And It Feels Like Rain....

This is an image of the lake a brief drive away from the home i have made in this north Florida Panhandle town for the last 20 years, an uprooted if not entirely subdued Yankee. That last will take more than any cache the rural south of the wearying MAGA types may lay claim to as far as being grounded in hard work, God, and country tunes about women sipping sweet tea and making a U-turn on the highway “right on back to meeeeeee” as proof of a culture under duress, besieged by lesser forces still smarting from an unfair usurping of its “Confederacy” its image of a stoic heroic rebellion and by white people now challenged by the fact that brown people are now covering most of every construction project and adding to the sinking feeling that identity is being siphoned away and mysteriously like the spring-fed lake whose water disappears into hidden subterranean tunnels. And there are stories there too, of entire horse drawn wagons re-appearing in rivers miles away…

It will take more than venal carpetbaggers like Ron DeSantis who i caught for the first ten minutes of the debate this week before i switched over to the Trump side-show (his main goal going forward seeming to be projecting the vigorous look of an unrepentant ape exultant in the caked shit it has slept in) and he was bragging about “winning” vs. “teacher’s unions” (i guess unions and working people paid a decent wage are more a threat than Disney itself now) while vaguely perceiving the sounds Nikki Haley made in rebuttal coming across as the persistent chatter of a chipmunk which is alerting any deer you might be ready to take a bead on the first morning of hunting season. Fuckers.

Anyways the lake is as nearly circular as nature could make it which fact along with the oldest library in Florida a sweet white lap-sided structure of inimitable character and the railroad tracks which run along side parallel to the main street, the post Civil-War event which gave the town its new name and not a Scottish one and they were the first European settlers here migrating along the coastal routes from then crowded North Carolina in the early 1800’s and the library displays curios of armour and swords on the wall, all in the spirit of tourism i guess. The railroad people built spacious stately homes just off the circle of water and of course there was a church or two. To the south in the valley where there was irrigable land from a creek and the names of roads are Laird, McKinnon, Campbell with “farm” or “mill” evocatively tacked on and to the north towards Alabama the same and these people weren’t slave-owners, not by a long shot. They were the immigrant inheritors of an economy already deeply rooted in the European tradition which destroyed and enslaved from the first Spanish ship which caught sight of the Bahamas and later the importation of kidnapped Africans by the millions into South America, the Portuguese, the Dutch, all had a hand in that evil. England was guilty too but moved away from a trade it had initiated and from the start with indentured passengers on the Mayflower, even as late as 1812 war offering freedom to those blacks who turned against the rebellious Americans.

The Civil War was about the economy in my opinion, indeed the horror of human enslavement played a dominant role yet the altruism of the abolitionists of the Puritan New England i was born into was cleverly tacked on later even while it remained at the time a way to lure Michigan and Maine and Pennsylvania farm boys into the killing fields. No one likes being told what to do and when you think how quickly this nation spread out following our own Revolution, one cabin, one couple at a time and danger behind every tree and rock and the scant time it took to come to loggerheads again with inequity of commerce, representation in 1860 well the thing becomes murky. It was always about the agrarian party of Jefferson vs. the Industrial north of Adams.

Among other shit i have been reading this, a factual 1921 account of a country on the move and perhaps a key, just one, to figuring out why, when the impetus of the moving towards the unknown is halted, and “frontiers” are removed from the imagination as a goal resulting in the cannibalising of our own social fabric from within. Frontier is used in Star Trek for a reason, it is a concept much distorted now by the shifting sands of political diatribe, alternating current of the yin-yang interplay of the Fox News dumbing down zombie-lessons vs, the Msnbc/New York Times convoy/supplicant of the Liberal Consensus which has come under attack since the 1950’s and even more shrill as each year passes and other worlds on other shores react to the lack now of any true “frontier” but of humane sanity. That is the one thing we can perhaps now strive for.

I prefer small true glimpses into things. Movements and universal of the heart. Sure i’ll finally catch up with a movie like “Barbie” and laugh and think even as i know most of its jokes will be lost on future generations. I’d prefer something like “A Thousand and One” as its more like the pace of real time adversity and triumph, joy and pain. Even absorb the sadness of a ponderous but chilling Scorsese film and yes the murderous result of greed expanding the frontier even while an earlier film of his from the 70’s like “Alice Doesn’t Live Her Anymore” seems smaller but yet somehow excavate the small human challenge of just examining our universal if less incendiary challenges, contradictions, hopes…

This book is a dry read and not populated with anything but the movement of humans, and a particular time in history when an unlikely nation came into being and so much by chance and sacrifice, life and death which should be celebrated in song like “America the Beautiful” apart from the absolutely agonising victims along the way, the appreciation for what we have and so distorted from the agressive war anthem of the Star-Spangled Banner we have marched under so long now in our current mania: to blame, to react, to eat our insides out because we have too much comfort now, the ones who claim to represent and have power, time to do other than bicker and complain now that the wild has been tamed.

But i think the wild within us is still here, that new frontier. One small cabin at a time, one plowed field of compassion, acceptance of the truth that we are all in this together, sharp words are dull as blades on granite. We are overblown in our conceit that a form of government, say: our transformative somehow benighted “Democracy” is at dire risk and NOW and of course anyone can tell you its for the few, that democracy, still, even as the southern farmers here once took up arms as more a duty of honour rather than a racial priority and lived like the rest to see that authority always gravitates, again like water, to money, that democracy is not under threat as much as needs new definition, reality based in truth.

Sure i have taken a side. There is no doubt or ever was about that. But there is so much more to worry about than an ape covered with shit. It is the structures of enabling which reward him and rewarded before his negligible impotent rage (soon to be flushed from our warning systems) genocide of native people and animals not the farmers along cypress populated rivers of 200 years ago whose ghosts are being re-configured to fit a script i don’t want to see on the big screen or otherwise influence a way of seeing, being, thinking that eviscerates the bigger picture of our country, this wonderful nation i so fell culpable with but also love and appreciate for all it has offered of beauty and life, as moving closer to the light than our planet has ever achieved in all its history. To throw it all away is to dishonour so much utter living and doing all aside from our internet-gleaned new wisdoms, easy answers, 50 character pronouncements and 60 second videos. From ‘sea to shining sea” here need not be taken as fighting words, It is already a fait accompli. Now we must live and with each other. Not take for granted our small moments or even our larger one as the leaders because if we are not good even given the depth of our communal ridiculous neuroses than we have a bigger problem. No doubt.

This was a needed interlude. I have written here for almost a year now and best when immersed in life and either fresh off an experience taken on creatively as one may do with say ripping up a floor, plumbing a shower, or ruminating on the meaning of a luminous dream which materialises as early light in dawn air might, in bits and pieces, forming like ice at edges of river might, never impeding flow but hopefully giving it perspective, something my own inner eye might appreciate. Thanks to all of you the “almost” 100 subscribers who pick your way with me when you get chance (and god this platform has SO many wondrous distractions by comparison i can only imagine some of you are just curious or wary as to where the mood may compel, require, next) down this path. I do want to improve the clarity of narration if not adjust the receiver as the latter is ingrained now and aware only of its own craving for hmmmmm frontiers……