Beauty Matters

Little Wing on Chapman Stick – I Can’t Believe I Pulled This Off

Judge J. Wayne "Mouse" Wolfenbarger

One of my favorite people in the world.  Judge J. Wayne "Mouse" Wolfenbarger has died.  I cut my baby teeth practicing in his court.  One of the best people I've ever known.  He's way up on the list of my surrogates.  I just cannot believe I'll never see him again.  This picture stabs me in the heart, especially as I listen to Agnes Obel.

June Carter Carter - Ring of Fire (She wrote it, not Johnny Cash)

Hill Street Shade of Blue

Michael Paul Smith: Fast Forward

My heart breaks for you, Michael.  When I look at this picture of you, my eyes try to play tricks on me.  They conspire with my consciousness to create the ostensible lie that whispers to me that you're always sad, constantly depressed, and steeped in continuous loathing, all based upon this almost incomprehensible visage of the countenance that prison has heaped upon you.  I have to remind myself that you probably smile, or laugh even, and that this photograph is a spark that was pitifully, sadly captured nanoseconds before you grinned out its proper opposite. I've heard the joy of prisoners as they discuss their retarded anecdotes, while coughing out loud.  It's what J.D. Salinger meant when he wrote of  the rocking back and forth "between the grief and the high delight."  I, too, am intimately familiar with both extremes, one more than the other. So we share that, and a cruel father and that's about it.

The Dead Baby in the Dynamite Box

On the eastern slope of the Cumberland Plateau there sits a bundle of mountainous topography that tries to hide places like Wartburg, Frozen Head State Park, the Obed, Emory, and New Rivers, and two prisons; the Morgan County Correctional Complex, and Brushy Mountain Penetentiary. From town the Gobey Road descended all the way across the foot of Wiley Arms Mountain to Lancing and the Emory River, which fed the Obed. My grandparents' "home place" was just outside Wartburg on the Gobey Road. My two uncles, Tom and Tim were older than me but just barely. So we boys would venture out in the mountains and stay gone all day sometimes. On that fateful day, they told me to follow then down deep into one of the hollers, that they had something "really special" to show me. I followed right along, worshiping my two uncles as always, who might as well have been slightly older brothers. These were my mother's little brothers. The Sexton family. Grandparents Bart and Edna, Billy Joe, Mary Sue, Betty Lou, John Paul, Ralph, Tom and Tim. Mary Sue was my mother. She used to leave me there for long periods of time. So off they went and well I followed. We left the road in a hair pin curve and descended into a unnamed hollow that was thick with Rosebay and Mountain Laurel. A little, clear branch followed the footpath. After delving deeper into the woods we came upon an old Model T cab of a truck turned upside down beneath which was a wooden dynamite box lodged between it and the earth. What's that? The boys stared deeply into my face and grimly announced that there was a dead baby in the box and turned and ran as fast as they could, leaving me and the dead baby behind to work things out. Terrified, (I was about 5), I ran, too, imagining that that the ghost of that dead baby was gaining on me. Eventually I found my way back to the house where Tom and Tim were eating apples laughing out loud at me. As it turned out, my uncle Johnny has stolen the box of blasting caps from the mines and hid it under the cab of the old truck. Years later, while contemplating these events from my youth, I realized that the "dead baby," was possibly a trope. See, my grandmother had fallen into an unwanted pregnancy late in life and given birth to Debbie, a few years earlier. Tom and Tim would have known or even remembered their baby sister. Debbie was congenetally ill and died at home, shortly after he birth. Probably for the best.

Bout des doigts

Hunting Island

Fully clothed I sank into the Atlantic ocean among the roots protruding from the banks of Hunting Island South Carolina and could not understand why I didn't run away from home when I was a boy.

NENA | 99 Luftballons (Live 2018) (HD)

California's Inhumane Prison Isolation Units

Electrelane - To the East