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Edited on Sun May-22-11 07:38 PM by Fly by night
Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.
Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta.
Ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me.
("I will go to the altar of God, to God, the joy of my youth.
Do me justice, O God, and fight my fight against an unholy people.
Rescue me from the wicked and deceitful man.")
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Good cloudy and unsettled late spring afternoon, all y'all. The winds are blowing hard over my deep hollow home, coming from the southeast (here, a bad sign), whipping the treetops as only Mother Nature and low-flying DEA helicopters can do.
When this happens, I know to breathe, just breathe. I'm used to this by now.
I knew this rain was coming hours before it arrived. On my way to weed my small town square's flower Gardens, I spied a large, prehistoric snapping turtle moving swiftly across the blue highway that connects my hamlet (Fly) to my post office village (Santa Fe, pronounced around here "Santee Fee") whose flower beds I have tended ever since I built them more than a decade ago. Miz Kelly, the old great-granny woman whose farm I now steward, taught me years ago that turtles moving across the road are a sure sign of impending rain.
Once again, Miz Kelly was right, as she was right about so many things back when I was her "tent boy", living below the boughs of a huge black walnut tree where my corral now stands. In exchange for helping her move her quilting frame whenever she rang the cast-iron school bell I installed on her front porch (the frame on which she created completely hand-stitched quilts that she sold me and everyone else for $10 apiece, quilts with names like "Dresden Plate" and "Sunshine and Shade" that I sleep under still), Miz Kelly taught me what grew wild in her (our) hollow that the two of us could eat. She taught me which local men and women could be trusted and which I should steer clear from. She taught me not to fear the ghosts who lived in our deep hollow, the ones that rested in the rocking chairs on her front porch every evening, the ones that stood staring at me from the foot of my bed, though (thankfully) not every night. And she taught me that her God (and my Goddess) would provide, from the firewood we both used to heat our homes and the cool, clear, pure water that both of us hauled home each day from our respective springs.
I learned a lot from Miz Kelly, from the lessons she had also learned in this deep hollow home during her almost ninety-nine years here while she was its steward before me. And I listened closely to her whenever she spoke to me, except for once. That once was almost nine years ago now, when her own ghost whispered frantically in my ear one late August evening, "Tent Boy, you better go pull all your pot plants because John Law is coming soon." Words that her ghost repeated over and over as I rocked on my own front porch swing after a hard day's work on the farm. Words that I wrote off as just the usual pre-harvest paranoia when they could not have been more true. Words that I ignored just that once and, by so doing, helped seal and write my own hollow tale.
With Miz Kelly's help and her prayers for me from within the great beyond, I am still on this farm and I am still thankful for that. Her husband Bud's own daddy once fought John Law himself (and John Law's corrupt co-conspirator, a local banker) for this farm himself and, in winning that fight, earned the nickname "Bull Head" from his admiring neighbors. My own nickname, "Big Man", was earned much the same way, though my temporary neighbors who bestowed it were my fellow felon "homies" in a federal Bureau of Prisons halfway house, a place where I lived for a few "minutes" a few years ago, "minutes" that are fading but not fast enough in my rear-view mirror.
I got up even earlier than usual in my deep hollow home this morning (before 4:00 am), for whatever reasons I do not know. It is likely that it is because my mind is uneasy from all the nonsense that is taking place in my adopted state these days, a place that was once known as the home of Andrew Jackson and now could accurately be renamed the birthing-place of the (American) Fourth Reich, if our frightening and far-from-facetious state legislature has anything to do with it. In either case, Tennessee still firmly remains the birthplace of the blues.
The nation (and the world) now views Tennessee as a sick joke. And that we are. For the past four months, our newspapers and Comedy Central have been filled with the awful effluent of our reich-wing legislature, once again (s)elected by unverifiable voting machines that they insist we continue to use, machines that have slowly and steadily replaced well-respected moderate and conservative Democrats and Republicans with rabid flying monkeys – overt racists, pug-ugly jackals, tone-deaf tinkerers with our Constitution and Hooters girls.
Metaphorically speaking, we are a target-rich environment for satire and ridicule these days, and the faces of our (un)usual suspects are now way too familiar to the many folks in our nation (and world) who still own televisions. People like Bill "Strange Fruit" Ketron (R-Auschwitz), the obliging, plagiarizing sponsor of our anti-Muslim legislation whose lacquered hairdo suggests that he perhaps huffs too much hair-spray and secretly yearns to be a Statler Brother. People like Stacey "Nacho Loonbre" Campfield (R-Stockholm), the life-long bachelor and perhaps-unsatisfied-with-his-own sexuality sponsor of our "Don't Say Gay" bill. People like Glen "Hey there, sailor!" Casada (R-Mustang Ranch), who loudly proclaimed "I'm not for sale" in this week's debate to strip our public school teachers of their collective bargaining rights, when anyone standing behind him could have seen the "Bought and Sold" tattoo just above his frat-boy butt crack. People like Ken Yager and Mike Faulk, the "topless twins" (Rs-Muhlenberg Co.), who have worked tirelessly to protect the rights of coal companies to remove the tops of our Smokey Mountains in order to save the fewer than 500 jobs involved in this despicable desecration. (Next year, I hope they are at least honest enough – we already know they are shameless enough – to co-sponsor a bill to change the UT football team's fight song to "Rocky Topless".)
Somewhere in our formerly fair and (mentally) balanced state, two Republicans -- Howard Baker, our intelligent and moderate former US Senator, and Winfield Dunn, our intelligent and moderate former Governor -- are on their knees, hugging the porcelain chalice while they dry-heave, wondering just how the party of Lincoln in the Volunteer State morphed into the klavern of George Lincoln Rockwell. Too late now to join the rest of us in our battle-cry: "Vote free or Diebold", now that the flying monkeys in their party have finally drowned our Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (to ban unverifiable voting equipment for paper ballots/opscan and mandatory random manual audits) in the state Senate bathtub. I hope those two Republican statesmen (who I proudly cast my votes for) will refrain to their own dying days from falling for the fascist rhapsody that has befallen Lamar Alexander, a once-moderate and intelligent Republican too in our state who also won my vote for Governor (twice) before his failed run for the Presidency and the far right-tilting exclamation point implant that accompanied that quixotic campaign. Lamar! lay down with flying monkeys back then and rose up with their hantavirus-infested fleas, a strain of plague that is particularly virulent because, first, it kills the soul.
Yes, these are indeed troubling days here in Tennessee and in too many parts of our once free, fair and worth fighting for nation. Something is happening here and far too many Mr. Joneses (and Miz Smiths) just don't want to know what it is. And in that willful ignorance lies the seeds of our own destruction. I saw that ignorance staring back at me this morning, as I was on my knees in the town square flower Gardens, a big "Come Help" sign propped up in my pick-um-up truck, unheeded by all the fancy dressed church-goers who were perhaps surprised to still be here this Sunday morning, folks whose fancy cars suggested that they did not fully understood (or perhaps had never heard) the parable of a rich man, a camel and an eye of a needle in their "Six Flags Over Jesus" nondenominational mega-churches here in middle Tennessee which serve more as Sunday gleaming spots for flying monkeys than for followers of the Son.
As these carloads of clueless, holier-than-thou cattle whizzed by, I could not help thinking about what their supposed Teacher had to say at times like these:
"Why art thou sad, O my soul? and why dost thou disquiet me?" (Psalm 42:42)
The answers to that question these days are too numerous and the solutions are too few. But I take solace (and resolution) from the fact that, for a peaceful man, Jesus could also act in anger when the times called for it, could lay His hands roughly on the money-changers and drive them from the temple. Today, that might be harder since the lacquered-hair ministers in too many of our modern temples also wear Mark of the Beast "bought and sold" tattoos above their own butt-cracks.
But nothing is impossible. Miz Kelly taught me that. So did a few of my halfway house "homies" who had just spent many, many "minutes" locked inside of prisons, everywhere but in their minds. And so did my Arapaho elders out in Wind River country in Wyoming who taught me that if our path is too smooth, we are most likely on the wrong path.
Over a half century ago, my fellow son of Mississippi, the preeminent Southern writer William Faulkner, confronted Southerners who quietly allowed the South to "wreck and ruin itself in less than a hundred years." He begged his fellow Southerners to "speak now against the day, when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: ‘Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?'"
If Faulkner were with us still (or we would only listen to his ghost), he would tell us that anything that is worth doing ... is worth doing now.
Prayerfully, with resolution and with righteousness. And now.
I know, in the small of my heart, on the bottoms of my barefoot soles and in the strong, quiet place that is my full-filled soul deep in this Tennessee hollow, that I was Raptured at age nineteen, the first day I sat foot on this land. I am already in heaven and, thankfully, I know it. My job is to keep it that way, one way or the other. I can stay isolated on this land while our Commons is imperiled. Or I can realize that the Commons is everywhere, as abstract as the bedrock of democracy that is the accurate and honest measurement of the consent of the governed or as concrete as the pure waters that fill the aquifer beneath our feet, the clear, clean lifeblood that flows forth from my spring.
Our Tennessee flying monkeys, in addition to all their other foolish and frightening follies, are now talking about expanding the "rights" of oil and gas companies to frack our Volunteer State's Mother Earth, looking for the very little petroleum that lies underneath our ground like a desperate crack-whore searching for small, spilled flecks of her poison in her cat shit-clumped shag carpet. If our flying monkeys succeed, then the cool spring waters that sustain me and every other living being on this farm who welcomed me into their company here four decades ago, and who have kept me serene ever since, will be at risk. Since I am the singular representative of my species here, a member of the only species that now lives as if petroleum is valuable enough to pursue at all costs, even if that cost means fouling the life-sustaining flows of air and water that embrace us, it is my job to speak. My duty. My path.
It is my job to act. And to fight. And to pray. Until we drive the flying monkeys, the money-changers and the Mother-frackers, from our body politic and far, far from our midst. With whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.
I am Raptured and in my heaven. For that, I will give thanks now by getting up from this internets connection, this much-appreciated pathway to all y'all and going back to my Garden to once again end my day on my knees.
I hope you are Raptured too and also in your heaven. Gathering strength now for whatever comes.
Right now, our path looks mighty rough. So we must be on the right one. Time to get moving.
Peace out. Y'all come.
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"These are the days of miracle and wonder.
This is the long distance call.
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo.
The way we look to us all.
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry."
The Boy in the Bubble (Paul Simon)
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