Prefatory Twaddle

Is everybody gone? 

Good. We can begin.

Now that everyone is micro blogging and Tweeting away, doing this is maybe a little more pointless than ever before. It’s as irrelevant now as it would have been two years ago, though, and - doubtless - equally futile. Since both as a writer and a person I have always been fond of the irrelevant and futile gesture, this is the perfect time to start.

I live in my mind, which is a dangerous and yet also incredibly boring and tedious place to be. I fucked around with the whole blog concept off and on over the last few years when people still got book deals out of it, but I could never find the hook. After awhile, I was so obsessed with the notion I needed a hook, a focus, that became the perfect way to mentally masturbate myself with process rather than actual deed. 

Three years ago, I did something so unexpected my family and friends actually sat up and took me seriously for awhile. I moved from Cincinnati, my birthplace and home of 38 years, to Oxford, Ms., which Northerners think of as the Deep South but which locals know is only the Mid South. I moved without a job prospect, which seems the be all end all reason for everything, anymore, including motivation not to swallow a bottle of Vicodin with your nightly bourbon. 

I ostensibly had a plan, which crumbled into nothing within months of arriving in my new - and now default - home. That’s more or less the point at which friends and family began to tune back out, once more resigned to watch me muddle through and succeed at nothing so much as failure. This is the perfect place to digress and do the rant about mental illness and the way families see what they want when they want (as does everyone, really) and throw myself a huge pity party, but let’s just not.

I moved here to be with “the love of my life,” which goes in quotation marks because if I have a love of my life which isn’t either jacking myself off with useless and elaborate thoughts and fantasies, or the more literal meaning of that term, it has yet to arrive. And, given certain psychobiological realities we’ll no doubt visit at some future date, I do not look for it to show up until it’s way, way too late to matter. Shortly before a myocardial infarction does to my heart what that bullet did to the apple on that old Jeff Beck Group album cover, say. 

Shortly after arriving, I pitched myself as a writer to local alterna-rag The Local Voice. In the course of that pitch, I floated and then swatted “the whole guy from up North moves South/culture shock thing”  as being “so done.” I don’t know, now, whether I am more troubled by using that expression in a semi-professional conversation or that I rejected what was obviously the best idea for a blog/column I may ever have. (Unless I somehow, someday manage to date the kind of woman to whom I am attracted, as opposed to the kind who are attracted to me.)

But we’re not doing the entry on the “love of my life” today.

It doesn’t really matter how played out an idea is, I don’t think. It matters what one does within the form. A blog is, at least in theory, a journey into and through personal experience, and the experience of being a guy who’d lived his whole life in one Northern city and then moved himself to the Mid South, which is approximately the same as moving from Hawaii to Alpha Centauri, is shaping up over the last three years to be the defining experience of my early middle age. 

We read and hear things to the effect that the “New South” is fast obliterating the Old. The old ways are disappearing, replaced by a culture so homogeneous as to render geographical distinction a thing to almost  long for. After living here for three years, I call bullshit on that. Atlanta isn’t the entirety of the South. North Carolina is different, in the cities, but maybe cities are all just slowly coming to be the same. Hell, maybe they even need to be. 

Mississippi, which ended Slavery Redux only at gunpoint and threat of losing the federal money which keeps this state from slipping off the continental shelf and floating out into the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t heard anything about the New South. It’s hard to hear much of anything when you have your head jammed far enough up your ass to eat the undigested corn from lunch. 

That said, Oxford has changed from what it was, conforming itself to the expectations of the new, moneyed class of retirees it started attracting in the ‘90s. These changes have less to do with aspiring to be just like everyone else than they do with the power exerted by money. If that is a common theme across the country these last few years, the translation still remains unique in the South. 

Mark Twain famously said he wanted to live in Cincinnati when the world ended, as it’d take ten years loner to arrive there than everywhere else. I guess Twain never spent any time in Mississippi - the funky, crazy artsy, psychedelic San Francisco ‘60s didn’t make their way here until the ‘80s. For about twenty years, Oxford was a tiny town of Falkner’s sons and daughters and a music scene to rival Athens, Ga., or Austin. These days, some speak of Oxford as the hybrid of Austin and Aspen, but that’s wishful thinking. The money people are pushing the Austin out, and the slavering jackals in our historic city hall lap up whatever crap they serve. 

Any depiction of Oxford’s recent past as a paradisiacal arts colony rolled in batter and deep fried, then served with an icy cold glass of whiskey are almost certainly as much the inevitable distortion of nostalgia as an accurate reflection in an unlined mirror. This is and has always been, in its quiet way, a Money Town, and Money Towns are all about a good life for some and a hard ass fucking to the rest. 

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were right about The Rich, it turns out. They do have more money, as Hemingway noted, but they aren’t like you and me, either. In a sense they are, of course, but to tell oneself it’s only the money that makes the difference is to engage in a willful delusion which leaves toxic brownfields where it used to squat, monolithic as a factory. 

I’m just sketching themes and trends I will want to explore in future entries today - I will leave the salvos against the pernicious influence of wealth for another day. 

In all fairness, though, this isn’t going to be merely the grousing of one willfully naïve man-boy against all that is wrong with the South - that would not only be done, it’d be both unfair and vastly inaccurate. There is much to be said for the preservation of old ways and old values against the incursion of new and untested priorities. North Mississippi makes a good microcosm of that conflict. Whether moving here now and being somewhat the perpetual outsider gives mea unique perspective is an open question. I have arrived at a fascinating juncture, however: America is at a crossroads between old promise and new necessity, and this, the poorest state in the union, is often a perfect encapsulation of that dilemma. 

Fertile as that field may be, however, I am not one to specialize. Late sci-fi author frank Herbert railed against the deleterious influence of specialization upon culture (ironic from one who specialized in writing science fiction opuses) and I share his concerns, or at least embody them. I am too fascinated by the intersections of pop culture and politics, religion and sociology, among others, to get away with writing only about the slow wearing-off of culture shock. 

If that reads as one who’s covering his ass right ahead of entries pondering the relativism of music fandom these days (or, how in the fucking goddamn hell did we wind up with Def Leppard and Bon Jovi as cross-generational ambassadors?) well, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. 

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this with humor and good grace, but it wouldn’t be true to myself if there weren’t days when the bile rises and slops over, scarring everything it spatters with black, acidic scorn. Humor is as much a way of keeping you at a safe distance as anger, rage and the frequent deployment of a three-dollar word where a 25-cent one would do. 

I don’t trust people. I like the theory of other humans infinitely more than I like the reality. Whatever the failings of this little corner of the world, my own failings are as much to blame for the sense of isolation and loathing which will often end up characterizing this project. 

But there will be an almost childlike sense of wonder; flashes of almost impossible optimism; adolescent enthusiasms and juvenile humor. Peter Pan Complex isn’t always a curse, but anyone who considers it nothing but blessing is too easily sated by banging 19 year-old porn stars. 

If this is successful, it will deal as much with the good as the not-so-much. The ghosts of Mississippi take more shapes than spectral Klansmen and angry rednecks cruising the state highways with a length of rope in the trunk. The Delta, that haunted, storied plain of American mythology, begins less than 30 miles from my front door. Music rises from its fertile soil as sure as cotton every Spring. Oxford lies midway between the American Medina and Mecca - Tupelo, birthplace of The King, and Memphis, seat of His power. 

It is difficult for a fan of perversity, perversion and decadence such as I to imagine a better location in which to observe all three in play at once. When autumnal Saturdays are characterized by 20 year-old ladies in search of their Mrs. degree at Ole Miss puking up Kentucky bourbon all over thousand-dollar cocktail dresses as they work the tailgate orgy in The Grove; when local law flouts the state supreme court in order to protect business interests ahead of the people’s well being; when the state governor diverts federal funds for hurricane relief into the pockets of a wealthy few and no one says anything; when people break their arms patting themselves on the back about how far race relations have come since the early 1960s, seemingly oblivious to the darker pigment of the entrenched underclass; when white and black and brown all see things in terms of race,  missing the rather-too-obvious string pulling by the wealthy to divide and conquer; I know I am in the right place. 

And there is beauty, of which I am also a great fan. A friend said to me not long ago that appreciation of beauty is too often missing in my work. I hope this blog will make amends for that deficit. North Mississippi often feels and looks like the Middle of Nowhere. Who knew Nowhere was this outrageously beautiful?

Maybe this project will also help me resolve my longstanding ambivalence toward both my former hometown and my inability to sit easy with any notion of home.  It is not only the rootless drifter who feels no sense of belonging - alienation is a state of mind, not location. 

Any other goals and hopes for this will have to remain private - at least for now. When one cannot seem to grow up, it is too easy to sketch out grandiose blueprints for structures which will not support their own weight. Self fulfilling prophecy may be cliché, but that makes it no less real. I am already soaring into the stratosphere of unattainable ambition. If I am to succeed here, need to stay closer to the ground. 

Up next: Introductory notes on Oxford.