Music City Author’s Haunted Nashville Novel Released: A City of Ghosts

This won’t be news to a majority of the readers that still stop by here, but in case you’re one of the rare few, my friend Betsy Phillips (better known to the blogosphere as Tiny Cat Pants author Aunt B.) wrote a novel featuring ghost stories steeped in Nashville legends and lore – a haunted alternative history of Nashville, I guess you’d say – and it was just released on Amazon today and you can get a copy here.

It also has a cover photo that is quite possibly my favorite picture of Nashville ever, shot by the enormously talented Chris Wage.

For you Kindlephiles, it’ll also be out for the Kindle soon.

About half of the stories were published at TCP last October for the Halloween season (and were awesome), but the rest are brand new and I’m super looking forward to reading them! Be sure and grab a copy of your own (P.S. they’d make great Christmas gifts too!).

First Things First: Down Here In Tennessee, We Call That Shameful

So, right around the time I was reading the rather absolutely appalling latest from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office via the Knoxville News Sentinel online in the middle of the night last night, so was Katie Allison Granju reading it somewhere online on her computer.

Seriously – who’s in charge of protocol, PR, and spin control at KCSO? If it’s ultimately all up to the Sheriff himself, surely they also have some legal eagle on that payroll that says things like “Maybe you should wait ’til…” or “I would advise holding off on that until…” and whatnot. Or if not an attorney, I would guess that they probably have (as most such state and county and metro agencies do), some PR person for whom one of their primary roles in their job description is advising “yes, this is a good idea” and “uh, this is not a good idea”.

Maybe they should hire me – someone with ZERO experience other than several years of voluntarily unpaid stuff that’s been mostly me helping out musician friends – because even I, in my complete and utter ignorance about law enforcement public relations, would have had at least a shred of good sense not to:

1. Release a new public statement on their most recent findings and autopsy results to the press before notifying the listed next of kin or a family member of the deceased of the results;
2. Release said statement late on Friday night (the time stamp on the KNS article was midnight EST) when they know good and well the family is laying their son to rest on Saturday.

The first – if not a legal issue and an outright violation of something – it’s overwhelmingly a questionable move, and most definitely highly unprofessional no matter how you look at it. KCSO has obviously taken the offensive regarding this case, but that shouldn’t just give them carte blanche to ignore what is obvious to anyone with a working brain the more appropriate thing to do in such a case (and, I suspect, is probably in their protocol and someone just chose to ignore it or find some excuse not to follow it because they were pissed off).

The second is just plain a matter of class and decency. Since it was at or almost freakin’ midnight on a weekend (Friday night) when that statement was released to the press – it could have waited until Monday. Or at least Sunday, or – at the very least – late Saturday afternoon or evening, and AFTER Henry Granju’s memorial service, to release those results to the press, especially since obviously no one was going to notify Henry’s mother or father of the results first before making them public. No class – no class at all, and most well-mannered human beings with any class and decency would agree.

KCSO may well have been within their rights to do both – releasing the statement publicly without talking to the parents first, and releasing it however and whenever they wanted to. Does that make it right? Heck, no, not in any decent society.

Which I’d like to think, simply by virtue of being down here in the South, we tend to at least handle some stuff with a little more care, sense and common decency than some other places maybe do sometimes. It shouldn’t be that way, no – everybody everywhere should have common decency – but still, we in the South do tend to do a little better than some at treating “acting decent” as sort of an unwritten law that pretty much just everybody knows. (Though obviously not everywhere in Knox County, huh…)

And whether or not it was within their rights to do both, it doesn’t change the fact that their actions still appear questionable on a moral and ethical level (at the very least) and completely without class, and are going to appear to anyone with (A) sense and (B) any interest in this case in support of the family (and probably some who weren’t, or didn’t really care either way before) to have been exacted the way it was on purpose, and out of offense at perhaps feeling “under fire” right now.

It’s simple, really. Very, very few people are going to look at the news of the preliminary autopsy results this morning, when they open up their paper or turn on the morning news, and NOT think:  You know, that could have waited until Henry was laid to rest today. People that knew him or his family, people that don’t, and pretty much everyone else with any sense of common decency.

Even those who really aren’t and haven’t been interested at all in the case and don’t/haven’t care either way -  it’s not going to go unnoticed to a lot of them either. Totally besides the people that were already mad and upset about all this stuff with Henry’s case yesterday – there’s going to be heads shaking and “tut-tut”-ing all over East Tennessee (and elsewhere) who couldn’t have cared one way or the other all that much yesterday. Guarantee it.

Then there will be those who learn that the latest results were released to the media without notifying either parent first, and that Henry’s parents found out the latest results just like the rest of us did – and pretty much most every one of those people is going to think, well, THAT was a shoddy (I’m trying hard not to curse here) thing to do.

Especially to a mother and father who are laying their dead child to rest today.

Come on. PR/Spin Control/WhoeverPerson (or the Sheriff, if it was ultimately up to the Sheriff) should have known all that. It ain’t rocket surgery (borrowing a favorite phrase from a favorite friend) to figure that one out. It wasn’t a matter of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t, damned whatever you do” with this particular piece of the whole shebang.

It’s just plain common decency, class, good morals and ethics. That’s all. Nothing more than that. Well, and professionalism too, yes.

Yeah, a lot of people were going to be upset and angry and outraged about that press statement anyway, no matter when nor how it was released. No doubt. It probably wasn’t going to calm too many people down too much.

But releasing that statement to the press before notifying the parents, and releasing it mere hours before Henry’s memorial service – on a weekend, late on a Friday night, no less – instead of waiting until Monday? Or at least Saturday afternoon or evening after the young man was laid to rest?

I grew up with an absolutely darling young lady who was plenty book smart, but just had absolutely no common sense whatsoever. Some people are just like that.

And some folks, bless their hearts – we all know the odd person or two or three who just wouldn’t know the difference between class and no class even if they had to spend twelve years studying that and only that. Even people who act without class at times usually really do know the difference. But still, there’s some out there that really and truly just don’t know any better.

Perhaps that’s the case here – that someone just doesn’t know any better and wouldn’t know class if it bashed them in the head and gave them a skull fracture and a closed head injury. If so, what do you do about that, other than hope one has advisors around that can discourage such a massive faux pas before it gets out, which obviously isn’t the case here.

But whatever the case may be with how and why things went down as they did, the problem NOW is this – the majority of folks out there are going to look at what’s happened overnight and see that press statement as either a deliberate, offensive move on the part of the issuer, or a move made totally without class, ethics, or decency. Most people will see it as both.

Whether it was truly deliberate or not is beside the point. And it’s too late to take it back – and really, any more spin or damage control on that’s just gonna make it worse. This kinda thing is just one of those things you really can’t fix – not in the public eye – other than maybe apologizing and moving on from there.

And even if those responsible just really and truly didn’t know any better – I can’t imagine that someone that DID know better didn’t advise them against it, and advise them to wait.

You have a county agency up there that has been under fire for a good while now for things completely unrelated to this particular case, and even more under the microscope this past week because of this case – and somebody makes a boneheaded move like that last night?

If the good people of Knox County decide they’ve finally had enough – and a whole lot more of them are going to be outraged this morning when they weren’t at all yesterday, and the rest are gonna be a lot more outraged than they were yesterday – those responsible for issuing that horribly ill-timed and poorly handled statement to the press aren’t going to have anyone to blame but themselves. Period.

It really just all boils down to one word, which is the one my Grandmama probably would have been shaking her head this morning and saying, were she still alive and reading that press statement hours before that young man is being laid to rest – “Shameful.”

My grandmother would have said it, my great-grandmother would have said it. Your grandmother would have said it too probably, or something like it.

Point being – so, probably, would have their grandmothers and great-grandmothers too.

Confessions of an Aging Beach Bunny

When most people think of the beach, they think of sunny Southern California, or Florida or other Gulf Coast beaches, and the like. When I say I grew up on the beach, people sometimes raise an eyebrow in response (whether literally or through the monitor).

This is not unlike the time Prince Charming made the mistake of calling me a “country girl”. I’ve never lived more than a half a mile outside of any city limits in my life, but my insistence at the time that I was a town girl elicited guffaws and floor-rolling paroxysms of laughter, and still to this day there will be the occasional side remark - “Oh, that’s right, you’re a town girl“ – followed by the kind of barely muffled snickers and chuckles that just make you want to kick the living daylights out of someone sometimes, just because they grew up in Knoxville (oh please, Knoxville is a small town disguised as a big city) and Columbus, Ohio and think that makes one ohhhh so worldly and metropolitan, hmpfh.

But truly I did spend most of my teenage years on the beach, and it maybe wasn’t as beach-y as the beaches of Southern California and Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it was a beach, no less. I spent a fair amount of my earlier childhood just a few miles up the river, where the occasional catfish would graze my ankles (Newscoma just died reading that) while I waded around searching for shells. I spent the teenage years as a beach bum at all hours of the day and night and in all four seasons (please don’t ask me what we did down there on dark winter nights, heh) – especially summers, of course, when I spent a good bit of that time perpetually failing to ever learn how to water ski despite about a hundred people’s attempts to successfully see that I did. I blame this on the same reasons I never successfully learned to roller skate or ice skate. My ankles couldn’t deal.

But ah, the beach.

And now that I’ve been out of high school 25 years, I can own up to the fact that yes indeed, Michelle and I absolutely did skip out of school almost every day of sixth period in the 11th grade to go to the beach – because we were teacher’s aides that period anyway, which basically that was the whole plan of snagging the teacher’s aide gig that year, of course. Senior year it didn’t matter ‘cos I got out of school at 1:00 anyway – presumably for work, but I didn’t have to go to work until 5:00.

Sweet? You bet.

Collectively Broken?

I know most of you probably read or heard about the church shooting in Knoxville this past Sunday. I’ve been trying to find the words to comment on it all week, but it’s really been difficult to put thoughts into words in this case.

Different people I have discussed it with have been most struck by different things about it. One was horrified that such a thing happened when children were on stage performing a play. Another has not been able to get the thought of the child who was covered in his mother’s blood out of her head. I was particularly disturbed by the irony that one of the victims wasn’t a member of the church, but of another church in the community, and had come to the church that day to see the kids’ play, and the fact that some of the other victims were visitors from out of town (I heard anyway).

And I guess one of the most disturbing things of all to many people is the fact that obviously you can’t even be sure you can feel safe in church anymore. Of all places.

I think of the church I grew up in – a small town church, but there are many big churches with large memberships in town and the town’s not all THAT small anyway – however, the church I grew up in was pretty small compared to most. Even with a full house, someone with a gun could have taken out the entire congregation and any visitors in a matter of minutes. That just makes my blood run cold and sends shivers down my spine.

As a kid, I spent literally hours in that church, and quite often by myself – with an adult on the grounds, yes, but not necessarily in the general vicinity where I was or even in the same building. But who wouldn’t have thought that wasn’t safe?

I also lived my entire life until I went off to college in houses that were never locked – not my home, not my grandparents’ – unless you went out of town on vacation, and maybe not even then, because it really didn’t matter. From around the second or third grade on, I walked home from school to a home that had been empty and unlocked all day long, and usually spent another two or three hours alone in the house until my parents got home from work. We didn’t lock our cars; we didn’t have to.

And nobody would have thought twice about the fact that I spent countless hours walking or bicycling around the neighborhood or all the way to downtown by myself, also from a pretty young age. Even when 8-year-old Cary Ann Medlin’s body was found raped and mutilated in the woods in a nearby town when I was 13 – a tragedy that Newscoma, my age and growing up in the next town over at the time, referred to the other day in her own thoughts about the Knoxville shootings – still I continued to hoof it around town by myself all the time, albeit with probably some stronger cautionary words about being careful and watching out for myself. Heck, at 13 years old, that was prime time for me walking downtown every week to spend my allowance at the music shop on records and that week’s issue of Rolling Stone.

But you really didn’t HAVE to worry about not being safe, not then, not there, and not even all that much even in the bigger cities. In 18 years, there was the Medlin case, there was the Marcia Trimble abduction and murder in Nashville that was such unusual and big news that, I guarantee you, every single native Tennesseean still alive that’s over the age of 40 not only remembers her name, but can probably tell you exactly what she looked like. Because stuff like that just didn’t happen, not as a rule.

And people in small towns didn’t go around killing each other. I recall one big nasty murder in the county when I was a child, and one when I was in high school. One was killed by someone who had previously worked for him, the other was shot and killed by a man he knew over some argument. Two – TWO – murders in two counties in 18 years.

And now there’ve been more murders than I can count in both those counties over the last ten, fifteen years – not every day, no, but far, far more than two in 18 years, and many of them seemingly arbitrary or random. Kids get abducted and sometimes wind up dead, and it’s still shocking, sure, but not like it once was. Another school shooting happens and you’re appropriately horrified, but no longer all that surprised.

And now people are walking into churches on Sunday mornings and shooting and killing people. If you can’t be sure you’re safe in school, or in church – where, then, can you feel safe?

Of course, now I live in a city where murders happen every week and I hear gunshots pretty much every day just about now, so I’m even more numbed and jaded by the constant influx of violence and crime. But that’s why the horrible things that keep happening back home – and even in Knoxville, which is not crime free, of course, but nowhere near the percentage Memphis is – that’s why these things bother me even more. Stuff happens here that’s not supposed to happen up there, or there.

Would the church shooting have been as shocking and people so horrified if it had happened in Memphis? Sure, of course it would have. But I don’t know that many would have been all that surprised, sad to say, especially the rest of our fellow Tennesseans. People from up yonder where I’m from, other than a very small handful, they don’t come to Memphis to shop or to see doctors or for entertainment like they used to. They go to Nashville instead, or even just to Jackson. It’s really pretty sad.

I am grateful that nobody I knew was at the church the other day in Knoxville, but plenty of folks I’m acquainted with did have friends or family that were there, and even one or two that are members that weren’t there that day. That doesn’t make it any less disturbing or sad.

And when I heard from someone in Knoxville about a comment someone they know made – someone who is a member of a large Baptist church in West Knoxville, and quite possibly the same one my future mother-in-law attends every Sunday – the comment being something along the lines of well, you know those people in that church practice witchcraft – I just felt sick.

My future mother-in-law – the Baptist churchgoer – used to be involved in programs that were held at the TVUU church weekly, and had just been telling me on the phone the day before what a nice church it was, and how lovely and wonderful all the people she knew there always had been. In fact, it turns out one of her other sons – one of my future brothers-in-law – used to be a member of that very church.  Maybe still is technically and still on their rolls, though he doesn’t really go anymore.

Witchcraft. I mean, please. Granted, it wasn’t the Baptists or the Methodists or the Presbyterians or a super well-known sect, and it wasn’t even the Catholics, who goodness knows have been accused of lots of whacked out things in thousands of years. But witchcraft? Don’t be stupid. Google before you go shooting off at the mouth. I mean, Wikipedia’s right there.

The ignorance in this country seems to be at an overall all-time high, and safety’s at a premium, obviously. If you can even say safety exists anymore, when you can’t be safe in church on Sunday.

People are having to choose between buying groceries and putting gas in their car, and at the same time, people are getting laid off from their jobs left and right, businesses are closing, and not too many that still have jobs are reporting that their salaries are going up along with the cost of everything else that’s going up.

When does it all end? Where does it stop?

There’s an election coming up, but is anybody who could really change things really going to do something about it all?

I wonder. Something’s got to give. When things break, you fix them. Are we, collectively, broken enough yet?

In Which I Respond to the Bez

I haven’t been able to post on any Blogger blogs in months, so I’m probably about to adopt the annoying habit of turning my intended comments on peers’ Blogger blogs into posts on my own blog.*

So, my response to Mike over at Chez Bez is: Non-Southerners**. It came from the Times, after all!

Shoot, everyone knows you if meet a new adult person down here, “What do you do for a living?” is going to follow soon on the heels of (if not before):

“Where are you from?”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Are you married?”

“Do you have children?”

“Where do you go to church?” (in some circles, anyway, and…)

“Can I get you (some ice tea, a beer, a coke, etc.)?”

And some more, of course.  Nosy or not, I expect some of my kinfolk would have sniffed that it’d be considered rude and impolite NOT to answer those questions.  Folks in the South are just that way.***

* (Fortunately this is now a minority as most have moved to WordPress or otherwise, whew.)

** (Nope I didn’t say Yankee… but I could have. Or Midwesterner or West Coaster or whatever, natch.)

*** (Not saying I agree, mind you.)

P.S. Hee.

Would You Like Fries with That?

I’ve repeated the story many times (much as I was told many times) of how when my mother was pregnant with me and living in Memphis, she used to send my dad out for Krystals all the time.

And now, many (who’s counting?) decades later – Krystal Pizza.

Pregnancy craving satisfier or gastrointestinal Armageddon? Could be both.

.

HT: The most excellent R. Neal @ KnoxViews

A Small Town Tradition & A Lack Of Time

One thing I usually do every morning, since I have extended family all over Northwest Tennessee – not to mention all the friends and their families back in my two hometowns up yonder – is check The Jackson Sun’s obituaries, because you never know when something might have happened like that that you really probably do need to know about. Now that I’ve gotten to “that age” where things like that seem to happen more and more – no longer just people’s grandparents passing away like it once often was, but their parents, siblings, sometimes themselves – I try to stay on top of it all, and have ties to several counties up there to check up on. A couple of my friends are good about calling when it’s somebody or their parent or whatever that we know really well, but a lot of times someone’s mom or dad will have passed away or something that they won’t think to let me know about, and I’d like to send a card or whatever – that kind of thing – so I just try to make sure to check the Sun as well as my hometown paper’s websites daily (or weekly in the one case).

This might just be a Northwest Tennessee thing (or a rural group of towns kinda thing), but I find that since I’m scanning the obits real quick at a glance every day, it’s quicker for me to scan down the column list of funeral homes rather than the towns themselves. I guess it’s odd that I know the names of all those small town funeral homes so well that it’s quicker for me to look through the page that way, rather than reviewing the towns themselves – but again, I think that may just be a Northwest Tennessee, or at least rural-ish, thing. I know Karnes is in Dyer, and Shelton’s in Trenton, Stockdale-Malin in Camden, and so on and so forth all over the northwest part of the state. Sometimes I have wondered if Newscoma and Squirrelly do somewhat the same thing, or if it’s just some weird quirk with me, but it seems I just process the information much more quickly looking down the column of listed funeral homes than the list of towns on the page. I dunno why.

OK, so yep, that’s kinda weird. I’m well aware of that.

I also get e-mail obituary notifications from one of the funeral homes back home. Which is really convenient, but it’s also kind of a source of amusement for me because, well, if you’re from that particular town of my two hometowns, who’d have ever thought something like that via the information superhighway would EVER be available, you know. Until a few years ago, that town had all of one – ONE - traffic light. Things seemed to be getting really progressive when the OTHER, and first, funeral home in town put in a recorded obituary line you could call to see who’d passed on and was laid up there at the moment. Which that in itself is another source of amusement to me, because the fact that my little hometown is even able to support TWO funeral homes is just crazy to me. But apparently they’re both doing well, both the original and long-standing one as well as the newer kid on the block (which, admittedly, is really not so new anymore, I guess it’s been there about ten years now, but it’ll always be “the new one” to me and half of everybody else back home).

Now, in my other hometown, there have been two funeral homes for as long as I’ve been around and way before me; in fact, technically, there’s three, maybe even four (not sure about that). But the two main, large ones – they’ve always been there pretty much. And every family in town, no doubt, has their preference of where their people will go when the time comes.

Or you have families like mine where one side of the family (my grandmother’s) were all laid to rest by one funeral home, and my grandfather’s side of the family all had their preparations and funerals at the other. Nowadays that the older folks are all gone and it’s just the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I think we’re all pretty much sticking with just the one for those needs (the one my grandfather’s side always went to). The family that runs that particular funeral home includes folks that grew up with, went to church with, and/or went to school with both my parents, my uncle, cousins, etc., so it’s just kind of natural that in the end, all the “younger” generation has gravitated towards that one for all burial and funeral needs. I don’t know, nor do I know that I ever have known, the people that run the other one, and it’s been going on 30 years since we’ve had a family funeral there, my great-grandfather being the last one. So when the time comes for my Mom hopefully way far off in the future – assuming I outlive my mother, that is – I’ll be calling Leon (or his son), and they’ll do what they do, and there ya go.

The fact that everything I just wrote is so convoluted and complicated is actually one of the things I love about being from the South, or at least the more rural parts and small towns of the South. There are probably very few small town anecdotes you can tell or subjects you can try to explain that are specific to Southern small towns without it getting all complicated and convoluted like that, all those little details and stories and tangents.

Oh, there’s much, much more besides the funeral home deal, and I’m sure I’ll write about a lot more of it in the future, not enough time for that right now. But that stuff just cracks me up, plus I’m glad of it, I really wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s just the kind of stuff you just don’t find everywhere, just in Small Town USA, and some of it’s so very specific to small towns in the South.

Anyway, guess what, none of that’s really what this post is about. Not exactly, anyway.

As I mentioned above, I get the e-mail notifications from the one funeral home back home. So yesterday afternoon during my lunch break, as I’m trying to catch up all the conversation and lots and lots of clamor that was the local-ish blog world yesterday, my e-mail beeps and I go see what I got.

And it’s from that funeral home, and I look at the name. Which is not exactly a terribly uncommon name, even though this is a small town we’re talking about. There’s actually several people in town that share both the same first and last names in this case; in fact, two of them with the exact same name graduated with me, even though I graduated in a class of only 160-odd folks. They had different middle names though, so one was “Firstname D.” and the other “Firstname K.” – or “Big Firstname” – when you spoke of them.

Anyway, I saw it, and immediately said, “No…” And clicked on the link to go to the website and looked, where the birthdate confirmed yes, not no.

Look, this wasn’t someone I was particularly close to or knew that well at all. Just a few days ago I wrote about being a little shell-shocked recently over friends’ brothers and sisters, both older and younger than me, having recently passed away and how weird that was to deal with. Well, this is the older sibling of another one of my friends, one of my gang from school days. Again, not someone I knew well, even though his brother was one of my crew – but kind of ironically, someone else I was in school with myself, and someone else I shared a lunch table with for an entire year. And someone else who, though I didn’t know so well, was always pleasant and super nice.

It’s really kind of unnerving and is definitely sad and depressing in any case, but especially since this is the third time since the first of the year that siblings of friends have died, they’re all around my age, two I was in school with myself. It’s not the big city; it’s a really small town. And people that are 44 and 42 and 39 years old within less than two months in this really small town – it’s flabbergasting as well as depressing.

And I’m further bothered because in small towns like where I come from, when someone dies or someone’s people pass away, what do you do? You go to the funeral home for visitation, or the funeral, or both. But you don’t NOT go. You ALWAYS go. I am just not close enough to go every time something happens, which I know people understand. But even though I’ve been a city girl for many decades now, the small town girl in me wants to be able to go every time something like this happens, and pay my respects. And this is about the forty millionth time something’s happened and I can’t go. Yes, that’s an exaggerated number, but it’s certainly no exaggeration as pertains to what it feels like.

So in the course of all that yesterday, I just kind of took the night off last night from anything involving the online world, save for a big project I’m working on right now, and you can probably see why stunt legislators and their circuses and any other big major things that I was acutely aware of yesterday suddenly seemed very insignificant and small in the great big grand scheme of things. The fact that someone I know and think very highly of and like a great deal, and literally grew up with, lost his older – and only – brother, who was only two years older than the friend and I… that was much more important, as well as dealing with the disturbing fact of these other recent losses. It all bothers me a great deal as well as being, naturally, sad, so I “took the night off” to reflect and ponder. And talk to my mom since I hadn’t in a few weeks.

So basically what I’m saying, in a very roundabout way, is I am still in the middle of working on this huge project in my off time and suddenly yesterday the e-mail and everything else got really backed up, and all of that was even before this bit of bad news that kind of knocked me out of commission for the rest of the day. Then my big project kind of took an unexpected (read: taking more extra time to correct) turn last night, and the rest of this week is looking pretty busy for freelance work so there goes a lot of my catch-up time. So bear with me a day or two or three while I get caught back up, if you were waiting on something or if I’m slow to respond, that’s why… thanks mucho grande bunches.

Ice Ice Baby

Wow, I just stuck my hand outside the front door for, like, five seconds to get the mail a few minutes ago, and then I was outside less than thirty seconds probably getting the dogs back in, and I am froooooozen.

It would probably help if I didn’t live in the Ancient House from Draft City but man, it’s still cold out there. Sun’s shining though. Not that that’s helping much.

We Tennesseeans don’t do so hot when it’s under 30 degrees.

Wait, what’s wrong with this picture… it’s 26 in Memphis with a predicted high today of 37.

It’s 32 in Nebraska, where my sister moved this summer, with a predicted high of 46.

No, no, no… it’s supposed to be the other way around! Grrr.

Up Against the Wall

Well, the Camden trip, as expected, was a hoot. Actually the aforementioned club isn’t a dive, it’s actually pretty nice. I was really grasping to see any familiar faces tho, I have been away too long, I saw few. Susie W., who I wound up sitting with, KT, Kim H., Debbie P., Russell H., Al W., and that was probably the extent of it, besides Kelli & Cole.

A bunch of people Kelli knew that I didn’t sat with us for a time and this one guy goes (to me), “You just look really out of place here among all this redneck,” and I said no way, I grew up here, and he didn’t believe me. Oh well…

If You Don’t Like My Redneck

Well, after a three-way phone conversation with Cole and Kelli (during which Kelli and I instantly reverted into redneck Camden girl-ese … why is it when you talk to people on the phone like that you instantly regain the accent you dropped years ago??) -

Anyway, now I’ve been talked into going to some dive bar (that believe it or not, I’ve never been in) in Benton County this weekend to see David Allan Coe with my drunk redneck friends. I’m sure I’ll be able to report back to you Camden folk after seeing god knows how many people I haven’t seen in a decade there.

In any case, no, I’m not going for the music, only for the company and good time (and the fact that Cole’s new wife won’t let him go there with anyone but me).

BTW, I saw what you wrote again KC … you’re treading on real thin ice there, buddy boy. “JTMU”, indeed.

Luv, LB