in which wealthy people could hunt down a local population of animals for sport rather than sustenance. In my mind, I kept zooming back and forth from the task at hand, and thinking about the concentric layers of the situation. Here I was ... helping to recreate an outdoor sport in an indoor space, a space that was itself situated in a landscaped microcosm of "nature", all for people who wanted to experience "country life" in a rigorously controlled setting. I stood near a box of chilled corpses that had been stuffed and wired into "lifelike" poses, while building another box for fake golf, nested in a box meant to suggest a barn.

After that first job, which seemed to set the tone for the succeeding months, I quickly took on a number of other temp gigs. I worked in construction site cleanup, collecting litter left behind by crews building an apartment complex, and being shocked once again at the staggering amount of waste generated by these types of projects. I crated ornamental steel doors (each weighing hundreds of pounds) in a blazingly hot warehouse, while the other guys bitched about their wives and kids and court dates. I shoveled insulation and charred debris from the burnt ruins of a cabin on the grounds of a nineteenth-century grist mill ... which had, of late, become a popular venue for weddings and other large events, so it featured a lot of peacocks and antiques and rustic props placed "just so". If you had sufficient bucks to throw a ceremony there, you could exchange your vows in a place that looked "real country-like".

Unlike the hardcore hardscrabble grit of Memphis, Nashville is a town built on tinsel and twang. Two consecutive assignments gave me the chance to catch a glimpse behind the shiny curtain of Music City ... situations that left little doubt about my plummeting professional standing, while further complicating my impressions of the region I've recently moved into.

First, I assisted a twenty-something photographer as he documented some scenic branding for the Country Music Awards Fest in Nashville. My boss was less than half my age, had started his career long after my hard-won darkroom skills became obsolete, and was already building a flourishing business in the Age of The Digital Influencer. He would earn about four times what he paid me that day, though he admitted to not fully understanding the manual settings of his camera, and that he'd be turning over his raw images to a team of retouchers instead of doing any postproduction himself. Nonetheless, we got along very well, and enjoyed a good rapport. Our eleven-hour workday went without a hitch, and it was the longest continuous stretch of time I've spent in the heart of downtown. The festival looked lively and colorful; I don't know that I've ever been in such a "straight" environment that featured so many rhinestones and fancy boots. All day long, loudspeakers blared songs about Jesus and beer and infidelity, while we took candid snaps of people milling about the bannerlines. As afternoon tipped into evening, the main drag of Broadway became a circus of tube-tops and ten-gallon hats and drunken boisterous "WHOOHOO". Every window framed a cover band. Bachelorettes tumbled from mechanical bulls. Would-be starlets tottered in fringed dresses and barfed between the cars. Cowboys leaned against brick façades, thumbs hooked into their belt loops, waiting to be "discovered" beneath the neon guitars. It felt a lot like Las Vegas, but with fewer feathers and more leather vests.

I don't quite get Nashville, to be honest. It's kind of weird to see a bazillion-dollar industry making bank on songs about farms and small-town hardships and last calls. The stars may be wearing denim and boots, they may be voting red and putting flags on their trucks and outwardly showing all the signifiers of being "plain country folk" ... but the counterfeit glitz of The Big Time feels light years away from the realities of Southern poverty: meth mouth, package theft, feral cats, roadside litter, Dollar General.

A few days later, I found myself back on Music Row, acting as the personal assistant and chauffeur to a reality TV showrunner. Her program was all about young ambitious musicians trying out for careers in the country music business, and her sincere concern for the success of these protégés was both heartwarming and revealing. My client on that assignment was a true professional ... laser sharp in her focus, patient with the process but efficient in her movements ... and she completely grasped the exact adjustment of lights/lenses/makeup/hair needed to put together a "natural" look for the cameras. I was impressed with her showbiz savvy, but depressed once more by the inherent artifice of "reality" TV.

So I went back to the grind for my milk money. I hauled boxes of unassembled furniture into an extremely bougie children's academy, the sort of place that has subdued lighting, tasteful murals, and umpteen tiers of early education: infants, toddlers, early preschool, transitional preschool, real preschool, pre-Kindergarten, real Kindergarten, et cetera. The physicality of the gig was brutal enough ... emptying a sun-roasted semi and humping hundreds of chairs and tables and chalkboards up three flights of stairs was no fun at all. But the job also slapped me across the face with a hard fact of capitalism ... namely, that having money allows some people to buy their children an entirely different kind of education than the majority of us. Looking at the color-coordinated seating and fancy playsets and alphabetized bookshelves, I felt the strangest pang of retroactive envy. Come early September, these little emperors will probably be starting in on their Latin declensions and acquiring a taste for sashimi. Us public school kids were lucky to get "Hop on Pop" and tater tots.

I packaged Jeep parts for a defense contractor, in a plush private facility way out in the boonies. As a lifelong pacifist, I did wrestle a bit with the moral quandary of earning money by aiding the military-industrial complex ... but I realized that being paid $15 an hour to box shocks in Buttfuck County would hardly make me the next Adnan Khashoggi. Each of the units I packaged cost more than two weeks of my pay. My supervisor was an educated, affable man, and we enjoyed many easygoing conversations about the state of the world. I learned from him that the Pentagon will shell out about $100 for a metal washer and $2600 for a plastic toilet seat. He offhandedly remarked, while scratching the back of his neck with a pen, that the USA would soon be going to war with China over Taiwan. When I asked what made him so sure about this, he indicated with a sweep of his arm the crowded shelves and heaps of dunnage and piles of upcoming orders. Business was already booming, though the first shot of WWIII hadn't yet been fired.

Perhaps the strangest job I've had this year has also been the most fun. I started working with a close friend who runs a home staging company for local realtors. "Home staging", for those of us who can never hope to sell a house of our own, is the business of furnishing and decorating an empty property for purposes of boosting its market potential. Realtors want to show their listings in a good light, and potential buyers want to visualize the approximate size of rooms. Home staging is a big business, and it can really help both buyers and sellers.

My friend has become extraordinarily skilled in assembling a display with whatever inventory he or the realtors have available. If he's staging several properties at once, the pickings can get slim. But he's so good at his job that it always comes together, and the empty house suddenly appears "lived in". I swear, you could hand that man a broken butterfly chair, a flat bicycle tire, and two used napkins, and he'd somehow manage to make an entire four-bedroom household look occupied, even desirable. It's an amazing skillset he's developed. I'm also impressed with his ability to recall the distribution of items between various "households".

Both he and his realtor partner are representing the idea of a home in order to sell the actuality of a house. Nobody believes that these depictions represent a real person's domicile ... it's tacitly understood that each picture is a simulation of what "home" could be. It's taking the old sales chestnut of "if you lived here, you could be home now" to the next level, with artificial plants and empty soap dispensers and fruit made of plastic. The beds are not actual beds, but air mattresses balanced atop plastic storage bins or buckets. The lampshades aren't screwed to their harps. Chairs can have broken legs or armrests, so long as the pieces can be propped up convincingly enough for photos. Stains can be hidden behind a knitted throw. This is not actually a child's bedroom ... but it could be, with this pink tufted stool in the corner and selection of stuffed animals arranged on the bed. This kitchen can't be cooked in yet ... the fridge is still dark and the oven is disconnected ... but there's already a cute little breadbox and a white butter dish and an empty cake stand waiting on the countertop. Nobody has ever slept in this bed, because it's not really a bed ... it's just the suggestion of a bed, with a beige duvet and a shitload of frilly pillows. The living room, which has been hastily assembled by a pair of stressed-out sissies, has never entertained visitors. The closets are empty, as are the cabinets. Even the "artwork" on the wall is just a photoprint on cheap canvas. In short, it doesn't have to feel good, work good, or even smell good ... it only has to look good.

My recent experiences in Tennessee have been further disrupting some of my preconceived notions of what constitutes "country living". I think much of America has based its idea of what rural life should look like on a series of simulations ... movies, television, jingles, catalogs, advertisements. I sometimes wonder if our imaginations and emotions have been so consistently manipulated by media depictions that we cannot even feel things by ourselves anymore. We need laugh tracks to cue our amusement, and holiday merchandising to evoke our "traditions", and songs about trucks and honkytonks to make us feel more ... err ... 'Merican. But spend some time hanging out in the itty-bitty towns and farmlands, where the roads get rougher and the yards get wilder, and you'll start putting together a very different picture of our nation.

Continuing my ongoing search for the center of things, and aching for a dose of authenticity, I paid a visit to the Dickson County Fair. This turned out to be an unexpected delight, one of the highlights of my year thus far.

Dickson, with a population of around 16,000, is fifteen miles to the east of McEwen, where my partner and I live. When we talk about "heading into town", this is what we're referring to. Dickson is the largest municipality in its eponymous county, and it has most of the things you need: auto mechanics, grocery stores, a Waffle House. Its chief concern is rehab ... Dickson prides itself on being one of the centers of substance abuse treatment in the South, so there are far more halfway houses here than liquor stores. The downtown is kind of cute, though it peters out quickly into warehouses and factories and dusty industrial parks. You can drive from the Arby's to pasture in a few minutes.

County fairs can be a lot of fun, and Dickson's biggest whoop-de-do is no exception. Events like these provide a lot of insight into the industries, crafts, and traditions for which locals feel the most pride. After paying my entry fee, and walking below the grin of a creepy wooden clown, I wandered throughout the various exhibits, my senses fully engaged. I first checked out the horticulture pavilions, strolling past plates of prize vegetables, shelves of jams and preserves, pegboards covered with blankets and needlework. One fascinating display talked about the many "century farms" of the county, farms that had been in family hands for a hundred years or more. It drove home the fact that I was living in a community of farmers, those brave souls who had taken on the challenges of agriculture and animal husbandry. It's very easy for urbanites to lose track of where food comes from, choosing to focus instead on this season's Hermès bags and being able to identify Beaux Arts buildings on a first date and other "sophisticated" stuff. Meanwhile, somebody has to know how to grow okra. Someone has to bale hay.

The chicken barn was neat ... though I don't know a goddamned thing about chickens, so I couldn't tell you what made one Jersey Giant a blue-ribbon rooster while his seemingly identical neighbor received the red. I leaned down to congratulate the Best in Show winner, who tilted his head and blinked a few times in response.

Next up was the art contest. Now mind you, I'm a highly trained artist, with two college degrees and three decades of artmaking experience under my belt ... but one of the few things that I refuse to feel any snobbery about is art. I can derive more spiritual satisfaction from seeing some grandmother's earnest little watercolor study of daisies than eyeballing any zillion dollar Asset of Importance on the block at Sotheby's. Art made for joy by the hoi polloi has a purity that cannot be matched among the hoity-toity. The quilt that came from your Aunt Dot's spotty but assured hands has as much artistic integrity as anything made by Picasso ... and he'd probably agree. Gazing at all of the sketches and paintings ... even those with tenuous lines, wobbly brushwork, and blotchy color ... filled me with such an uncomplicated and warm optimism that tears came to my eyes. I felt a lot of pride for those so-called "folk" artists, those who were creating beautiful things simply because they felt compelled to do so. Shows like this make me want to give up on being noteworthy, just so that I can focus entirely on being sincere.

I walked towards another indoor arena, my nose announcing what was inside long before I arrived. Having grown up near cattle farms, I find the smell of fresh manure homey and comforting. The show ring was surprisingly small, and so the young contestants would be chiefly evaluated on their handling of the animals as they made tight little turns before the judges. The kids used long-handled "show sticks" with brushes and hooks on the end, alternately soothing their heifers with belly scratches or positioning their hooves with pokes between the toes. The crowd watched with intense concentration, having an entirely different understanding of the stakes and qualifications than I did, and some of the leathery oldtimers clucked at the kids with varying degrees of approval or rebuke. One lady pushed an adorable little dog around in a pram, and a toddler threw a clod of dirt into his dad's face.

In an adjacent building, not far from the 4-H pie expo, Dickson's "Fairest of the Fair" teen beauty pageant was already well underway. The hall's interior pretty much looked like a warehouse ... steel trusses, foil-wrapped HVAC ducts, inadequate ceiling fans ... but it had been gussied up with strands of white Christmas lights, sheer curtains, white Grecian columns, and fake flowers exploding from funereal urns. Above all this hung a glittering sign that read "Fairest of the Fair". I arrived right as the high school's cheer squad, decked out in orange and black, performed three numbers to a canned marching band while the contestants changed outfits backstage. After all the high kicks and rah-rahs died down, the pageant girls emerged again, looking willowy and glamorous in their sequined gowns. Some had more a natural flair for working the runway than others ... but everyone glowed under the spotlights with the incandescence of youth, that fleeting teen freshness that escapes us all too soon. About half of them were sponsored by local businesses ... electricians, concrete factories, car dealerships ... while the others enjoyed the support of their parents. One pageant mom in particular made quite an impression. Dressed in a loud floral blouse, with a mini skirt that knocked her knees together, she clomped around the background in her espadrilles while the girls glided across the stage in their serene swanlike way. I became increasingly enamored of this lady, imagining various backstories for her as the contestants burbled on about God, Mom, and Apple Pie. To me, she was the real star of the show, and I kind of wanted to find her backstage and give her a big hug.

Watching all this unfold brought up some very uncomfortable memories of my own teenage years. I wasn't aware of any pageants in my hometown ... I was too busy dropping acid and cutting class to pay any attention anyways ... but the pageant-ready kind of girls certainly went to my high school, and many of them weren't very nice to the fags, freaks, or fringe element. Pageant girls seemed to belong to an entirely different world than me, a world of affluence and influence and four-poster beds. Back then it seemed like pageants were strictly for girls who could afford to accessorize, girls who obsessively counted their calories, girls whose parents probably didn't need to fill out a FAFSA. In my mind, all pageant girls put Vaseline on their teeth so that their lips wouldn't stick, and spoke with a cadence of recitation.

But I must acknowledge that my assumptions about pageant life were based more on my own insecurities and jealousy than any real evidence. I imagine that Dickson's pageant girls come from a variety of backgrounds, and they work hard for their prizes, and many are probably truly lovely on the inside, too. After all, at least a third of them described themselves as "compassionate" in their questionnaire.

Anyway, I watched the whole star-spangled spectacle right up to the end, when the queen would be crowned. All of the runner-up contestants received these engraved silver-plated platters, which struck me as a slightly more utilitarian alternative to a trophy. The big moment finally arrived, a pair of confetti cannons went off, the first runner up got to smile and traipse around the front of the stage with her mirrorlike dish while everyone's eyes stayed fixed on the winner, who cried off her mascara as the tiara slowly descended and landed upon her hair. All the other girls applauded as she held her spray of roses and sniffled decorously. "Good for you, honey," I said, as I held my hands up high and clapped for her victory. "You enjoy your sash."

Feeling satisfied that I checked one more box off on my list of "Cultural Events That Every Homosexual Should Attend At Least Once In Their Lifetime", I hustled across the fairgrounds to check out a contest of a completely different nature ... the Jump n' Run.

Whoa, daddy!

The Jump n' Run is a gonzo derby, where two barely-there beater cars careen through a twisting course of dirt and concrete pylons, smashing into one another at every opportunity and leaving plenty of bent parts strewn about. There are only a few simple rules ... the cars have to be street-legal, use two-wheel drive (no 4WD allowed), and have no mods beyond a roll-cage ... but otherwise it's basically Thunderdome with plenty of vroom vroom. I grabbed a funnel cake, plopped my ass onto the bleachers, and had myself a grand old time, laughing with maniacal glee and getting powdered sugar in my beard as cars lost their mufflers and skinned back their quarter panels.

Sitting on the sidelines of this chaos, watching brightly colored lights of the carnival rides spin in the night sky while bats zipped past the floodlights, it suddenly occurred to me that I was feeling, for the first time in a long time, truly happy. As I licked the grease and cinnamon from my fingertips, watching yet another Impala eat shit on the second turn, I realized that I was experiencing one of those ephemeral moments that we are occasionally blessed with in our lives ... an instant of simple but complete contentment, when we are satisfied with how things actually are, rather than how we imagine them to be.

None of this is what I expected of my country life. None of these jobs or activities or opportunities matched the fantasy I harbored before moving here. My partner Daniel and I live in a tiny town that has little to recommend it, beyond a pair of attractively faded graveyards and a few antique shops. Our neighbors are warm and chatty, always dropping by with extra produce and fresh eggs. Nights here are calm and full of stars, the quiet being broken only by the occasional police siren and the frequent crossings of the freight train. Skunks and armadillos abound. Our local sheriff is strikingly handsome and friendly, sometimes slowing his squad car down to chat with us as we walk the dogs, probably unaware that he's inadvertently giving me plenty of fodder for my hot cop fantasies. We shop at Walmart because that's one of the only options we have. Our movie theater makes shitty popcorn, so we're enjoying our own at home. We cuddle up every night on a sofa, shower our mutts with affection, and eat salads out of mismatched bowls while watching reruns of a reality TV competition. It's not a very fancy scene round here.

But it's all okay. This simple boring small town life is so much better than the mental simulations I've been running about what my late adulthood should feel like. I've come to appreciate the fact that the country looks nothing like catalogs and commercials have made us believe. I've come to appreciate the textures of things that truly exist, rather than the polished surfaces promised by commerce and entertainment. Turns out that real life doesn't always look so good. But sometimes it feels really good.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Edison’s Medicine

I live in a crooked old farmhouse in rural Tennessee, with a tattooed folksinger and four handicapped dogs. Our house, the oldest in town, was built in 1899, and it stands on the unfashionable end of Main Street, where people don't bother to tidy up their porches and primroses poke from the concrete. The structure rests upon pilings rather than a real foundation, and as a result its central axis has become noticeably skewed, a feature that we're choosing to view as "whimsical" instead of "worrisome". Some of the walls are covered in whitewashed shiplap, others retain ragged remnants of floral wallpaper, and the overall feel is akin to a folk-art collage. Paintings and antiques abound. Tumbleweeds of doghair snag on the chair legs. Spiders haunt the crannies. Daniel, the musician, loves his bric-a-brac, so the majority of available surfaces are crowded with animal figurines, musical instruments, framed sheet music, toys, masks, tools, and heirlooms from his family. An enormous philodendron has colonized one fifth of the kitchen, its tendrils winding between ceramic dogs and fruit bowls. We've hung chandelier prisms in the western windows to cast rainbows across the walls. I've established my painting studio up front, while Daniel has set up his recording studio in the rear bedroom. Our house is full of laughter and music and quips from "ALL ABOUT EVE". It's dusty and cluttered and quite possibly the most peaceful home I have ever known.

McEwen is a town without stoplights. In fact, "town" is a pretty grand appellation for this place, which features three fast-food joints, three gas stations, two banks, two cemeteries, a handful of small businesses, a volunteer fire department, a post office, and maybe a dozen churches. City Hall doubles as the police station and municipal court. The hairdresser on Main Street is a real hoot; she's a chatty and charming New Yorker who collects vintage hats, and she'll even shave my back for an extra five bucks. There's a darling little deli that sells local goods ("Memories & Marmalade"), a weekly farmer's market, and a pair of decent antique shops. On the highest hilltop stands a water tower, a gleaming white sentry that looks especially dramatic under thunderheads.

McEwen's chief claim to fame is its annual outdoor barbecue, recorded in 1988 as being the world's largest by The Guinness Book of World Records. The grounds for this event stay idle for most of the year ... leaving behind a large field full of silent concession booths, empty souvenir stands, woodpiles, and faded pennants. Ever since I left the sandy paradise of Anastasia Island for the country life, this vacant green and the nearby Irish Catholic graveyard have been my go-to places for meditative walks.

A railroad bisects our town, and its freight trains roll through several times a day. There's a nostalgic and somewhat mournful feeling that creeps over me when I find myself walking alongside the tracks, and I hear an approaching locomotive sounding its horn. The crossing bell dings, and the striped boom gates descend. The orange light of afternoon falls upon weeds and gravel, broken bottles gleam beneath the crossbuck, and the creaking procession of hoppers and flats evokes distant destinations and the forgotten romance of the bindle. The web of iron that once bound our nation together suddenly comes into vivid focus, and as I watch the converging rails wobble under rising heat I think of hoboes and seekers and other wandering souls, ghosts climbing silently into the boxcars, ghosts in pork pie hats and tattered shoes, decamping for points unknown, and I find myself grieving for a musty mythos, for an era that died decades before my arrival, for an America that probably never even existed.

There really isn't anything to "do" around here, so our home life is mostly centered around cooking meals, nurturing our own professional and artistic ambitions, and caring for the dogs. It's a simple, uncomplicated existence, boring in all of the best ways. It's a season for spiritual pursuits and growing fresh herbs on the windowsill and mixing paints and tuning guitars. It's a season of quotidian bliss.

Because of their special needs, our dogs pretty much dictate the household's operations and schedule. Everything has to be specifically engineered to ensure their safety and comfort, and the routine is firmly embossed in everyone's mind. Late at night, before Daniel and I eat our supper, all six of us go for a walk through the quiet streets. Walking several handicapped dogs at once is not an easy task to manage ... the dogs all move in different directions, each following their own erratic interest, and so any human caught in the middle will inevitably be beribboned like a maypole by crisscrossing leashes. Cats, skunks, armadillos, and strays captivate them. We're constantly being interrupted mid-sentence by explosive barking and sudden lurches, and we've both pretty much given up on "directing" them. Besides, it's really their show, not ours, and so the walks have become a nightly exercise in Zen acceptance.

There are four dogs in our pack: Miss Cheez-It, Phantom, Bear, and Edison.

Miss Cheez-It is a calico border collie who was born without eyeballs. Despite her blindness, she is utterly fearless, and quite assertive. She has something of a 1950s juvenile delinquent vibe about her ... think of Rizzo from "GREASE" mixed with Tura Satana from "FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!", and you get some sense of her innate boldness. Daniel and I are convinced that if we were to turn her loose on the streets, she'd be leading an all-female switchblade gang within a week.

Phantom, our Australian Shepherd, is both blind and deaf ... but he is blissfully, radiantly happy. I've never see a dog so thrilled to be alive. When we retrieve the leashes from the antique toy chest by the door, he becomes the most excitable creature on earth. Every walk is an adventure, every meal is a feast, every smell is a novelty. Phantom wants for nothing. He is our household Buddha, with untamable fur and a perpetual smile, and an expression that says, "I love being here." His eyes, beautiful but utterly useless, are a milky blue, the color of a winter morning.

Bear, the hound, has all of his senses ... but his neurosis has taken the form of an unshakeable guilt complex, in itself something of a handicap. He requires ongoing reassurance that he is, indeed, a Very Good Boy, and that we aren't mad at him, and that he deserves to be here just like the rest of us, and that we won't ever skip him at dinnertime. He leads a pretty cushy life ... nobody raises a hand to him, nobody yells when he upchucks on the hardwood, and he's constantly showered with love and praise ... but he keeps giving us the most baleful glances, as if to say, "It's all my fault."

And this leaves us with Edison, the deaf pit bull. Although I adore all of the dogs, I've become especially attached to him. He's like a battery for affection. You can charge him up with hugs and rubs and kisses ... and when you need that love returned, he will surrender it all to you in a single devoted glance. As I write this, we are sharing the ancient orange sofa in the studio. This has become the standard arrangement for us: I take the north end, he anchors the south, my feet rest against his haunches, and he snores contentedly while I type. Whenever I shift my position, he immediately looks up at me to see if I am staying put or rising. He'll stubbornly follow me from room to room, never letting me out of his sight for more than a few minutes at a time. We are closely bonded, Edison and I. There is some kind of tacit understanding between us, a sense that we're in it for the long haul, that our fates are linked. We are mutually responsible for one another.

Unfortunately, pit bulls have gotten a bum rap in America. The public image of the breed has less to do with any innate malice than with the wickedness of bad masters ... illegal fighting rings, unscrupulous breeders, skinheads, neo-Nazis, self-professed "gangsters" who pride themselves on the viciousness of their dogs. Back when I lived in one of Kansas City's grimmest neighborhoods, I witnessed a yard full of neglected pits maul an escaped piglet, something I can never unsee.

My personal experience with pit bulls, on the other hand, has been consistently wonderful. I've watched these "beasts" nuzzle babies, and tolerate the senseless prodding of toddlers, and settle in for family time with the gentleness of lambs. Edison is the kind of monster who would allow pre-teen girls to slap makeup on his face and stick a tiara on his head. He has no real need for dignity, and will allow you to arrange him however you want, like a four-legged throw-pillow. When we're rough-housing in the mornings, he'll sometimes seize my right hand between his jaws. I know that he could easily destroy my painting career with a few choice bites ... but my trust in him is complete.

Truth be told, Edison is getting on in years. We can't sugar-coat the facts of aging. He's already starting to show some early signs of dementia ... he has to be coaxed to eat his breakfast, and he no longer trusts that he can just remain in place when I get up to refill my coffee. There's sometimes a befuddled, worried look in his eyes, as if he doesn't fully grasp something he's expected to understand. No amount of encouragement will soothe a dog who is losing his faculties, and his confusion will grow increasingly heartbreaking as time goes on. Lipomas and liver spots already mottle his skin. He's developed some arthritis in his hips, for which he takes an anti-inflammatory drug twice a day. I sneak the pills into his mouth via dollops of mayonnaise, giving his siblings an equal amount so that the poor creatures don't feel cheated. I know I'm dispensing far too much of the stuff ... Daniel probably thinks I'm ushering us all into the poorhouse, spoonful by heaping spoonful ... but I want to spoil these mutts for as long as we have them.

Part of being a dog parent is understanding that they won't always be around. Sooner or later, Edison's dog bowl will stay empty. Sooner or later, this couch will seem twice as long as it does now.

And so I give everything I've got to our embraces. Whenever I pet Edison, it's with a focus and intensity that keeps my mind locked in the "here and now". Every time I scratch his neck, every time we snuggle, every time I pluck burrs from his paws, it's with the understanding that we'll only have so many more moments like this. Our special bond, like all bonds, is a fleeting thing. Even though Edison is as deaf as his namesake, I whisper into his ear how deeply I love him, how he'll always be my special buddy, how he's "the most bestest boy in the whole wide world". I tell him that he's smart, and cooperative, and loyal, and sweet-natured. Only the latter two of those things are true, but I want him to feel good about himself. Besides, he doesn't hear a lick of it. For all he knows or cares, I might as well be reciting the Gettysburg address. But he can feel what I am saying to him. For the remainder of his days, he will be assured of my devotion.

Edison, Bear, Daniel, and I share the bed every night. Unfortunately, Edison has no gift for geometry, and Bear is basically a skittish pony disguised as a dog, so cramming us all onto a queen-sized mattress is often a clumsy business. Paws poke into backs, limbs collide, the real estate is badly subdivided, everybody snores ... but we make it work. We make it work because we have to.

Unlike people, dogs always remain in the moment. They may wait, with varying degrees of patience, for anticipated events ... meals, walks, a parent returning home from the salt mines ... but for the most part they seem to exist entirely in the present. They are the masters of mindfulness.

When I hold Edison, my senses snap back to the experience at hand. I note the texture of his fur and the mélange of odors trapped within. I listen to the sound of his breathing, the purring rumble of his satisfaction. My heart rate slows, as does his. My muscles unclench, as do his. The noise of the world diminishes, unresolved crises fade, the inchoate terrors of tomorrow dissolve ... until there is only this old dog, my noble friend and I, sharing a quiet moment of fellowship in the middle of nowhere. He can't hear the train whistle, though he may feel the rumble of the tankers in the trembling of our house. He sometimes feels me crying against his neck, and hooks a sympathetic foreleg over my wrist. And in this way we mark the passing of time, curled up against one another, healing neglected injuries. These are moments of mutual restoration, and I wouldn't trade them for anything. Edison is curing more maladies than he will ever know.

Those pills he takes with his meals are just the beginning. The roster of remedies will likely grow in the years to come. He will need more drugs, more doctor visits, more patience. But we'll be ready when the time comes. That's the deal we're keeping, he and I, until the very end. I'll help take care of Edison's medicine, and Edison will help take care of mine. Because for me, the phrase "Edison's medicine" has two meanings.

Edison has medicine. Edison is medicine.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

When I Was A Princess

Ever since I was a little boy, the role of royalty in fairy tales has always confused me. My grasping young mind seized upon princesses ... their beautiful costumes, their perfect hair, how they always seemed to get the happy ending they wished for (whether or not they really deserved it). But my mental picture of life as a medieval princess had been mostly formed by Disney movies and treacly storybooks, and these cotton-candy fantasies were, of course, way out of whack with the harsh actualities of the Middle Ages: stinking gutters, festering sores, tooth decay, mass starvation. In fact, being a real princess probably sucked, day-to-day, though I'm sure it was still substantially nicer to be a princess than a peasant. I'd reckon that it still is.

I’ve come to realize that my fascination with princesses was due more to the aesthetic and romantic awakening such tales ushered into my imagination than any real admiration for wealth. Growing up as a queer kid, in every sense of the word, and trying to figure out my place on the gender spectrum, I had to admit that I often identified more with princesses than princes. Princesses had better outfits, for starters, and simpler narrative arcs; they basically had to just wait around for a handsome prince to come along, and he would whisk them away to an enchanting castle, which presumably had good ventilation and abundant fireplaces, and life would forever after be perfect.

The messages us kids got from these stories were of dubious morality. Cinderella married out of her class by virtue of her comeliness, an impractical shoe, and a little magical trickery. Sleeping Beauty was a princess disguised as a peasant, who could only be rescued from her coma by a wealthy and apparently none-too-picky heir. Snow White married a would-be necrophile. Rapunzel was a captive virgin with good shampoo.

An observant friend of mine once said about Disney movies that it was “better to not look under the hood.” These are the shitty takeaways I got from watching Disney tales: “Girlfriend Be Trippin’ If She Thinks She Can Marry Into Wealth And Escape From Her Lowly Social Strata ... But Oh Wait, Here Comes Drunk Magic Grandma, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, Have A Hoopskirt And Some Pearls, There, Problem Solved”; “Girlfriend Better Not Turn Sixteen Because She Already Pissed Off The Green Sorceress Just By Being Born An Attractive Female And Now She’s Gotta Watch Out For Dragons And Country Antiques, Oops, Well, Shit, She Pricked Her Finger And Now She's In A Coma, What A Bummer, Hope A Horny Prince Shows Up”; “Girlfriend Better Not Eat That Drugged Apple After Getting High As Balls On Mushrooms And Singing To Wildlife And Shacking Up With Seven Random Dudes She Met In The Woods Because Sleep-Rape Is Apparently An Acceptable Practice In This Moral Landscape, And By The Way, Her Stepmother Is A Murderous Witch Who Asked A Hunter To Bring Her Bloody Heart Back In A Box”; “Girlfriend Better Stop Singing About Freedom And Mobility And Start Reinforcing The Patriarchal Order Through A Sad Regime Of Self-Denial Or Else She’ll Be Cursed By The Scary Octopus Drag Queen Into Having A Body That Probably Menstruates”; “Girlfriend Better Not Try To Educate Herself Through Reading But Should Instead Cave In To Stockholm Syndrome So She Can Come To Love Her Hairy And Violent Captor Who's Really Deep Down A Sensitive Guy, Honestly, Despite His Animal Rages And Dangerous Possessive Behaviors And Obvious Psychological Instability”; “Girlfriend Better Cooperate With Racist Colonialists If She Knows What’s Good For Her”; “Girlfriend Better Dress Like A Dude And Wield A Sword To Get Anywhere In Life”; and so on.

Why did the storytellers of yore aggrandize the aristocracy? Weren't kings and princes and dukes, at least historically speaking, usually the oppressors? When many of these popular fables were being formed, the peasants were still suffering under the rule of the fortunate few. The real history of royalty is rife with incest, inbreeding, religious persecution, torture, suppression of dissent, excessive taxation. So why, then, were the rich and powerful so often made into the centers of our fairy tales? Why do we cheer for the “charming” prince, who rides into the scene and sweeps our poor lady protagonist up and away to a better life? Why do we lionize the merciful king who throws lavish balls and stays executions, or thrill to the plots of the wicked queen? Why do we confuse true love with economic agency?

We do this because power makes for a seductive escape. It's easier to imagine being rescued. The prince just showed up, with white teeth and a white carriage ... what could possibly go wrong?

But when I went to college and studied history and actually got a chance to view images of real royalty in action, I had to admit my disappointment. What I saw looked nothing like what Disney and company had prepared me for. All those tapestries and etchings revealed a much sadder, grimier life.

Poor princess. I see her in her lonely tower, wearing a dumb conical hennin and a heavy-lidded, somewhat dopey expression. She has the double chin, pouty mouth, and baggy eyes of a medieval woodcut, and she always looks like she’s suffering from a bad cold. She's attended by maids and a homely matron and maybe a unicorn, and she’s pretty much resigned to a lifetime of making bad embroidery and mooning over dreamy brigands. Her “entertainment” mostly consists of watching sad syphilitic jesters or doing that lame limpwristed dancing courtiers used to do. You know the kind I mean ... twirling about and hopping with hands upheld, bowing to one another, prancing back and forth across the flagstones, making uneventful circles, all to a namby-pamby melody of sackbuts and flutes. Blech. Given that I'm a homosexual with a crinoline in his closet, you'd probably think that I'd be gleefully clapping my hands for all this cutesy curtseying and jangling of tambourines and such ... but insipid pageantry totally turns me off.

It's really no different today. We have become so removed from the primary objectives of survival that we seek to derive meaning from media depictions, from virtual representations, rather than through our own direct experiences. We talk about movies now rather than myths, celebrities instead of heroes, plots instead of legends. We are encouraged to define ourselves by the roles we occupy within businesses, by our placements within economic taxonomies, and not by our vocations or passions. We accept the narrative that hard work and fair play will get us to a place of stability and harmony, to a land of plenty, and are disappointed when we don't get the expected results. The American Dream itself is a form of fairy tale, one in which each of us will get the castle we so richly deserve. For some, the handsome prince is a one-way ticket past the moat.

Reality television is so popular because it perfectly reflects the boredom and spiritual vacuity of our culture. We get off on rehab redemptions, ugly duckling makeovers, riches-to-rags stories. We obsess over famous trainwrecks, simultaneously envying and scolding those who are richer and more reckless than we'll ever get to be. In watching their lives unfold before us, we want to feel an attendant rush of adrenaline, while avoiding actual discomfort or injury. We ridicule celebrities for their failings, while aping their influence and purchasing the products they endorse. We gravitate towards images of the rich and powerful, yet we relish every reminder of their human frailty. Our grocery store aisles are filled with shame and schadenfreude. The next time you’re at the market, just take a look at the tabloids glaring at you. Look at all those princes and princesses, publicly flayed for real or imagined sins.

We used to slay dragons; now we covet expensive sneakers. We used to tell tall tales of royalty; now we tell tall tales of supermodels and gangsters. Not much has changed ... just the bling.

I remember learning as a kid how important brands had become. One's identity was tied to adherence to a brand strategy. Of course, being a nervous adolescent, I got just as caught up in the horseshit as everybody else. In middle school, I once threw a hissy fit because a pair of cool girls two grades above me suggested I wear a particular sweater/collared shirt combo, and my parents simply couldn’t afford it. I stamped my feet and howled and wished that I could be more like the princesses, who dressed smartly and had lots of money and who seemed to wield some kind of power that the rest of us didn’t have.

Since then, though, I've learned a thing or two about class. I discovered, with a mixture of surprise and relief, that it's been the same since the days of Versailles: your class and your economic prospects can often be determined by the costumes you wear. Sometimes a person's character is not described so much by their own interests, their strengths, their morality, but by their adherence to (or outright rejection of) a quickly changing code of fashion.

That said, people who actively transform themselves to better reflect their inner lives really move me. I am stirred by self-actualization, especially in the face of stifling conformity. One day in downtown Seattle, I saw a transwoman in what was obviously an early stage of public interfacing, walking out of a building for what may have been the very first time. And I say this without a drop of condescension or snark, but rather with the deepest admiration ... I was impressed. I could see her nervousness, the shaky breath she took before stepping out of the vestibule. I could tell that this was a giant leap of faith she was taking. It would have been wildly inappropriate for me to approach her, but I so desperately wanted to. I felt such a strong urge to cheer her on that tears came to my eyes; instead, I just gave her the biggest smile I could, which was returned with some visible relief. So I’ll say now what I wanted to say to her then.

“I see you, sister, taking your first tentative steps out in public. I see that you are making an artwork of yourself, revealing the sculpture of your femininity with a chisel. Okay, maybe at this point it's more like you’re using a jackhammer, but still … you’re working to define yourself aesthetically and conceptually. You're becoming who you were always meant to be. Maybe you’re just beginning this transformative work, armed with only with a tube of shitty dimestore lipstick, an ill-fitting dress, some awkward heels, a crooked wig … but the results, for all their sincerity and pluck, are beautiful. You are so much more a real princess in my eyes than Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or any of those other doe-eyed confections Disney sold us on. I see your courage and your commitment. I see your grace revealing itself in stages. I see your majesty, your majesty. You don’t need a prince to rescue you. You’re rescuing yourself. You go, girl.”

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a princess, sort of … though I secretly and more fervently envied the starchy villainesses, with their high eyebrows and pointy shoulders and severe hair. They had more glamor, and power, and there was something satisfying about their unremitting bitchiness, something that spoke to my own nascent and unsatisfied cruelty. But I grew out of it. So now this is what I want to say to the younger me, the one who wanted to be a princess, or a queen: forget about the damnable royals. There's no time to waste in aping them bitches. Become yourself. Your youth is going to pass so swiftly. Focus on your family, your best friends. Ignore the cool kids, the shiny popular ones with good hair and good clothes, because they will peak early, and unremarkably. It'll be the outcasts who matter to you in the long run. Stick with the lonely ones, the nerds and the misfits and the dark mysterious ones with hooded eyes, because you will spend decades adoring them, because they'll become your most loyal friends, the ones who will see you and accept you for who you really are. Focus on your real wealth: the people you love, the people who will love you back. The fake princesses will die a thousand daily deaths, suffocated by their peroxide and pearls, humiliated by their own vanities … while you will remain surrounded by jewels, your genuine ones, your flawed and pitted and perfect treasures, your heroes, your royalty.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Message From An Injured Bird

Anastasia is a barrier island near St. Augustine, in the northeastern "First Coast" of Florida. Shaped roughly like a lobster claw, it stretches fourteen miles from inlet to inlet, yet it runs only about two miles across at its broadest point. For the majority of its length, less than a mile separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Matanzas River. Vulnerable, serene, imbued with a quiet magic, Anastasia is an important stopping point for several species of migrating birds, a haven for deer and geckos, and a prime nesting ground for sea turtles. It has also been my home for the past four years.

When viewed from above and facing north, the right pincer of the lobster claw is occupied entirely by Anastasia Island State Park, roughly 1,600 acres of pristine dunes, mangrove hammock, and marshland. A broad tidal estuary known as The Salt Run divides the two upper parts of the island ... the developed part to the west, and the wild, sandy, raw part to the east. Because of this topography, the outermost shore of the island stands at a significant remove from buildings, trees, utility poles, or most other vertical elements. Thus, a beachcomber walking on the outer shore is treated to one of the most awe-inspiring vistas on the entire Eastern Seaboard. One would be hard-pressed to find a bigger dome of uninterrupted sky anywhere ... a view hemmed only by low dunes on one side, and the curvature of the Earth on the other. There are very few hints of civilization, save for planes or helicopters flying overhead, a faint glow from the historic downtown, the occasional buoy or washed-up bit of flotsam, and our majestic lighthouse, which towers over the dunes and casts its roving beam across the entirety of the landscape.

For much of the past four years, I've been walking this glorious beach nearly every day, usually at sunset. Now that my time in St. Augustine is drawing to a close, my hours here have come into an especially sharp focus. My daily walk on the beach has become a ritual of vital importance.

Most of the sand here is fairly coarse, made up of quartz, pulverized shell, grit from broken coral, and flakes of silica. The heavier material is a rusty tan color, with finer grey grains drifting into piles and plateaus. Flat stretches of white get interspersed with a tarry black, creating dazzling marble patterns. Every acre of exposed beach contains the remains of trillions of life forms: clams, oysters, snails, crabs, lobsters, urchins. It's full of fascinating finds ... every so often, things like shark teeth, 16th Century Spanish relics, and rare coins from shipwrecks will pop up.

Below all this painterly variety lies a foundation of coquina, a natural concrete composed of compressed shells. This material, so resilient that cannonballs will sink into walls made of it, was the island's chief commodity during the era of Spanish colonization. St. Augustine’s famous Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the United States, was built using coquina, along with several of the town's earliest buildings.

The dunes themselves are held together with sea oats, a type of tall reed with strong roots, as well as a number of flowering vines, sea grapes, and bush daisies. Hidden among the rises and falls of this terrain thrives an entire ecosystem: gopher tortoises, brown water snakes, marsh rabbits, ghost crabs, armadillos, and the critically endangered Anastasia Island beach mouse. Dolphins leap between the whitecaps, sharks and pompano slice through the shallows. Right whales blow in the distance. Several species of bird can be found here, in large numbers: the least tern, the royal tern, the great egret, laughing gulls, turkey vultures, cardinals, pileated woodpeckers, ruddy turnstones, willets, ospreys, roseate spoonbills, wood storks, black skimmers, loons, and pelicans.

The pelicans are my favorite. They can be seen alone, or moving in “squadrons” of up to a dozen birds. Their hunting technique is impressive … they climb high into the air, circle around a few times as they observe their prey, and then go into a steep dive, plunging into the water with astonishing force. The resulting splashes of white can be seen from quite a distance, and can easily be mistaken for whale spouts.

When they're not actively searching for food, though, the pelicans engage in a remarkable display of agility ... they coast in long processions, single file, floating only a few inches above the water. It's amazing to see them knifing alongside the breakers or following the flat expanses further out. This very low and daring flight pattern utilizes an aerodynamic principle known as "compression gliding", in which a cushion of air forms between the slightly cupped wings and the relatively smooth surface below. It's a highly efficient form of movement, as it conserves energy that will be needed later for gaining altitude. Yet I've come to suspect that this particular behavior is not merely a matter of economy.

I believe that this is the pelican's art.

Or, more accurately, that this is the nearest equivalent to how we humans use art, as an outward expression of one's inner experience. For many people, good art is a demonstration of virtuosity. Great art, in my view, is the consolidation of one's entire being into a meaningful gesture. It is a succinct depiction of the relationship between self and environment, between impulse and action, between transmission and reception. The pelicans' flight above the water has an unerring certainty, and it carries within it a charge of sublimity, perhaps even joy. Their formations are possessed of a grace unequaled by any of our crafts. It is as if the birds, individually and collectively, are expressing their mastery, their pride, the essence of their being.

Anastasia Island teems with life ... but like all environments under scrutiny, it will also sometimes present sobering reminders of death.

Last year, on one of my many beach walks, I came across a mortally injured cormorant. Its wing had been badly mauled, probably by a boat propeller, and it was struggling to hold the ruined limb aloft as it limped around on the surf.

My guts churned to see the creature in such a sorry state. Clearly it was in terrible pain, but I had no idea of how to help. I tried to approach the bird several times, but it always retreated. No matter how often I paused, how softly I spoke or slowly I moved in, it continued to panic and flee from my advances.

Using my phone, I searched on the internet for somebody to call. Surely there had to be a department for this kind of emergency. There had to be an official out there who could help alleviate this poor animal's suffering. But the late hour was working against us ... it was already early evening on the weekend, when most offices were closed. I called nearly a dozen numbers, and every single one went straight to voicemail. Finally, I was able to contact an after-hours emergency veterinarian willing to treat injured shorebirds. He advised me to carefully capture the bird, bring it in, and they would see if it could possibly be rehabilitated. But therein was the problem ... how could I possibly do this? I had carried nothing with me, no bags or blankets or ropes or nets or any viable means with which I could safely transport this animal. Worst of all, I was easily three miles away from my car. Even if I were successful in somehow seizing and subduing this justifiably snappy cormorant, I certainly couldn't carry it in my arms for such a distance, especially giving the fragile state of its wing. My best hope would to hike back to my car, rush home, and re-equip myself for a challenging rescue.

"I'll be back," I said. "I promise." I already knew that this was folly, but I was determined to try.

The sun continued to sink as I started my return journey. Eager to distract myself from the agony I had just witnessed, I turned my attention outwards, to the Atlantic. The lights of shrimping boats blinked on, illuminating swarms of gulls. I looked to the waves themselves, mesmerized as their crests got tinted by the sunset and the hazy hues of the horizon: lilac, cream, a dusty rose. Streaks of saffron climbed the inner surfaces, while silver flattened the backs. A lacework of froth skimmed the troughs.

About an hour later, I made it back to my car. A sheet of clouds had moved overhead. I sped home, where I grabbed a laundry basket, several blankets, some bottled water, and a flashlight. I immediately returned to the beach, which had by now been plunged into total darkness, with neither moon nor stars to relieve the black.

At low tide, the long slope that descended from the berm would be much easier to walk upon, the sand having already been compacted by the pounding surf. But at high tide, treading along the narrow and steep expanse that remained above the swash became a challenging slog, especially in the dark. I felt both determined and ridiculous as I carried the padded laundry basket across the darkened beach. Normally, there would be enough ambient light to see at least the water's edge and perhaps some details of the terrain. On a clear night you could read a newspaper by the starlight alone ... but this low and thick cloud cover obscured everything, and so I had to rely entirely on my little flashlight. I swept the beam back and forth, making a continuous scan between the berm and the breakers.

The first mile passed. Then the second. Then the third.

I could not find the bird.

I knew that I had already covered the same distance as before, and had then gone a little further. Even without much in the way of visible landmarks, I was familiar enough with that expanse of Anastasia to know exactly how far I had walked. The northernmost end of the island was only another quarter mile away. But I found no hint of the cormorant. It had either gone back into the sea, and to its eventual death, or it had dragged itself further into the dunes and out of sight. Either way, it had traveled beyond my reach.

After searching for another hour or so, I surrendered. The shorebird would meet its fate, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I walked back in a state of deep despair and increasing exhaustion. By the time I finally arrived at my car, I had already walked across twelve miles of loose sand in the space of a single evening, and my calves were on fire. I leaned against my steering wheel and cried for a long time. "I'm sorry," I said, over and over again. "I'm so sorry."

The memory of that bird haunted me for months afterwards. I rationalized my grief away ... reassuring myself that I had done what little I could to aid a creature in distress. But the fact that I failed, or that the bird refused to cooperate and stay put long enough to be rescued, felt like some kind of terrible injustice. I wanted to ask for forgiveness, for some kind of acknowledgement that I had at tried my best, that my effort to set things right was a sincere, if unsuccessful, gesture of goodwill. Still I found myself wracked with guilt and sorrow. The sight of its ravaged wing re-emerged in my mind again and again.

Recently, though, I had the opportunity to reconsider my encounter with the shorebird, and the divine message occulted within.

Over the course of the last year, I have been working with psilocybin, cautiously and deliberately reintroducing this natural psychedelic into my mental health program. I've been taking very moderate "threshold" doses, often in the company of a trusted friend, and we've been enjoying our journeys together in a safe and appropriate setting: my favorite stretch of beach. The spiritual yield of these sessions has been incalculable. I should note here that I do not see any conflict between this work, which is a work of engagement and expansion, and the ongoing maintenance of my sobriety, which is a work of restraint and resolve. If anything, my recent experiences with psilocybin have made me even more grateful for the clarity of mind I've gained after ten years of avoiding alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other recreational drugs.

I've come to understand during these recent mushroom trips that the shore is an interface between worlds, a liminal space between the known human experience and the (metaphorically) unfathomable mysteries of the ocean. As such the beach offers up a treasury of valuable insights. The seemingly boundless expanse of ocean invites us to imagine time on a much vaster scale. The meeting of land and water lends itself to consideration of important but often intangible concepts ... like the ephemerality of all things, the hypothetical "authorship" of nature, and the importance of an individual observer's relative vantage point in the cosmos. The beachgoer, be they a saucer-eyed psychonaut or a zaftig Bathsheba in sunblock, comes to the sea to feel a sense of connection with the infinite. Whether we realize it or not, we are obeying some primal summons to meet our source. The sea draws us back because looking upon it reveals our place in the grand scheme of things.

On my most recent quest, I spent a fair bit of time examining my feelings on death, purpose, and the fleeting nature of all human achievement. I became fixated on the idea of "the record". Theosophists, quack mediums, and spiritual charlatans of the 19th Century spoke often of "The Akashic Record" ("Akashic" being a misappropriation of the Sanskrit word for æther), and there's been a heap of New Age hooey piled atop the topic ever since. Nonetheless, it's a tantalizing idea to consider. There are correlating concepts in Buddhism, Jainism, and the Aboriginal Australians' non-linear experience of The Dreamtime, which shares the notion of an accessible ancestral memory.

This calls into question whether or not the universe itself has a memory. Will all of the things that ever existed within it, on our planet and the countless other worlds moving through space, be remembered or reflected upon? Did the universe invent life in order to gain some kind of awareness of itself, like a grand thought experiment or the material manifestation of a dream? Did matter (and by extension, sentience) blink into existence merely because the universe needed a mirror? Is there really a universal story that we are all contributing to, and who will be interpreting it? Are we merely an accident of physics, an inadvertent poem of carbon, or are we players on a grand stage?

Many creators are deeply interested in documenting their experiences for posterity. The impulse to make records in the form of artworks stems from the same imperatives as reproduction, storytelling, and the mythological anthropomorphizing of nature into humanlike deities. The ancient Egyptians and Mayans carved their histories in stone, while modern day artists use pixels and photographs and paintings. But all of these documents, be they monuments or temples or the Mona Lisa ... all are like sandcastles, subject to the inevitability of wind and tide. All things will eventually be returned to their constituent parts, disintegrated and reintegrated into new structures, new species, new stories. All gods will live and die, cresting like waves and withdrawing again into the roiling sea of thought. All human endeavor ... all religions and empires and arts and language ... will eventually be washed away. We are dunes, we are whitecaps, we are flecks of foam. The "divine" may be an action, not a being.

While watching a seagull peck at a helpless crab, I thought again of the injured cormorant, and its likely demise. I thought of how unfair this fate seemed, how cruel, and how even my pathetic attempt at rescue was in vain. "Why?" I asked, looking towards the spot where I had first encountered the bird. "Why did that have to happen?"

Just then a thought struck me, a truth so simple and direct and unvarnished that it could not have been a product of my own (admittedly Baroque) imagination. The answer had been sitting in plain sight all of this time, so obvious as to escape detection until this very moment, when I had stepped out of my narrow little ego for an instant and took a gander at the larger picture.

Every life and death is a testament.

Every life, no matter how brief, how small or tenuous or insignificant it may seem, offers some degree of feedback to the macrocosmic observer. Like an organ sending pain or pleasure to the body that envelopes it, each utterance, movement, breath, each wish or word or howl, each unfurling frond, each opening petal, each death rattle, each moment in the endless eternal dance of existence ... each relays a message to the higher consciousness. The baby that cries with its first gasp of air, the injured bird that squawks in pain and fear ... both are speaking directly to the cosmos, saying, "I am here. This is my message to you. Listen."

I speak now of the macrocosm, the collective being that envelopes us and binds our molecules and sets into motion the whirls and eddies of evolution. Call this entity what you will ... "God", "Shiva", "a higher power", "the almighty", "the man behind the green curtain", "the universe" ... the macrocosmic sentience receives these messages and responds. In the same way that we acknowledge the pain from stepping barefoot on a broken seashell, or we delight in the tender caution of a first kiss, our cosmos reacts to the signals we send. It responds with amplifications, adjustments, corrections, balances, rewards, punishments, obstacles, keys, barriers, gifts. It is listening, all the time.

No life is meaningless. Not the blade of grass, nor the beetle that gnaws on it. There is no mineral without a soul, nor is there any villain without merit. Each living thing contributes its understanding of the world, its actions and growth and death being a form of testimony, an accounting of its time on the planet. Consider the songs of whales, and what they might tell us about time and creation ... perhaps they push their poems through the water in the form of sonic shapes, sharing ancient hymns of love and valor. Perhaps they venerate gods that dwarf our cosmologies. Think of the subtle prompts of slime molds, the whispers of an aspen grove, the quiver of a bee, a murmuration of swallows. Even the tardigrade has its tale to tell.

On one of my latest walks, I came across a dead pelican. The two halves of its open beak were jabbed sideways into the sand, its open eye stared sightlessly into the sky, and the breeze animated its feathers in an unsettling parody of flight. It had died so recently as to look intact, almost alive.

As the sun dipped behind the dunes, I stood for a long time above the corpse, gazing upon it with a mixture of admiration and pity. I hoped that this animal did not suffer, in the way that the doomed cormorant had. I hope that it enjoyed many hours of smooth flight above the waves, taken many satisfying plunges into the sea, that it had found its mate, that it had known moments of grace. I hoped that its final moments were peaceful. I wondered then if its experiences and feelings and thoughts had been recorded somewhere. Was the perfection of its flight seen and appreciated? Did its life transmit some meaningful message? Was that message ever received, and by whom?

All of my works are an attempt to transmit discoveries. The hum of the sublime may be apprehended, or ignored. But the birds need no brushes or keys or chisels to deliver their testaments. Their arts are flawless.

Nothing is lost. Everything is seen and heard. All is as it should be. The sand is full of stories, and the roving dunes will reveal the fate of all stories. The footprints you have left are already disappearing. The injured bird has spoken. The dead are still speaking. The gods in the waves are listening.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Here's another sneak peek at the big artwork reveal for March. [C] was started in 2019 as a collaborative brainstorming enterprise with co-creator and project incubator Ross Muller. It's morphed in scope and focus over the past four years, and these paintings are the result ... one hundred canvases, all executed using only Ivory Black and Titanium White, showing a broad range of styles, subjects, and moods. Signed prints will be going on sale in March, to fund the establishment of a new studio in Tennessee. Stay tuned!

[coreymichaelsmithson]

I Gave My Heart To The Junkman

Yesterday I sold my best friend to a stranger for $315.

This was, of course, far less than what a 2005 Kia Sedona ought to fetch, even for scrap alone. There were certainly a lot of useful parts still tucked inside ... but beyond any question of material worth, the sentimental value was incalculable. After all, I had poured so many financial and emotional resources into this long-term relationship, and steadfastly made repairs whenever the need arose, and had shown more unflagging devotion to this soccer-mom minivan than I had for some of my boyfriends, jobs, teeth, and homes. She was my first car, and like any first love, a first car carries a special significance.

I bought my Pamela in March of 2017, springing her from a dusty little shitpot in Bonner Springs, Kansas. I paid $2300 in cash for her, and easily poured ten times that amount into repairs. In just under six years, I replaced her starter, radiator, alternator, thermostat (twice), drive shafts, brakes, catalytic converters, power steering pump, rear shocks, rack and pinion, tie rods, hub and bearing, window motor, door actuator, timing belt, alternator belt, EGR valve, purge solenoid, charcoal canister, air conditioning compressor, cooling fan, valve cover gasket, tensioner and idler pulleys, exhaust Y-valve, oxygen sensors, hood struts, coils, hoses, filters, batteries, rear window, and three camshaft position sensors. We broke down in Iowa, Colorado, Washington, and Florida. We blew tires in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Georgia. I got to know the various components of my vehicle, one by one, as they fell apart.

Last week, she failed to start. In and of itself, this wasn't anything new, as she had crapped out so often in the past. But this time felt different, somehow. There was something so final about this silence. I knew, in that moment, that Pamela just didn't want to go any further. She had gone far enough.

With a heavy heart, I made arrangements with the junkman to come cart her away. I took the next few days to clean her out, retrieving all the tools, camping gear, and souvenirs I had stashed in her crates and cargo areas. The last thing I removed was the bobbing statue of Hula Girl, which I had glued to the dashboard back in Missouri. Her nose had gotten chipped in Iowa, when a sudden crosswind thwacked my camera's lens cap across her face ... but her irrepressible smile and cheerful ALOHA had accompanied me for over 99,700 miles, and I couldn't bear to leave her behind. I did, however, tear off the last few shreds of her disintegrating grass skirt, which no longer afforded her any dignity.

I sat for a long while in the driver's seat, holding the wheel that had been in my hands for thousands of hours. Its foam grip had been shredded by the stress of too many white-knuckled rides, all those times when I prayed for us to make it through blinding downpours or snowstorms or terrifying deep country two-lanes or narrow construction zones.

Sitting there, like a kid playing vroom vroom in the family car, I recounted some of our many adventures aloud. "Remember driving down the Vegas Strip? That supercell catching up with us in Valentine? That sunset in the wind farm? Heading out to the Olympic Coast? Devil's Tower? Ed Gein's place? Tinkertown? Bonneville? Waco? That refinery by Dodge City? Sunrise at Monument Valley? That one flat we got in Viroqua, and the farmer helping us change it? Dawn at Cades Cove? Those little hilltop dairy farms in The Driftless? The Badlands? The rim of Bryce Canyon? The meadow in South Park? The pueblos at Bandelier? Finding the trail at Butler Wash? The caves of Maquoketa? Picking up that hitchhiker in Dinosaur? Taking the Mountain Loop Highway up to Big Four? Morning mist on Steamboat Slough? The salmon run at Granite Falls? Taking the Alaskan Way Viaduct? Running along the Skykomish? The vultures on 312? Shiloh? Hooking up with the guys at Magnetic Springs? Going up Mt. Baker?" This went on for ages. Each memory brought to mind another, and another, experiences strung in sequence like beads on a string, a rosary of perils and deeds. After about ten minutes, my soliloquy devolved into a précis ... all I had to do was murmur "Kitty Hawk" and we returned immediately to one of the worst nights in our history, when we had to drive 700 miles through a tornado outbreak with a busted alternator and half a dozen batteries, sometimes driving blind in the rain without headlights or windshield wipers. We had so many close calls in our time together, and our survival sometimes seemed miraculous.

Finally, words failed me, and I wept. I sat there, finding myself once again broke and broken, a few weeks shy of turning forty-nine, devastated at another huge loss, crying my eyes out because my car wouldn't start.

Pamela had listened to me laugh, scream, sing. She heard my deepest secrets, my most buried fears, all the things I will never share with another living soul. She held space, literally and figuratively, as I processed early traumas, the kinds of injuries that had to be coaxed out of my soul like splinters. She kept me company as I mourned lost friendships, raged at failed opportunities, exulted over spiritual and professional victories, learned the lyrics to dozens of showtunes, and sifted through the smoldering wreckage of too many love affairs. She saw me at my very best and my very worst.

We traveled from coast to coast, crossed the Mississippi dozens of times, explored every kind of terrain in the continental US. We'd chased after tornadoes in Nebraska, dodged hailstones the size of tangerines in Oklahoma, coasted into Death Valley with squealing brakes, gunned through the Cascades on bald tires. We'd raced across salt flats and skidded out on gravel roads and slid on ice and got stuck in the mud. We climbed narrow mountain roads, corkscrewing upwards like a buggy in a Disney darkride, and were rewarded near the summits by whispering aspen groves and skies the color of lead. We followed thunderheads across hundreds of miles of cornfields, doubled back to photograph collapsing barns, got lost and found and lost again. We nearly ran out of gas on a stretch of moonlit desert, and were almost forced off the road by a madman near Mexican Hat. We saw insect swarms, murmurations of starlings, clouds rising from firs, incandescent sunsets, fogbound highways at 4:am, hazy feedlots, mine shafts, floodwaters, dust devils, wildfires. She had given me a treasury of beauty.

Pamela drove me to jobs in corporate office demolition, sanitation, construction site cleanup, disaster services, aerospace manufacturing, warehouse fulfillment, toy merchandising, and food delivery. She waited in parking lots while I went skydiving and whitewater rafting and hiking, while I ate, slept, got laid, gathered sharks' teeth, watched lions mate, and raised a circus tent. She carried me to zoos, sex clubs, cemeteries, battlefields, dormant volcanoes, dams, lighthouses, shipwrecks, museums, rodeos, waterfalls, weird roadside attractions, a nude beach, a monastery, a cassowary ranch, and the homes of countless friends. We saw Monterrey, Santa Fe, Orlando, Tukwila, Minneapolis, Fort Sumner, Little Rock, Mukilteo, Pensacola, Oso, Tulsa, Jupiter, Oakland, Bellingham, Eureka Springs, St. Louis, Mosca, Wichita, Portland, Pahrump, Ocracoke, Waco, Memphis, Sarasota, Montgomery, Estes Park, Vernal, Coeur d'Alene, Peoria, Birmingham, Lumberton, Des Moines, Topeka, Darwin, Beaverton, Bemidji, Enid, Deadwood, Hot Springs, Cullman, Austin, Ocean Springs, Chattanooga, Carlinville, Abilene, Darrington, Nashville, Moab, Pagosa Springs, McEwen, and innumerable parks, farms, rivers, and valleys. She took me to Judy Garland's birthplace in Grand Rapids and my own origin point in Ellensburg. We killed a hare near Ogallala and drove below arches made of lightning. We endured for far too long the joyless mazes of suburbia. She brought me into and back out of my homeland. She was my home at times.

Yesterday, a tow truck showed up on Reef Drive, our residence for the last four years. Pamela was marooned just behind her usual spot, along a hedge at the front of the property, in the shade of a nearby palm. A flock of scarlet ibises used to roost on her roof, and a clowder of feral kittens sometimes took shelter beneath her when it rained. There was a big rectangle where the grass had long ago given up and stopped growing. All of this was about to change.

The junkman was a friendly, toothless old chap named Thomas, and he had been doing this job for decades. His skin had been leathered by the sun, his hair bleached into straw, and save for the ball cap and tee shirt he looked exactly like a Gold Rush prospector. On his flatbed slumped a '71 Ford Bronco which had clearly seen better days. In any other circumstances, I'd be delighted to photograph such a wreck ... its windows were blown out, most of its panels were rusted, and it had an appealing patina of green mold, the sort of picturesque decay that I've spent decades documenting. But now it all seemed just too sad for words ... two old vehicles, far past their prime, being taken out to pasture. I thought of how horses used to get shot if they couldn't be ridden anymore.

Thomas indicated that my car seemed to be in pretty salvageable shape, though, and that she was likely to undergo a refurb rather than being scrapped altogether. This gave me a ray of hope that perhaps Pamela might yet play a special role in somebody else's life, and that just because our road had come to an end did not mean she herself was destined for oblivion.

I told him a little about the vehicle he was buying, how famous she was, how there were loyal followers around the world who had been cheering her on for the past several years. "This isn't just a car," I said. "Pamela's been through a lot. She's special." I told him about the memoir I published last year, about how we had traveled together over the whole country and seen the most incredible sights. He nodded and smiled and feigned interest, as he pointed out the numerous papers for me to sign off on. Then he handed me a check, which seemed pitifully small in my hands, and he set about hooking my poor old hooptie onto the tow rig.

I'd witnessed this ritual so many times ... the slow humiliating whine as my baby got hoisted into position, the rattle of chains around her undercarriage, the sinking helpless feeling as the tow truck lurched forward. I had already seen her get pulled away when her radiator blew up in Boulder, when her starter crapped out in Bothell, when her fuel lines got clogged in St. Augustine. But this time was different. This time there would be no joyful reunion at the shop. I stood across the street, and the reality of the situation hit me full force. Pamela, the car who had transformed my entire life, who had freed me from a desperately unhappy stint in Kansas City, who had framed most of America in her windshield, was leaving me forever. In a few minutes, she would disappear, and that would be that.

It's different in the movies, when a love story wraps up. Your heroes ride off into the sunset together, and the music swells, and THE END appears in big fancy letters over the clouds. And as the credits roll and you stand and brush popcorn from your lap you enjoy a tidy sense of closure. There is a clear sense of something having been finished, of a narrative having reached its rightful conclusion. My last few minutes with this minivan, on the other hand, felt weirdly anticlimactic and unsatisfying. I caught a few seconds of video on my phone as the tow truck began its journey. Then I just stood in the middle of the road with my arms hanging limply at my sides and watched as the most meaningful possession of my life rolled away, growing smaller and smaller until she reached the end of the block. And then the tow truck rounded the corner, and left my view altogether, and my Pamela was finally gone.

"Goodbye, old girl," I said, wiping my eyes. "Goodbye." Then I went back to my studio, returned to my easel, picked up a brush, and began the search for a new frontier.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Things That Happened This Year

2022 was, for the most part, a challenging year … one marked by some crushing disappointments, a few deep heartbreaks, and a great deal of hard work. But, in looking back at the big picture, I’m seeing now that it was also a period of significant artistic achievement and spiritual growth.

I spent the first few minutes of 2022 making a pot of shitty coffee for an AA meeting in Dickson, Tennessee. Perhaps this wasn’t the most glamorous of activities I could have chosen for ringing in the New Year, but it seemed to portend a year of searching for significance in ordinary moments. I was there to support my partner Daniel and our mutual friends in recovery, all of whom had done more than their share of partying in the past. Many of the folks gathered there had already survived the worst kind of personal disasters … incarcerations, incinerated family trees, homelessness, ruined holidays, domestic violence, illness, car crashes, custody battles … and now they were gathered together in a somber room, reflecting upon the choices they had made and the sundry crises that had brought them there, expressing thankfulness and a renewed resolve in this season of fellowship.

In the first few days of January, my two-year-old computer bit the dust. This machine, which had cost a pretty penny, had barely passed out of warranty, and it died in such a way that repairs would run nearly as much as a new computer. By the end of the year, my backup laptop had also become unusable, and my phone crapped out. My debit card number got stolen, and I scrambled to refute a bunch of fraudulent charges. I suffered a painful attack of gout, and a weird bout of food poisoning while traveling through South Carolina. I caught COVID for the third and fourth time. Both infections were nearly non-symptomatic, revealed only by rapid testing … but the latter event led to Daniel and I spending an unexpectedly romantic week together in quarantine.

St. Augustine got slammed by two hurricanes, Ian and Nicole. The first storm was a nerve-wracking game of “wait and see” … my housemate and I feared the possible eruption of the faulty sewage lifting station across from our home … but we got through it unscathed. Luckily, I’d already left town before the latter event, which caused significant damage to the dunes that protected our island from the wrath of the Atlantic. In the face of such implacable monsters, human civilization feels so fragile, and our many vulnerabilities are suddenly revealed.

Pamela and I celebrated our fifth anniversary and crossed our 98,000th mile as a team. She was mysteriously, but harmlessly, vandalized when somebody threw a bucket of a chalky white substance, something like diluted drywall mud, across her windshield. Her fuel system went tits-up, right as we started a road trip. She received a new thermostat (her third) rear shocks, front brakes, driver’s door window motor, hood struts, charcoal canister, exhaust gas recirculation valve, purge valve solenoid, an engine coil, and six spark plugs. We also had to replace her rear window, after a misunderstanding with a tree in a tight parking lot. During one of our voyages, Pamela lost a tire to a rusty scrap of metal left on the road. The mechanic who replaced it discovered, to his horror, that she was within a few miles of her wheel flying off altogether, due to an improperly secured axle nut. In other words, a flat tire may have saved my life.

I turned 48 getting lost in rural Alabama. I visited a number of small historical museums, where I saw Napoleon’s hairbrushes, Hitler’s tea service, some outlandish spy gear (including a .22 hidden in a flute), and two mummies. In Cullman, Alabama, I encountered one of the most stirring examples of outsider art in America … seven acres of sprawling architectural miniatures by the Benedictine monk Brother Joe, who dedicated nearly five decades to his wonky little assemblages of oyster shells, concrete, pumice, tiles, pottery shards, chicken wire, bottle punts, cold cream jars, costume jewelry, flashlight casings, compote dishes, beads, beach glass, and plastic toys.

I maintained my daily practice of strolling along the beach of Anastasia Island at sunset. I came upon two dead loons half-buried in the sand, as well as a mortally injured cormorant, I watched a pod of dolphins splash in the pink waters of dusk, and saw a shark slicing between the breakers. I witnessed a waterspout, walked through windblown foam as it piled upon the shore, and caught two rocket launches. I continued to study the Russian language, though with less fervor than before … the black-hearted prince who stole (and then discarded) my heart in 2021 also drained some of the oomph out of practicing this difficult, grumpy-sounding, maddeningly unspecific tongue. I beefed up my Instagram game, and made three bonfires to destroy old artworks. I also dipped my toe into the stock market, but quickly withdrew after I got a sense of its volatility. I visited the Torture Museum, the Shipwreck Museum, the Anniston History Museum, the Berman Museum, the Cummer Museum, and climbed once again to the top of St. Augustine’s famous lighthouse.

One of my closest friends and I underwent three psychedelic sessions on the beach, using sub-threshold doses of “Golden Teacher” psilocybin. The most memorable of these took place on Easter Sunday … we started our journeys at dawn, watching the sun rise over the Atlantic, and spent much of our day wading in the surf or exercising on the sand. I have rarely known such serenity, orderliness, and lucidity as I felt that morning.

This same buddy and I executed a pair of massive abstract paintings in his large but structurally unsound studio. From there, I helped him move into two subsequent spaces … first an unsuitable open-air washout and then an old-school office in Jacksonville’s coolest commercial building, the kind of joint where they gild your name on the door glass. We attended an art fair at West Palm Beach, and hobnobbed with a few gallerists, though this yielded no immediate results.

Professionally speaking, it was a densely-packed year. I cut several short-form documentaries for the Bank of America, including videos on Georgia O’Keeffe, Georges de La Tour, Remedios Varo, Berthe Morisot, Sandro Botticelli, George Caleb Bingham, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, and the Farnese Sarcophagus. I designed a book about the role of hormones in women’s health for a naturopathic doctor, and gained some new clients in the energy sector, writing whitepapers and other copy for companies in the hydrogen, oil, and natural gas industries. I continued the paralegal work I began last year, conducting interviews and writing essays for accident victims and their families. I edited two music videos for musicians … a photo/footage collage for the protest anthem “RISE” by Neycha, which won “Best Music Video” at a film festival, and a highly complicated 2.5-D animation for “INFINITE STARS” by Daniel Cartier Loves You.

Unfortunately, by mid-autumn my client work began to dry up. Financial difficulties cancelled out many plans … I missed a wedding (one that I really should have attended), I had to forgo my second ayahuasca journey, and I was unable to do any stormchasing.

I made good use of the downtime, though. I published two novels (“THE BROTHER OF MAGGIE BROOD” and “THE NOVA IN THE ATTIC”), and three memoirs (“THE PAMELA DIARIES”, “LOST AMONG THE MARIGOLDS”, and “RELISHED VICES”). Sent two of my books to the hosts of my favorite podcast, and didn’t receive a response. Pushed the needle forward on my fourth novel, “THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW”, started my fourth memoir, “HORSESHIT AND GLITTER”, and continued collaborating with a dear friend on our screenplay, “THE LAST BONANZA”.

I spent more time painting at my easel this year than I have during any other period of my career. I’m now on the final stretch of an ongoing project, which has been underway for four years: a suite of 100 black and white 12”x12” canvases. Most of them are done. I completed several abstract pieces, including “TARGETS”, “BONE DANCE”, and “LYRICAL I & II”. I started work on “FROST KING I & II”, “BIG TOP”, and kept going on the “BLUE ANGEL” series. I finished three commissions this year (“THE PEARL”, “NORMAN”, and “BLACK BELT”), and began two more (“CARDINALS” and “WARRIORS”).

Of these commissions, “NORMAN” proved to be the most surprising. The subject was a man who had died earlier in the year. He and his husband had built an expansive family of devoted friends, and his death came as a devastating shock to the entire community. With only a single photograph to go by, I started working … and all through the process, I felt as if the man himself was gently nudging me to add things, specific additions that were definitely not my own ideas. Eventually, the finished painting depicted a warmly smiling Norman against a saffron-colored ground, surrounded by a floral frame of grape leaves, vines, lilies, and roses. The recently widowed Bill, a wonderfully kind man, flew me out to California for an unveiling ceremony. He put me up for three days in their comfortable home in Davis, and graciously allowed me a full day’s use of his car. I drove around the Napa Valley, where I gazed at vineyards that had become a patchwork of autumnal splendor. On the eve of the unveiling, Bill and I stood before the shrouded painting, among forty of their dearest loved ones. He spoke at length about Norman’s legacy, and I read a quote about death by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. When the veil came down, and the portrait stood bare on its easel, a gasp of recognition rose among the crowd. Several attendees burst into tears. I don’t think I have ever been so humbled and grateful for an artwork’s reception. One by one, Norman’s friends came up and talked about what an incredible human being he was. One of his neighbors tearfully informed me that he had just planted lilies in her yard. Another recalled a recent discussion they had shared about roses. By degrees, it became clear that Norman had been communicating with these people through my hands. This painting was not so much an artistic success as it was a séance … I had merely acted as a conduit for Norman’s enduring love. Aside from helping me complete his own posthumous portrait, Norman had also taught me a vital lesson: live in such a way that you’ll still be speaking to your friends long after you die.

Many friendships rose and fell within my year. Some bonds were strengthened, and others lost. I forged new loves, revived dormant ones, and accepted an invitation that will undoubtedly change the course of my life.

I ended a long-term professional relationship, the one that brought me to Florida in the first place, though the brotherhood beneath it is now stronger and healthier than ever. I had a virtual reunion with one of my earliest photo models, a woman who has lost none of her glamor and allure in the last three decades, and cherished a delightfully unexpected real-life afternoon in Suisan City with one of my dearest friends from early adulthood. I played host to two visitors from out of town … a talented activist from New Hampshire, and a beloved spiritual niece from Memphis. Being a tour guide is one of my favorite ways to share time with friends, and it’s always fun to be a tourist in your own town.

Three of my friends died in 2022. One of the brightest luminaries in the Boston arts scene, and a champion of digital media, passed after complications from a fall. Another friend, who to all outward appearances was a sunny and charismatic prayer warrior, lost his secret battle with depression and took his own life, sending a large wave of grief outwards among our many mutual friends. One of my favorite studio mates from the Memphis College of Art passed away in her sleep. For the three years that we shared a studio, I relished our chatty and warm rapport. We used to smoke cigarettes on the school’s balcony, gazing through the large plate glass windows at our canvases in progress and critiquing each other’s work. She was an extraordinarily talented painter and sculptor, and a great raconteur, one of those stylish older ladies who somehow made dentures and smoker’s wrinkles and a blonde shag-cut look sexy. She worked for Judy Garland’s agent in the early ‘60s, and she shared many personal recollections about the star’s mercurial attitudes. Coincidentally, Judy herself bowed out on my pal’s 38th birthday.

I finally sliced a toxic ex-boyfriend out of my life. After years of trying to maintain some semblance of a friendship with him, I eventually realized that there would be no restoration of the love, respect, and interest that had evaporated between us. It came as a tremendous relief to realize that I could be much healthier and happier if I just stopped all of my fruitless efforts to meet his approval. Some relationships should be allowed to wither away.

Speaking of forgoing unhealthy relationships … in November I celebrated ten years of total freedom from alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and other recreational drugs. Aside from caffeine, the therapeutic use of psychedelics, and the occasional hit of isobutyl nitrite poppers during sexplay, I have lived an entirely sober life. The resulting clarity of mind and expansion of capacity have been invaluable, and I find myself deeply grateful for the decision I made in my late thirties, which allowed my forties be a much healthier and more productive decade.

Because of my busy studio life this year, I had to dial down my sexual and romantic adventures a little. I enjoyed a soulful and very sweet encounter with a silver-haired artist, who surprised me with his youthful vivacity and flexibility. Later that month, and without knowing the connection, I ended up screwing the daylights out of his accountant husband; it was then that I learned that both spouses had the same first name. I seduced a young architect on the beach, manhandled an elderly valet in his company car, and had a gleeful frolic with two friends in their lush backyard garden. I got busy with a soft-spoken railroad worker, a stunningly gorgeous line cook from Bangkok, and a boorish interior designer who wouldn’t shut up about his expensive (and, frankly, hideous) furniture. After a particularly sad day, I found comfort in the arms of a neighbor who had once starred in a porn movie, but now manages clinical research trials. I made several visits to the hotel room of an itinerant store merchandiser, one of the most angelically benevolent men I’ve ever met in my life, and we shared the kind of intimacy that can only emerge between kindred spirits. I spent one memorable evening with a horse rancher and his paralegal husband. The three of us chatted in the kitchen for an hour, and it seemed like they were perhaps a bit too nervous to take the plunge … but when we finally made it into their bedroom as a trio, I saw arranged on the credenza an astonishing array of adult toys and props and supplies, which sort of looked like a Brutalist nativity scene. I stared in slack-mouthed amazement at the display, pointed to one of the surreal objects standing there, and asked, “Uhhh … isn’t that supposed to go on top of the Christmas tree?”

Feeling starved of autumn’s vibrant colors, I took a spontaneous road trip up into Appalachia. I visited Asheville, Cumberland Mountain State Park, and Ozone Falls. I saw two historic bridges … Poinsett Bridge and Campbell’s Covered Bridge) and climbed to the top of Mt. Roosevelt’s fire road, where I found a spectacular scenic lookout. I shared a mellow moment on an old plantation porch with a cat named Cinnamon, the unofficial greeter of the Marble Springs Historic Site. I walked through three different cemeteries, and then wrote “THE GARDEN OF TIME” in response, an essay which contains perhaps the most forcible sentence I have ever written.

I visited Tennessee five more times … in February, April, June, October, and December. I helped Daniel set up his home studio, spending hours gluing Styrofoam panels into his closet in order to make an isolation booth. We snuggled up with four handicapped dogs and watched three Karen Black movies (“Burnt Offerings”, “Airport ’76,” and “Nashville”). I brought a little cheer to my honey by hiring his favorite comedian (Maria Bamford) and a legendary singer (Boy George) to send him some personalized video messages … it turns out that many celebrities will pimp themselves out to the hoi polloi for a quick buck, and it makes for a really nice surprise gift. We celebrated his birthday in style, with a grand backyard party hosted by one of his best friends, attended by his huge extended family of loved ones. This fête happened to fall on the same night as an impressive fireworks show, so we happily clung to one another as colorful explosions lit up the sky.

After we hit a rough patch near Thanksgiving, Daniel and I decided to temporarily put the brakes on our engagement, and took some time apart to reframe our relationship. We suffered independently of one another for a few weeks, each of us coping alone with our uncertainty and grief, before we realized that our bond was too rare and precious a thing to lose. So, caught up in the spirit of the holiday, and eager for a real reconciliation, I returned to Tennessee once again. I drove for thirteen hours straight, through freezing temperatures and slick roads, to spend the end of the year with my love. Pamela and I made it safely through the 700-mile journey, though at one point near the end we hit a solid sheet of ice and slid entirely off the road, squealing to a stop one inch away from the metal base of a road sign.

I showed up with several Christmas presents, all nicely wrapped with pink paper and ribbons. But Daniel gave me only one gift: a handwritten letter in which he invited me to come live in his house next spring, and share a home with him, and be his life partner. And I said, “Yes.”

So I’m writing this on a worn orange sofa in the tiny hamlet of McEwen, Tennessee, in a room that will someday become my next studio. My feet are resting against the belly of a deaf pit bull named Edison, who contentedly snores and farts while I peck at my laptop. My favorite tea, lapsang souchong, steams in a mug nearby. Over the next few days, Daniel and I will be going to more meetings, joining friends, comforting the lonely, hearing stories of people rebuilding their lives. If all goes according to plan, I will be spending the last few minutes of 2022 in exactly the same way I spent the first few minutes of it, brewing bad coffee with an ancient industrial percolator, surrounded by country folk in various stages of resurrection … a motley family of wrecks and revenants and survivors, phoenixes all. This New Year’s Eve, I’ll be casting my lot with the lucky ones, the ones who are doing their very best after doing their very worst, the ones who are already vowing to make next year better, the ones who are holding each other up, the ones who truly understand the meaning of gratitude.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

The Garden of Time

There is a special kind of melancholy that can set in at twilight, when you're traveling by yourself on the road. As you drive by multitudes of porches and vestibules, you'll see bulbs blinking on, lights meant to welcome visitors or residents, but none of these lanterns will be lit for you. After all, you're only a foreigner here, an observer drifting by. You're an alien with a yen for reportage. At night the comfort of each dwelling grows more tangible for its occupants ... but as these houses settle into their familiar routines of evening, the fact of your itinerancy slowly creeps into your mind, and you suddenly feel more lonesome than ever.

Your sadness arrives at an hour when meaningful things are supposed to happen. Families gather in their kitchens, kettles rumble, couples catch up over glasses of wine, kids report on school, dogs scarf down their supper. It's "down time", "me time", "us time". You pass windows that are lit from within, and watch silhouettes move across their shades, and from these shadows you infer the stuff of human life: company, warmth, cheer, hobbies, homework, television, reading, romance. Meanwhile, you're driving alone in your car, traveling at a remove from all of this, and you can only roll on into the night, the vast and frightening night that seems to stretch on forever from the edge of town. By the time you pass the last titty bar and chicken joint and car dealership, where the streetlights thin and the sidewalks end and the shopping carts remain in their resting places, you will find yourself in the real darkness, the country dark, and you'll cross through a quiet span of indigo into another realm. There you will feel especially disconnected and disenchanted, a stranger braving the space between islands of light. Perhaps you'll find a hotel, or a rest-stop, some kind of temporary shelter with crap coffee and intermittent WiFi. But it won't ever be home.

I’ve had many addresses, but I've never really known what “home” meant. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to escape my birthplace ... that land of mud and blood and lingering gloom, where centipedes wriggled under rotten wood, where the souls of men sprouted black fur in the fog. At eighteen I left for New York, a city with which I eventually achieved a certain level of mastery ... but my sense of ownership was short-lived, with none of the finality and certainty I'd always longed for. I felt temporarily "at home" in places like Rome, and Varanasi, and New Orleans, but I couldn't sustain a life in any of them. I've lived in Memphis, Boston, Brooklyn, Kansas City, St. Augustine. Each provided me with shelter, schooling, challenges, friends, opportunities to grow and thrive, but none really felt like home. I've searched in vain for a home in towns, schools, jobs, drugs, booze, sex, art, relationships. I've been seeking sanctuary for so long, and in so many different places, that I've come believe that the road itself must be my true home. Perhaps getting lost is how travelers find themselves.

For the past several days, I've been wandering at will through the rural southeast. This was a spur-of-the-moment trip, born out of that restlessness that always kicks in whenever I've been stuck in one place for too long. On a sunny Friday morning I sailed out of Florida with a full tank of gas and a can of soda, heading vaguely northwards, hoping to get good and lost in America.

At the time of this writing, my poor old rattletrap ("Pamela") and I have traveled together for 95,000 of her 261,000 miles. She’s really showing her age these days, and the stress of driving a worn-out soccer-mom minivan is beginning to take its toll on me, too. I remain in a perpetual state of dread about her check engine light, so it's become impossible to fully relax into any long haul. Every unfamiliar noise becomes another cause for alarm. Is one of her tires about to go? Is she getting ready to throw a rod? Pamela's airbag warning light has been on since I bought her five years ago, in Bonner Springs, Kansas. The smiling dealer helpfully explained that this light probably meant one of two things: that the airbag wouldn't deploy during a collision, or that it might go off at any time without warning. It seems like something is always breaking down, or breaking up, or breaking off in my hands. Pamela's recently lost the latches on two of her storage compartments, and one of her headlamps is held in place with a balled-up dishrag. She's basically an incontinent elderly lady, always leaking either oil or coolant. The bobbing statuette of the Hula Girl I've glued to the dashboard is missing most of her grass skirt. And yet she's still smiling, and strumming her ukulele, and her smile hints at some happy future of which she's assured, even if I myself can't see it.

Pamela and I may be a pair of beat-up wrecks, struggling mightily to keep ourselves on the road ... but we're doing our best, given what we've got to work with. We keep driving through this strange and occasionally savage country, in an ongoing effort to collect as many moments of beauty as possible. We're looking for the liminal zones between this place and that place, seeking a verge of some kind. There are so many evanescent moods and moments that rush by on a road trip, and I know I can't possibly communicate them all. I can only impart an overall impression through small details, try to describe the cumulative effect of countless experiences and encounters. It always feels like an inadequate summary of some kind ... but such is the grief of translators. We can only transmit so much of the message with our pocketful of words.

One of the most depressing aspects of modern America is the sameness you begin to see wherever you look. From point to point there's a stultifying homogeneity that eventually numbs the mind and smudges details and strips away the marks of rarity. You have to look so much harder now to find any unique identifiers about a place. The nest of corporate logos looks the same on the borderlands of nearly every city. This consistency can be a source of comfort, when you're desperate for any familiar beacon in an ocean of uncertainty, or when you really need to pee. But it makes it harder to keep going, to keep searching for that elusive edge, when you have the sinking feeling you've already been everywhere before. Huge swaths of our nation have been irretrievably blurred together in my memory.

Many Americans strive to find an acceptable interface between convenience and those pretty but potentially menacing parts of the wilderness. The more intrepid explorers try to push this boundary as far as they can, hiking deep into national parks or climbing steep cliff faces or buzzing around on offroad vehicles. Others settle for buying into housing developments with names like "The Orchard at Brier Meadows" ... the sort of beige places that have grand but useless bits of masonry at their gates, fancy typography, some clumps of feathery grass and crotons, maybe a phony waterwheel or a dinky gazebo. The frontier is what you make of it, I suppose.

That's something I struggle with on a daily basis while living in America: its growing lack of authenticity. More and more, our lives are being modeled on facsimiles of a fabricated past. I remember once going to a holiday event at a gated community in Georgia. The developers had taken "rustic chic" to a whole new level, set-dressing every home, store, and utility so that the "village" resembled a heavily sanitized version of a Western movie set. They'd gussied up the joint with wide-planked porches and wooden sidewalks, fancy gingerbread touches on the façades, rough-hewn fence posts, old-timey lanterns, decorative barrels, wagon wheels, washtubs placed "just so". Everything was treated with exactly the right amount of "weathering" or "patina" or "distressing" to look convincing ... but it was all a simulation of a simulation, a photocopy of a photocopy. These folks had paid millions of dollars to live in a mockup of the MGM backlot. They were recreating a recreation of an America that had never actually existed. This had the effect of pulling me in two directions simultaneously; half of me admired the dedication of the designers, and half of me wanted to burn the whole goddamned thing to the ground.

Real rural towns feel a bit different. Poverty or stagnation sometimes keeps them suspended in a way that might seem picturesque to an outsider. They have bingo nights and apocalyptic church messaging and hand-painted signs that say, "DEER PROCESSING" or "BABY RABBITS FOR SALE". The trees and fences are riddled with "NO TRESPASSING" warnings, including some that say, "TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT". Gas station bathrooms are underlit and filthy, with coin-op condom dispensers that look like they last saw action in the '80s. I think of the romantic interlude that would involve a 75-cent glow-in-the-dark Tingler Ring. I think of chipped nail polish, the wrinkles that form around a smoker's crimp, dingy hoodies, dark roots beneath blond hair. I think of guns and methamphetamine and kudzu and wariness. In some country towns the ragged edges still show.

As the miles zip by, I glimpse an ever-changing tableaux of The Deep South through Pamela's windshield. Tin roofs on sagging cracker boxes, drooping beards of Spanish moss, barbed wire, tractor tires, grazing cows, crooked awnings, the white silos of concrete factories, the complicated geometry of refineries or mills. Abandoned diners with their names spelled in rust. Mobile homes with bent sheet metal or broken lattice around their bases. Junkyards that glitter in the sun. Punched-out signage framing the sky. Plastic toys smiling in unkempt yards. These leave only momentary imprints on my consciousness, there and gone in a flash, and I keep hoping to make note of them for later, as if I could possibly store all these transient sights for some eventual use. I attempted without success to shoot some video with my phone while driving, but couldn't get a satisfactory image through the glass. Besides, I knew, even in trying, that each of these views was something that existed only in that moment, meant for my eyes to see right then and there. My responsibility is to collect, curate, and convey my perceptions of October. But sometimes the burden of carrying all this glory feels so heavy.

At one point during our trip through Appalachia, Pamela and I sped along a gorgeous stretch of mountain highway, the kind that makes you feel like you are living in a car commercial. Harry Belafonte sang "Jump in the Line" on the radio, the sun beamed between the trees and strobed on Pamela's windows, and for a moment, the road became a sinuous ribbon of joy. I thought, "This is what they're selling on the TV ... this feeling, right here." I then began to wonder if my happiness were the real thing, or if it were only a byproduct of having seen all those advertisements, the ads for cars with names of rugged towns or indigenous nations, ads that promise a sort of freewheeling wildness that doesn't exist anymore and probably never did, ads that suggest a freedom from the legal and financial constraints of adulthood. Ads that sell the idea of liberty.

Our emotions, political views, and "traditions" have been art-directed by the wizards of advertisement for so long that we sometimes cannot recognize real life without comparing it to media images of what "real life" is supposed to look and feel like. We've been so thoroughly polluted with the noise of Madison Avenue that it's hard for us to differentiate what we're feeling from what we've been told we should be feeling.

But even though I roll my eyes over the rustic chic thing, I really do get it. I'd probably go in for that sort of thing, too, if I had any money. As snarky as this all may sound, I'm not really denigrating people for their lifestyle choices so much as letting loose an impassioned cri de coeur about the relationship between entropy, end-stage capitalism, and the scarcity of significance.

Faux farm fantasies are a response to the increasing blandness of suburban life. We yearn for "simpler" times, in which things didn't feel so adulterated and processed. Earlier eras appear more texturally rich, more colorful. We want the visual appeal of farm life, with none of its drudgery, grit, or smells. The excessive use of plastic and cheap, durable materials has robbed us of the warmth of wood, metal, and plaster. Because we feel a certain absence of substance in things, we rummage through history for better props and theatrical surface effects. We lean quaint suggestions of a different time into the corners of our homes. We use words like "towne" and "shoppe" and "olde". Sacred traditions get diluted to the point of décor. Everything gets appropriated.

In a world where people are struggling just to subsist, working themselves to the bone to eke out a bare-bones existence, concepts like "spirituality" or "aesthetics" or "authenticity" must seem like a remote luxury. The folks who live in that synthetic village in Georgia can buy $6,900 cowboy jackets from catalogs, and scent their homes with $250 sage-scented candles. They can go on yoga retreats, ring their singing bowls, treat themselves to mud baths at the spa, try to align their actual daily experiences with their mental pictures of "country living". They can decorate their homes with expensive scraps of farm equipment, drink from mason jars, keep their hand towels in repurposed well buckets, write affirmations on salvaged chalkboards. They can afford to think about Zen, or at least purchase better simulations of Zen, based on what they've seen in magazines or commercials or stock photo libraries. As a wise friend once told me, "It's easy to be all spiritual when everything's going great."

But I've come to accept that it's all okay. Even the most vapid and cannibalistic aspects of our era can possess their own special beauty ... if we remove ourselves from our dismay long enough to look at the big picture, and recognize that all of existence collectively forms an incredible story. The good, the bad, the ugly, the inane, the violent ... all have their parts to play. Nothing matters, and everything matters. Megachurches and militias and second-rate musicals, the rites of Samhain distilled to a display of decorative gourds, the imminent collapse of our supply chain, the dull gleam of wrecks on a hillside, daisies bursting from graveyards, pawn shops, robberies, holidays steeped in bathos, divorcees with frosted hair bitching at cashiers, invasive beetles, cheap wigs, moldy oranges, lymphoma, war, sweatpants in Walmart, the shambles of The American Dream ... it's all still spectacular, in its own way. The ongoing narrative remains majestic in its complexity, even when some of it seems unspeakably stupid or counterfeit.

I drove by one of those old-fashioned roadside signs, shaped like a big arrow and surrounded by dead bulbs, pointing towards some trees. The rows meant to hold its letters were empty, but in my mind they read, "Look upon these variegated splendors. Regard your follies and your masterpieces while you may. Both will come and go like the leaves."

I relish autumn so much. I didn't get a whole lot of fall color as a kid, growing up in the mostly coniferous western half of Washington State, and ever since then I've been trying to make up for lost time by treasuring my Octobers. When you move behind the rolling wave of autumn's "peak" (which in the Great Smoky Mountains can mean the difference between what you see on one side of a ravine and on the other), the colors get dialed down a bit. You move away from crimson, gold, and a vibratingly intense orange to a dull burgundy, straw, and brick. Ghostly trees that have already been stripped of their leaves emerge from among their neighbors like clouds of grey smoke.

Autumn isn't necessarily a season of death; the trees are only withdrawing nutrients to conserve energy for the winter. Nevertheless, the dwindling foliage still speaks to us of our passing seasons, our movements through the years. It reminds us that sooner or later each of us must let go of our tree and return to the earth.

Near Greenville, South Carolina, I drove past a funereal display so artful and weird that I slammed the brakes and squealed through a U-turn. This was one of those modern memorial parks, minimal to the point of dreariness, with identical cast-metal markers set into the ground instead of headstones ... but each plate here featured a central recession for an urn, and each urn held a big showy bouquet of artificial flowers. And boy did they deliver on the bogus blooms: roses, lilies, tulips, daisies, pansies, peonies, anemones, you name it. It looked like somebody had ransacked the floral aisle of a Hobby Lobby and dumped the contents onto a golf course. Because the urns themselves were quite tall and narrow, each bundle ended up assuming the same approximate overall shape ... foomphing out like the nosegay at the end of a magician's wand. These goofy bursts of color springing from the greensward turned the cemetery into a fireworks show, but with all the bursts at a uniform height. I watched as two different women, both middle aged, futzed with the bouquets of their loved ones before taking selfies with the results.

Cemeteries in America tend to fall into two camps: either they're for plastic flowers or against them. You'll usually see a sign posted at the entrance if a park forbids them. Personally, I think they look ghastly, especially after they've faded from the sun or blackened under mold ... but I guess people don't want to layer another memento mori onto a landscape already riddled with corpses and dates, so they'll choose the seeming "permanence" of artifice over the reality of wilting buttercups. I've never seen a park insist on them before, though. It's like the most extreme version of a homeowner's association: go fake or get the fuck out.

Near one of the (effectively indistinguishable) segments of the park, between two uneventful shrubs, I saw a small sign that read, "GARDEN OF TIME". This phrase stuck with me for the remainder of my day, haunting my thoughts as I rode through the bonanza of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After crossing into Tennessee, we stopped to check out a historic site, Marble Springs. This was once the property of John Sevier, the state's first governor, and now it features a collection of era-appropriate buildings plopped onto a scenic plot of land. None of them belonged to Sevier himself, so it's more a faithful reproduction of a typical late 18th-Century homestead than an actual conservation, but it's still pretty cool. I chatted up the lone docent, John, and asked if I could photograph the grounds. As we spoke, a cat walked towards me, his tail crooked in greeting. I knelt down, offered my hand, and he pressed himself against my palm. I was smitten. We gazed into each other's eyes, and instantly felt that kind of familiarity that seems to transcend lifespans, species, or even time itself. We clearly knew one another, from somewhere long ago and far away, and were happy to be reunited. As his eyes closed, I sensed that he, too, felt relieved to see me.

"So who's this guy?" I asked, as I smoothed the fur between his ears to an appreciative purr.

"That's Cinnamon," said John. "He works here. Kind of our official greeter."

Cinnamon followed me throughout the park, rubbing against my legs or waiting outside each structure as I poked around its interior. We eventually landed on the front porch of the shuttered gift shop. I planted myself on a rocking bench, and he sat on the planks directly in front of me, giving me lingering looks between self-grooming swipes of his paw. We hung out there together for a long while, listening to birds sing and crickets chirp, enjoying the afternoon sun as it brightened the fields and lined the withered corn in white. It was the most tranquil moment I've known in ages ... just Cinnamon and I, sharing a soulful pleasure, stepping outside of time so that we could passively watch the world go by. Then the road called again, as it always does, and I said goodbye to my friend, who did not follow me off the porch but meowed to me in farewell.

A short while later, Pamela and I obeyed a sudden compulsion and took a random turn off the highway. We climbed to the top of Mt. Roosevelt State Forest Road, where we found an old fire watch tower with a giant metal star affixed to its face. I learned later that this gets lit up every Christmas, so it can be seen hanging in the night sky for miles around. On this summit we took in an impressive survey of the Smoky Mountains and the land below them, including several bends of Watts Bar Lake, a dammed reservoir on the Tennessee River. The vale was a mural of copper and brass.

Cumberland Mountain State Park also proved to be an unexpected gem. I walked around its placid central lake on a paved, ADA-compliant pathway, and was pleased to see that so much of the loop had been made accessible to wheelchair users. This made me consider the question of accessibility ... not just for the disabled, but for humans in general. The parking lot offered some didactic signage about how Davy Crockett and his family migrated across this part of Tennessee in the early 19th Century on foot. Theirs wasn't a journey in covered wagon, à la the Oregon Trail ... they had to hoof it for hundreds of miles, struggling across dense forests and over rocky creek beds, climbing uphill through clouds of mosquitos, navigating bear country alongside overburdened horses. After reading about their lives, I felt embarrassed about having gotten peeved by minor inconveniences, such as a long gap between gas stations or unreliable GPS. As much as I like to fancy myself as a bold adventurer, bushwhacking my way through the teeming jungles of The Great American Unknown, I must totally cop to my own dependency on convenience. I'm still asking the questions of a tourist. Where can I park my car? Are there restrooms nearby? How's the cell-phone reception? Is there any food around? We've gotten so soft as a culture.

My visit to the park coincided with one of those gentle fall afternoons, when the leaves are just beginning to surrender their grips. A handful of them tumbled balletically through the air as I strolled down the path. The soft breeze across my face felt like the passing of a benevolent ghost. I looked up and saw the tents of fall webworms strung between branches. Even though I knew that these caterpillars would soon denude the elms with their insatiable gnawing hunger, I knew that they, too, had their part of the tale to tell. I gazed into the woods, and saw a fallen trunk blanketed in mushrooms, with a sapling rising from its crumbled bark, and in that moment, everything felt okay.

It was all okay. Nothing was out of place. All was exactly as it should be. I thought again of the phrase I had seen in the cemetery, "GARDEN OF TIME", and I felt a huge anchor of sorrow lift itself from my heart. All was well. Mortality had once again revealed the miracle.

Each of us is granted only so many Octobers, and the one I am documenting now is nearly over. All of this, all of this glory that we are bearing witness to ... it is all so fleeting. Our museums and our landfills will someday be returned to the weeds. Meteors will pulverize our hills into varicolored dust. Maple trees will thrive only on this planet, and only during this eon, and then they will be gone. Each of us occupies our quickening moment.

Think of the leaf detaching from the branch. Think of the kingdoms of plantae and fungi, forever locked in either battle or embrace. Think of brief empires and shrouded monuments and empty theaters. Think of the farm-themed housing development encroaching upon the actual farmland, the sea invading the beach town, the dune sweeping over the tomb. Think of our bodies, those roving waltzes of molecules, the innumerable linkages constantly disintegrating and reforming within us. Think of graveyards. Think of the worm as it gyres in the eye.

You exist in a garden of time. How much control do you have over its plots, the comings and goings of seasons, the blooms and decays of ambition? Your garden is one in which there is a constant dance between the forces of life and death. What will you plant, and what will you harvest? What will you cull, and what will you pass over? Whatever designs you might draft for the rest of your days, whatever dreams you may pull from your soil, be assured that they will all be as ephemeral as the flowers, and just as exquisite.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

The Devotion of Brother Joe

For the weekend of my 48th birthday, I decided to get lost in Alabama, a state that I’d always liked but had seen too little of. My road led me past many beautiful things … cotton fields covered in stubble and tufts, weathered grey barns, abandoned gas stations, exactly the sort of picturesque dilapidation that I love looking at … but the most stirring and unexpected thing I came across in my adventure stood on the grounds of a small monastery near the town of Cullman.

St. Bernard’s Abbey is known for three things: its prep school, its bread (baked every day by the monks), and a colossal work of outsider art, the Ave Maria Grotto. The grotto, along with a sprawling garden of sculptural assemblages, is the life’s work of one man, a hunchbacked monk who spent over sixty years sustaining a single act of mindful creation.

Michael Zoettl was born in 1878 in Bavaria, and immigrated to the United States in 1892. Passing through the halls of Ellis Island, being jostled among thousands of other hopefuls, he left behind a difficult childhood full of grief and trauma, including a few near-death experiences and the loss of his mother, so that he may follow his spiritual calling. He made his way to Alabama, and joined an order of Benedictine monks. This brotherhood of men had turned their backs on all worldly pleasures and chose instead a life of modesty, chastity, and quiet contemplation in the woods. Zoettl would spend the rest of his life in this place.

Because of a childhood injury, later exacerbated by an accident in the monastery’s belfry, he developed a severe curvature of the spine. This grew into a pronounced hunch, which affected his stance and his gait. At the time, the church would not allow a man to ascend to the priesthood if he showed a “distracting” deformity … his story, apparently, takes place in the days before “showing basic human decency towards the disabled” was invented … so the newly rechristened “Brother Joseph” was put to work in the powerhouse, shoveling coal into the furnaces, sweating day and night before the flames like a modern Hephaestus.

Brother Joseph set aside whatever disappointment he may have felt at being denied the priesthood, and instead refocused his energy on what Saint Teresa called “the little way”, the disciplined management of daily tasks. From all accounts, he was a taciturn, private man, even by monkish standards. In his spare hours, though, he discovered within himself a powerful desire to create, to make something beautiful and durable with his hands. He started with a few hundred small grottos for statuettes of the Virgin Mary, all of which quickly sold at the monastery store. This morphed, over time, into the recreation of various miniatures … replicas of famous churches, missions, monasteries. Soon, he was expanding his reach to include significant religious sites, examples of classical architecture, and wonders of the ancient world. He represented tombs, roads, aqueducts, colonnades, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark. He built scaled down versions of Rome, Jerusalem, and even Hiroshima in his little corner of northern Alabama. The ravine below the monastery was gradually carved up into a series of terraces, groupings, and paved walkways, and it was filled by the monk’s relentless creativity. In all, he made hundreds of miniatures and connective elements.

Brother Joe rarely left the monastery, and had never seen most of the places he so painstakingly recreated; he referred instead to a sizable collection of postcards and book illustrations. His understanding of each building’s layout was thus limited to the views in the pictures. As a result, there is something of a “Hollywood movie set” quality to the structures. The crooked façades, wonky proportions, and abrupt changes of scale lend the scenes a slightly surreal, dreamlike quality. Forced perspective makes the stacked clusters seem much larger than they actually are, and the somewhat haphazard orientation of structures creates multiple vanishing points. With their false fronts and simplified forms and toylike whimsy, they bring to mind both medieval tapestries and Disneyland.

But the real brilliance of Brother Joseph’s work lay in his use of materials. He incorporated glass beads, chips of marble from the local quarry, bathroom tile, china, dishware, flashlight cylinders, dolls, toy animals, costume jewelry, chicken wire, pottery shards, oyster shells, cast concrete, bricks, chunks of pumice, toilet tank floats, net buoys, pretty much anything he could get his hands on. Cold cream jars became pedestals for a pair of saints. The punts of wine bottles became rosette windows. The fountains in St. Peter’s Square were fashioned with two upended compote dishes. All of these castaway materials were put together in the most inventive and startling ways, creating a massive and marvelous collage that sprawls over nearly four acres.

The most imposing of his assemblages is the Ave Maria Grotto itself, a towering artificial cave that measures 27’x27’x27’. It’s crammed with concrete stalactites, seashells, glass flowers, life-sized statues of the Holy Family, and an obsessively decorated altar. Little ferns have taken root among its many nooks and crannies. With its overwhelming density, proliferation of drippy forms, and half-buried architectural motifs, it reads as a monument to horror vacui. It’s like attending Mass on acid, a full-on Rococo Bizarro freakout, and it’s utterly stunning.

After being wowed by the display, I walked across the campus to the nearby cemetery, in order to pay my respects to Brother Joe, who died without much fanfare at the age of 83. He worked until the last few years of his life, right up until he could no longer manage the physical requirements of his craft, and then he was laid to rest on the monastery grounds.

The pathway to the graveyard and columbarium is lined with fourteen carved reliefs showing the Stations of the Cross. These sculptures are capably if perhaps unimaginatively rendered; I thought at first that they lacked the zeal and playfulness of their more famous neighbors … and then I remembered that the crucifixion wasn’t really supposed to be an entertaining subject, and that a certain degree of somberness probably came with the theme.

Brother Joseph’s grave is remarkable only in how utterly unremarkable it is. There are dozens of other monks buried in this cemetery, all of them memorialized with white crosses. The markers are quite small and plain and identical. I was only able to locate his particular cross because of some moldy artificial flowers slumped against its base. It seemed like a powerful expression of modesty, that this remarkable man, this artistic genius, should not be distinguished from his unheralded brethren even in death. This was an eye-opening moment. I realized then that Brother Joseph’s artwork was never intended to shine a spotlight on himself. The grotto was not a statement of his individuality or a testament to his shining talent or a commodity to be traded. It was a prayer, a message to the world.

So many creators, myself included, wrestle with our legacies, and writhe in frustration at the seeming impenetrability of The Art Establishment. Our hunger for fortune and fame is really, at its root, a desire for acknowledgement. We ache to be assured in the end that our lives and efforts will have mattered, that our contributions had merit, that we were indeed as good as we believed ourselves to be.

Even though I make a comfortable living these days, and have managed to successfully monetize my skills in a few professional spheres, the sort of power and influence that comes with Making The Big Time has so far eluded me. Unfortunately, our ideas of what makes for “important” art are tied almost entirely to the vicissitudes of the secondary market, that high-falutin’ world of auction houses and major museums and corporate holdings, which collectively present a distorted and almost entirely investment-based idea of what constitutes merit. To that end, a friend of mine, in a blistering and completely unprovoked attack, once informed me that artists who are not engaged with the marketplace are merely narcissists. He has since apologized for the cruelty of his phrasing … but the remark left a very deep wound in me, one that still hurts and keeps me up at night. There is no worse ailment for the dreamer than the malignancy of doubt.

Many of the greatest artists in “the canon”, luminaries like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Claudel, Gauguin, and Cezanne, were ignored in their lifetimes. Some died in deep debt, their masterpieces scattered among friends or creditors or lucky strangers. Would they have been considered failures, because they could not find a road to recognition? Should their efforts, completely unsupported by the commercial interest of their era, be dismissed as mere self-aggrandizement or folly? Nowadays their works fetch millions of dollars at auction, and their aesthetic identities are unmistakable. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his short lifetime … but if I asked you to visualize his style on anything, a coffee mug or a beer cozy or a pair of edible panties, you could easily do it. He’s become a household name, an essential part of our cultural heritage.

But Brother Joseph, who enjoyed an extraordinarily long life as an artist while achieving no fame or monetary reward at all, couldn’t give less of a shit about sales or gallery representation or his place in art history. He did this work because he loved the process of making it. The grotto and its assemblages were an ongoing meditation, one that lasted for over six decades, and its glory belonged not to him but to the spirit of creation. And there is such a beauty in that idea, that it is the delivery of the message itself that matters, not so much the messenger.

Those who are tasked with conveying an essential truth may struggle with its heat or weight or complexity. Those whose bodies are bent or whose spirits are shackled may feel that their purpose has been lost, or that their rightful reward has been thwarted. But those who keep working, working patiently and diligently and with every tool at their disposal, may create something lasting and meaningful, even if they never see any acknowledgement of it in their lifetimes. So take it from Brother Joe … your messages will eventually be received, someday, somewhere, by somebody. It may happen during your life or it may happen afterwards, but that matters less than the integrity and sincerity of the message itself. Keep building, keep inventing, keep growing, keep transmitting. Remain devoted to your vision. You yourself may never be seen, nor your achievements lauded, but your influence will absolutely be ongoing. The greatest art that you’ll ever make shall tap into a source which is eternal. All is unfolding as it should be. Your works will speak for themselves.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

One Of Those Years

My favorite line from the musical “GYPSY” is from the song “Some People”, when Mama Rose sings, “Some people sit on their butts / got the dream, yeah, but not the guts.” And that’s how I’ve felt for my entire adult life: go, go, go, move, jump, strive, question, explore, try, fail, try again. Just keep trying, damnit. Even if I sometimes fall on my ass … even if I frequently, publicly, embarrassingly fall on my ass … I’m gonna keep trying. I do this because I know that real life is happening right now, right here. I know that life is quickly slipping away, disappearing into all those boring ordinary “in-between moments” of everyday existence. With every passing second the opportunity to make choices gets narrower and narrower. I know, way down deep inside, that the magic ice cream truck of death is already making its way towards me, as it does for each of us, and soon enough there will be no more choices to make or time to kill or tinsel to hang. I ain’t going down without a good story.

Without a doubt, 2021 has been "one of those years". One of those years that seems to stand out above the others, one of those years with a special richness and density.

I spent January 1st standing naked on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean ... letting it all hang out, so to speak ... at a clothing-optional beach in Florida, and I'll be wrapping up this December in a tiny town in rural Tennessee, safely nestled in the tattooed arms of my beloved, sharing a bed with him and his four special-needs dogs. It's been a jam-packed, blazingly intense, truly miraculous chapter of my life story, and I can't wait to share what I've learned. Here goes.

Let’s start by getting back to my bare ass on New Year's Day. I'd spent the previous evening, the last night of 2020, at a cassowary breeding ranch owned by two gay men in Central Florida. Cassowaries, in case you hadn't heard of them, are the world's most dangerous birds. Native to Australia, they're basically murderous dinosaurs with fancy plumage and daggerlike toenails. They can jump six feet straight up in the air and disembowel you with a single kick. So that was how I rang out the previous year: staring down enormous flightless birds that wanted to gut me with their foot knives. Anyway, while visiting this farm, I also got to hang out with a very good friend, a fellow wanderer, and together we decided to greet the New Year in typical scary hairy fairy style ... frolicking gaily in the altogether, warmed by the sun, two bearded furballs wearing only smiles and sunscreen. It seemed like a strangely auspicious opening to January. As I stood in the surf, facing my maker, arms akimbo, fully exposed, I looked up into the big blue sky and said, "All right, 2021. Do your worst."

As it so happened, though, this ended up being the year of me finally getting my shit together, on many fronts. I cannot say for certain why I felt so compelled this year, this one year out of so many, to start making some long overdue repairs, to improve some lifestyle habits, to advance to a new level of adulthood. But that's what happened.

Perhaps the most significant transformation was a physical one. I joined a gym, and started working out at least five times a week. Three weeks into my new regimen, I reached the maximum weight on two different machines, outgunning the sort of big beefcakey guys who had once scared me away from all things exercise-related. I bought a motorized standing desk, rearranged my home office, got a weight bench and dumbbells for home use, changed my diet, and got vaccinated for COVID. I finally addressed my teeth, tackling some long-standing dental problems that had been plaguing me for years. After some root canals, crowns, fillings, and some periodontal work, my smile has been vastly improved. I'm still missing some teeth, and I won't win any beauty pageants, but my mouth is no longer the train wreck it once was.

I celebrated my ninth year of sobriety. I also sought professional help for my depression, seeing both a psychiatrist and a therapist, before acknowledging that neither of them were a good fit. I briefly experimented with antidepressants, and then stopped taking them when I realized that they would never address the core issues I was facing. I decided instead to focus my energies on other mechanisms of self-improvement.

I hired an accountant, who helped me take on the steep mountain of my tax debt. This year, I paid off the entirety of my outstanding state taxes from my New York days, breaking a $10,000 shackle around my ankle, and I started chipping away at what I owe Uncle Sam.

2021 brought many new adventures for my minivan Pamela and I. We celebrated our fourth year and 83,000th mile together. My girl, like me, has had a lot of work done this year ... new hubs and bearings, a new power steering pump, new rack and pinion, and her exhaust system got patched up. Our first big foray this year didn't turn out so great, though.

We took an ill-starred roadtrip to the coast of North Carolina, and we almost didn't make it back. I turned 47 at Kitty Hawk, the site of the Wright Brothers’ first flights. Though I went up there intending to see the famous wild ponies of the Outer Banks, my plans were thwarted by off-season closures and Pamela's lack of four-wheel drive. Instead, I stood beneath the Bodie Island and Cape Hatteras lighthouses, visited a museum about shipwrecks (and photographed two actual shipwrecks), watched dolphins leaping above the breakers, and took a nausea-inducing ferry to Ocracoke Island. Despite these highlights, nothing quite went as planned, and the entire "vacation" was marred by ceaseless rain, chilling winds, and shitty food. Most upsetting of all, though, was a deeply disorienting and mysterious experience in the dunes of lower Bodie Island, when I got lost in a maze of scrubland and somehow blacked out while trying to bushwhack my way through the briers. There is still a blurry-edged hole in my recollection of that place; I must have seen something there that shook me to the core, something so shatteringly awful that my mind simply will not allow me to remember it. I have never experienced this kind of traumatic amnesia before, and I remain fearful that the memory may eventually resurface, at the least opportune time, and I'll suddenly be treated to a widescreen Technicolor recap of whatever it was I'd encountered in the dunes. Aliens? A dead body? A goblin crouching over an injured horse? On the return trip, Pamela's alternator broke down, right in the middle of a severe weather outbreak. We punched through nearly 700 miles of tornadic thunderstorms, sometimes driving in the downpours without headlights or windshield wipers, on a string of five brand-new ($$$) car batteries. In all my driving, even with all the stormchasing and white-knuckled rides I've lived through, this was by far my most terrifying night behind the wheel. Honestly, I'm grateful and amazed that we survived it.

Twelve days after my forty-seventh birthday, I celebrated a sad but significant milestone: I had outlived Judy Garland.

In 2021 I visited Ravine Gardens State Park, Natchez Trace State Park, Devil's Tower National Monument, a replica of the Parthenon, and the house that Grant Wood used as the backdrop for "American Gothic". I went white-water rafting down the Nantahala River, got lost in a mirror maze in Gatlinburg, saw a trio of bored bears in Smoky Mountain National Park, climbed to the top of Clingman's Dome, and hung out with bison and elk in Yellowstone. I outran a monstrous line of hailstorms on a farm road in rural Kansas, fled at midnight from an ugly misunderstanding in Montana, and ran over a dead skunk. Pamela killed an armadillo. I got a good haircut in Wichita, from a spunky lady who called my beard "calico", and a not-so-great clipper job from a three-fingered barber in Des Moines. I was also groomed by a monkey on Christmas Day, but that’s a story for another time. During various outings, I saw Key West, Nashville, Tulsa, Casper, Billings, Little Rock, Omaha, and Montgomery. The state of Alabama, which I crossed three times in less than a month, proved to be full of surprises: I stood beneath a Saturn 1B rocket at a rest stop, drove through an eerily empty town blanketed in windblown cotton, and watched an eight-year-old expertly maneuver a riding mower around the narrow grass berms of a Waffle House parking lot. I witnessed the aftermath of the devastating flash floods that took out much of Waverly, Tennessee, a town that was nearly wiped off the map entirely. I gritted my teeth through a disappointing attempt at shamanic "journeying", rescued a gecko, and sported a hoopskirt for a stormy photo shoot on the beach.

Meanwhile, my professional life has never been busier. My largest client, the Bank of America, really kept me hopping this year. In addition to working on a full-length documentary about the bank's history, and numerous presentations about its corporate support of the arts, I also edited short episodes on the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Diego Rivera, Georges Seurat, Mark Bradford, Katsushika Hokusai, William T. Williams, Frida Kahlo, Rembrandt, Allan Houser, Caravaggio, Thornton Dial, Archibald Motley, Harry Fonseca, and others. I did logo designs for nutritional supplement peddlers in New York, Colorado, and Connecticut. I started a new side hustle as a paralegal, interviewing accident victims and then telling their stories through essays that helped humanize their insurance claims. I cut a sizzle reel for a new cooking show, did post-production on a music video for a talented genre-bending artist, and proofread a friend's graphic novel.

I finished three painting commissions: a dual portrait (“Cheers”), a floral study (“Sally’s Bouquet”), and a giant Sedona landscape (“The New Eden”). I debuted a new short film, “EACH MISSISSIPPI”, which I'd co-created last year with a gifted local actress, and wrote dialogue for a collaborative screenplay, “THE LAST BONANZA”, with a director in Minneapolis. I moved the needle forward on my fourth novel, “THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW”, and finished a short essay for an upcoming book about artists in Memphis. I spent a great deal of 2021 hunched over my easel. I continued work on two series: "BLUE ANGELS”, which are a group of 30"x40" blue and white abstracts, and the [C] deck, which are one hundred 12"x12" black and white illustrations for a modern-day Tarot. I applied to a poetry contest, a photography contest, a painting contest, all of which rejected me. I tore out and replanted a garden, which promptly died after I left town for a few weeks. Sorry, snapdragons. Sorry, daisies.

One of the centerpiece moments of my career happened this autumn, when I was invited to deliver a lecture about my work at the University of Memphis. As a visiting artist, I got the chance to work with a cohort of graduate students, visiting their studios and critiquing their latest work. The honorarium for the gig didn't come anywhere close to meeting the expenses of the trip, but none of that mattered: this was a major professional honor. I learned so very much from this experience, perhaps even more than the students did, and I made some amazing new friends.

In fact, 2021 was full of friends. Chock full of 'em. Figures coming back into my life after long absences, splendid smiles, hugs and tears and laughter.

I met so many fascinating people. A friendly but jittery hippie tripping on mushrooms. A recent widower with crazy white hair and an apparent case of priapism. A sad-eyed Venezuelan in the midst of a messy divorce. A peaceful MMA fighter who just wanted to talk about turtles. I learned about the tragic dimensions of Carmen Miranda’s career from a gifted Brazilian artist. I hung out with a kayak eco-tourism guide, and we chatted about ecology while viewing a tranquil stretch of marshland. I pierced a transwoman's ears with a store-bought gun, and then we raced up the coast road together in her busted-ass Durango, joyfully shouting the lyrics to "WAP", easily the most vulgar song I've ever heard, while the wind blew her wig askew and the locals stared at us with either incredulity or envy.

I hopped down to Orlando, and spent a giddy bachelors' weekend with two dear old buddies, hetero life mates from my Memphis days. We visited Disney's Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, and Hollywood, spazzing out about the dark rides and the density and the amazing artistry of it all, and together we endured the worst dinner theater experience ever, a Prohibition-themed environment that was so unbelievably corny that we bailed before the curtain had even lifted on the actual show. I had an unexpectedly vibrant reunion with a high school classmate, one in which we commiserated about the many nicks and dents of fate, while walking through an eerily fogbound stretch of beach. We came upon a labyrinth drawn in the sand, which seemed apt for our mood.

To my surprise and delight, I discovered that a college chum and fellow artist from Massachusetts had recently moved to Jacksonville, less than an hour north. We started a tradition of sharing many wonderful beach walks and sushi dinners together ... enjoying long philosophical meanders, pondering our careers, our purposes, and our place in the grand scheme of things. In a short while, we became soul brothers, deeply invested in each other's artistic legacies. And in the spirit of cosmic awakening, my bro and I shared one of the most mind-blowing experiences imaginable: we underwent an ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca is a potent shamanic hallucinogen, one used by indigenous tribes throughout South America. It took six weeks of strict dieting (no sugar, meat, dairy, dried fruits, carbonation, fermented foods, spice, pepper, salt) and two weeks of total celibacy (which was for me, as you can imagine, a big goddamned deal) to prepare for the ceremony, which took place at a non-profit facility in Orlando ... but the spiritual and psychological payoff was beyond all measure. I received many important messages from The Great Beyond, a few of which I hope I have successfully transmitted, and I saw illuminated in golden lines my road to a much healthier lifestyle.

2021 took many loved ones away. I lost a former coworker, a sweet and sassy gal with sparkling eyes, who once gave me an unsolicited lap dance at an office Christmas Party. One of my favorite dog friends died, along with a surrogate mother figure from high school, and a tattoo artist (who had once photographed me naked and drenched in fake blood), and one of my very best clients, and one of my biggest teenage crushes. This last one hit especially hard, as my erstwhile crush had been posting a lot of great content online over the last few years, giving his lucky friends a keyhole view into his thoughts. His social media feed had become a flea market: crammed with antiquities, pop culture tidbits, great architecture, paintings, vintage photographs of hot dudes, food, gaiety, and tons of goodwill. His was a life full of engagement and creativity.

The town I live in, St. Augustine, has a lot of fascinating features, many of which I hadn't explored yet. This year, I finally toured our most famous building, the Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort. Dating back to 1672, it's an imposing stone structure, shaped like a four-pointed star, surrounded by a grassy moat and crowned by cannons. A visiting friend and I got to wander through its many dim and evocative chambers. I checked out our community theater, and saw charming productions of “The Odd Couple” and “A Closer Walk”. I spent as much time as I possibly could on Anastasia Island's pristine beaches. On a few occasions, I saw a right whale and her calf spouting as they swam the waters between Jacksonville and Ormond-By-The-Sea. I also found a shark tooth, and then a bigger one, and then a much bigger one. I saw two sharks caught on the beach, one of which I actually got to hold down as the fisherman struggled to unhook its jaw from his line. I saw a human tibia wash up in the surf.

Speaking of body parts ... I will definitely remember 2021 for another reason.

Men.

I mean, even for a guy of my gargantuan appetites, with a standard of promiscuity that would make a brothel madame blush, this year was one for the books. 2021 was full of sex, sex, more sex, abortive romances, bad dates, great dates, fun games, friendly exploration, dumb ideas, misfires, bad choices, one of the most crushing disappointments of my life, and finally, finding my true heart's desire. In twelve months, I ran through a bewildering gauntlet of dudes. I hooked up with a shy Pokémon nerd, a furry and friendly hairdresser, an upholsterer, the son of a preacher man (no kidding), and a kindhearted traveling store merchandiser who used his drawing skills to turn my name into a stylish maze. I bedded a former military man with a cute little chihuahua, shared a glorious orange moon with a Turkish musician/healer, and enjoyed a wondrous encounter with a licensed sex therapist. I had short dalliances with two "straight" guys, including a weird string of assignations where I was asked to tiptoe through my host's house in the middle of the night, sneaking into the guest bedroom, while his family slept nearby. I bounced around with a charming couple, a pair of real sweetie-pies with whom I remain good pals; our rambunctious little playdate was followed by an astonishing dinner conversation about defeating death, one that made me relax all of my anxieties about the remainder of my life. I got caught up in an absurd bit of drama with an unemployed actor, who became so screechingly shrill and clingy and histrionic that for the very first time in my adult dating life I actually had to tell the other guy to dial it down. I got stood up on two dates by two different jerks, and caught a case of crabs from a nomadic retiree while parked behind a Cracker Barrel.

I rented a car (for the first time in my life) and drove down to the Florida Keys to share a romantic weekend with a witty entomologist of Indian descent. We held hands while snorkeling over Sombrero Reef, eight miles off the shore of Marathon. I swam alongside a sea turtle in the shadow of a massive steel lighthouse, ate delicious grilled octopus, and visited a butterfly sanctuary, where a dazzling Morpho eugenia landed upon my forehead. We remain devoted friends, and our shared love of the English language keeps our conversations peppered with swishy double entendres and taxonomical puns. Many months later, I shared a superb week with another Indian man, this one a product manager visiting from Utah. We snuggled and laughed and watched our favorite movies together ... I introduced him to "Meet Me In St. Louis", and he showed me the legendarily beautiful actress Sridevi. Truly one of the loveliest humans I've ever met, he went back home with a piece of my heart stowed in his luggage.

Sadly, though, 2021 was also a year of profound romantic failure. I'm sorry to report here that one of the most painful disasters of my love life happened in 2021. And considering all the flotsam and jetsam I've left in my wake, that's really saying something.

One sunny day in May, I met a handsome theater director, visiting from Moscow, as he emerged dripping wet from a swim in the Atlantic. In the course of a few days, he and I found ourselves lost in a delirium of lust, a state of heated and perhaps irresponsible ecstasy that still makes me close my eyes as I recall it. We climbed to the top of Anastasia Island's lighthouse, swam nude under the blue lights of my backyard pool, shared tender kisses under a full moon, and made exciting plans for me to visit Russia. In earnest, I began to study the Russian language, practicing every day, making tremendous advances in the space of a few weeks, even writing my first poem in a foreign alphabet. We jammed our phones with video messages, spoke with an increased earnestness, began to share the most intimate dimensions of our lives. Alas, just a few months later, the dark knight revealed his true nature ... callous, selfish, cruel, and impatient ... and my heart was dashed to the rocks. Again.

But no matter. If there is one thing I've learned in 2021, it's that the human heart is miraculously resilient thing. You can keep breaking it, over and over again ... yet with just a dash of hope, and a lot of faith, it rebuilds itself anew.

Which brings us at last to my current sweetheart, the guy with whom I am sharing the final days of December. He is, without a doubt, the biggest and bestest prize I’ve won at the carnival that was my 2021. I first met this man nearly thirty years ago, when I first arrived in New York City as an impressionable eighteen-year-old rube from the hills. A singer-songwriter, gifted with an extraordinarily supple voice, his star was on the ascendant in those days, and he was starting to taste some fame in the East Village scene. We started chatting during a video shoot for the NYC Anti-Violence Project, a non-profit organization dedicated, as the same suggests, to reducing the risk of violence against (and within) the LGBT community. Right off the bat I found him absolutely arresting ... so bright and charismatic, so sexy and funny and sweet-natured. That night I ended up going home with a different man (a gem of a guy who remains one of my most beloved friends to this day) but I couldn't get that cute little punk rocker out of my mind. I've never forgotten that first impression I had of him, and nothing I've discovered in the subsequent years has changed it. Back in 1992, I had somehow roped him into posing for my camera, in a series of portraits, long before he covered his entire body with elaborate and colorful tattoos, like The Illustrated Man in the sideshow. My infatuation started right then and there ... and to be honest, it never really went away. We kept in touch over the following decades, casually checking in with one another on various social media platforms. Every year, for his birthday, I'd send him a very enthusiastic message, letting him know how beautiful and special he was, how much I admired his music and his spirit, hoping he was finding happiness. I always carried a torch for him ... but, frankly, I kind of thought he was out of my league. He was a celebrity, after all, and so damn gorgeous, and practically everybody in town wanted a piece of that cake. So I put the possibility far out of my mind. "You may as well try to date Marlon Brando," I said, with a sigh, "circa 1951." But this year, as I was making my way through Tennessee, our paths crossed again, quite by chance. And this time, the electricity between us was undeniable. Our friendship suddenly came to crackling, vibrant, buzzing life, and in the subsequent months it became something else altogether.

Let me tell you a little bit about this guy. He makes me laugh so hard that I cry or snort or both. He cares for four dogs with varying degrees of blindness, deafness, or … uh … specialness. He cooks excellent omelettes, and he makes homemade holiday fudge for the locals, and he helps elderly neighbors move their heavy furniture, and his singing voice makes me go weak in the knees. Just like me, he's had a string of relationships, with varying degrees of success. Just like me, he's sober, in an ongoing program of recovery. Just like me, he's at a crossroads in his life, trying to strike a balance between artistic fulfillment and survival in an end-stage capitalist society. Just like me, he gets teary-eyed watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” but thinks “The Bad Seed” is hilarious. We're holding onto one another firmly, like two men who have found a raft in the middle of a turbulent sea, and hoping for the best. It seems like we’ve both arrived at the place in our lives where we’re truly ready to make a go of it.

After all … what have we got to lose?

And so, in the spirit of adventure, in keeping with my ongoing quest to learn and grow and travel far beyond my comfort zone, I took one last great leap of faith in a year full of great gutsy leaps. I proposed to the crooner on Christmas Day. And he said “Yes.”

That was my 2021. I started it off by standing naked on the ocean, asking the fates to surprise me, and I will likely finish it curling up naked (and engaged) in a Tennessee musician’s bed. Between those two moments of literal and figurative exposure stands one of the best years of my life. Thus far, at least. Thanks for taking the ride with me. I love you.