My Appalachian Catchment

I have dear friends and clients, past and present, alive, dead, and dying, for whom I care deeply, who reside in spots with names like Owl Hole Gap, Poor Valley, Tate Springs, Rock Haven, Ni**er Hollow, Wildcat Hollow, Joppa Mountain, Washburn, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Chinqupin, Yellow Branch, Spruce Pine, Pressman's Home, Hogg Lot, Cloud Creek, Cloud Creek Hollow, Mulberry Gap, Natty Branch, Duck Creek, Snake Hollow, Newman's Ridge, Vardy, Clinch, War Creek, Stoney Fork, Cool Branch, Short Mountain, Boatman's Mountain, Stone Mountain, Devil's Nose, Treadway, Thorn Hill, Round Mountain, Grassy Fork, Kyle's Ford, Viking Mountain, Blackwater, Turkey Creek, Five Point, Three Springs, Stubblefield Creek, Morristown Mountain, and Gravel Hill, down on the southside slope, where I live. These people make mistakes, requiring at times my help, not punishment because punishment don't help. From a distance the mountains and hollows seem idyllic, but it's not so. In fact, ignorance permeates the rise and fall of my catchment and its topography. I'll only be able to change things one family at a time, introducing the ideas of neither killing nor consuming animals, mutual aid, community, and secularism. Unfortunately, upon learning that there are people who think differently, their faces blanken as if there's nothing's going on. But, in the words of my Torts professor, Hon. Bill Woods, "it ain't necessarily so."

Short Mountain in Mooresburg, Tennessee

Albert Einstein's Highly Relevant Observation on the Rise of Fascism with a Contemporary Adjustment

"The present state of affairs in Germany is a state of psychic distemper in the masses. Hitler picked up human flotsam in the streets and in the towns and organized them around himself." Contempoary Translation: The present state of affairs in America is a state of psychic distempter. Trump picked up human flotsam from the provinces, hills, and hollers, and organized them around himself.

Mountaintop Destruction in Mooresburg, Tennessee

Holler branches feed the creeks that churn the rivers. Somebody needs to tell these mother-fuckers.

Resisting Pouring Hemlock Into One's Own Ear - Eckhart Tolle on Transforming Suffering into Awakening

An essay on the dialectical nature of life.

An Atheist Every Other Day

God keeps some of us unlucky and long living because deep down she knows that a long and painful life is way worse than a slow bedded death, the goddamn bitch.

Neutral Milk Hotel - The King Of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1

Bedwetting, Nail Biting, shallow breathing, and impending doom afoot

The undertow of lifetimes of anxiety disorders where babies sometimes wash away from mommy's arms in muddy French Broad flood waters leads to ancestral lifetimes of morbid depression. Now imagine that shit.

Clark | Official Trailer | Netflix

Pleasant thoughts for neural pathways

Frost flowers, iron weed, wingstem, wild carrot, corn flowers, cup plants, the trees at Fulton Hill, the green giants, forsythia, cosmos, milkweed flowers, garlic flower, dutch iris, dandelon, black eyed susans, yellow cone flowers, rattlesnake master, norway spruce trees, the grand maple, foxglove, snowball bush, spice bush, eldeberry, button bush, hops bush, blue bells, pink dots, and white tulips. Dandelions, Firepink, Indian Paint Brush, Larkspur, Marigold, Shasta Daisy, Oxeye Daisy, Zinnias, Heather, Wysteria, and Flox Flowers.

Haley Bonar - Last War - Audiotree Live

Egon Schiele in 60 seconds

Appalachian American Ennui Conflated with Goya's Black Pictures

February 3, 2025: State of Tennessee v. [Redacted]: There I sat until my Motion for a Mental Evauation could be addressed so that my 70 year old client's emerging dementia could become official; requiring, I pray, for a dismissal with prejudice. The defendanat in state of tennessee v. [redacted] was a giant. As he and his dimunitive counsel took position behind the lecturn, an anomalous thing happened; anomalous, that is, in the Third Judicial District. See, Judge Beckner the Horrible started allowing a stipulation to the prosecution report to substitute for a recital of the underlying case during allocution, thus protecting me from the trauma that would have undboutedly come to roost upon the recitation of particularly horrid events. I'm reminded of Riley Eugene Ellison, whose three year old body died after he was burned alive inside of a clothes dryer in Cocke county and the consequent death stabs inflicted against Riley's torturer with a shapend plastic toothbrush. . . So, there I sat when the pretrial detainee was asked to plead guilty "if he was in fact guilty." He agreed and responded to the satisfaction of the court. But the recitation of facts was what cold cocked me between the hemisphers of my brain. After hearing just enough to nail my attention, I realized that I needed to get the hell away from the prosecutrix, whose performance was pure gravatas. Let's get this out of the way. The audible factual basis for the plea was child rape, called Rape of a Child on the charging instruments. Of his own daughter over a cruelly long duration of months, perhaps years. So I left and went outside. Put it this way, I could no longer hide the welling, so I hid my body from the bench, bar and gallery, opting to shut my eyes and stare at the warm winter sun. I went back and forth through security so I could peek into the silent courtroom in order to assuage my mental health that the nightmare had ended, enabling me to work. Errant, I went back inside in order to advance my motion only to realize that the play was at intermission, and started again with a victim impact statement by the deeply wounded victim, who said this: "I was so excited to spend time with my father after so long." I thought I was going to bleed to death, recalling my own inablity to spend precious time with my own children during one of the dark pictures in the nineties, painted in by yours truly. And he rapes her?! How could this have even happened to the redacted girl. Vaginal rape. Fellatio. Cunnilingus. Everthing but sodomy. I wonder what the everpresent, un-in-ter-vention-ist god thought of the horror story as it played out. Fact: Everpresence is bullshit, folks. But non-interventionousness is not. So when the young, overweight young woman with purple hair furthered the impact her biological father had inflicted, I had to leave the gallery. Again. Goya's black pictures are ubiquitous now that I'm old, and apparently still up for it.