The New Kitty Has a Usefulness about Her

Tonight was my last scheduled reading for A City of Ghosts. It was over at The Front Porch at the Scarritt-Bennett Center and it was wonderful. There were maybe twenty people there… maybe not quite twenty… but I would say that most of them I did not know in person. I knew a bunch of [...]

31. The Ghost of Water

“I still dream I am drowning,” she says to me. “Some mornings I wake up and I can’t catch my breath, can’t make my lungs take in air, again. “I can’t stand it. I still see water everywhere, how the bottoms of trees are still so dirty, even with all of this rain. And I [...]

Drama and Excitement at Taste of N’awlins

We went to the Taste of N’awlins for the Butcher’s birthday with some friends. By chance, they were having all you could eat shrimp, which meant we got to carry on the Butcher’s usual birthday tradition without having to go to Red Lobster. I still got the jambalaya, though. And damn, it was tasty. But [...]

30. Lucy White

Lucy White was a woman so long ago she barely remembers it. She remembers the boards she put down on the floor of the shack so that she could cross, without getting her feet wet, from her bed to the fireplace when it rained and the water streamed through the low spot in the dirt [...]

Down to the Hall of Fame

I had to go down to the Hall of Fame this afternoon for work, to hear Marshall Chapman speak. It was good fun. She’s a great entertainer and she and Jay Orr play off each other so nicely. I got to park in the cage out back and I have to tell you, they have [...]

29. Mason’s Restaurant

It’s pretty easy to be the youngest person in Mason’s Restaurant by a couple of decades, even if you’re in your 50s. Don’t let this dissuade you from going, though. Mason’s is the kind of place where you can buy enough food to fill your whole table and pay ten dollars for it–eggs and bacon [...]

Me on WPLN

I don’t think I could ever grow tired of hearing “Nashville writer Betsy Phillips.” Anyway, it’s weird. As I get older, my voice sounds more like my grandmas’. I like that, except I remember them having better enunciation than I have. Ha ha ha. Still, what a treat!

Haslam Doesn’t Want to Talk Specifics

From The Tennessean: Haslam said reporters are more interested in focusing on conflicts than on the candidates’ plans for the state budget. “You guys want to focus on those issues,” he said. “We’ve had 10 days of gun stories, and not one saying, ‘Yeah, I wonder who has done their homework on the budget.’ “ [...]

Something to Read

I just really like this post, the whole thing, so I won’t bother to quote any of it. But it reminds me of the Tennessee Obesity Task Force stuff. We’re supposed to believe they’re concerned about the health of Tennesseans, but their literature includes pictures of fat people designed to show us as slobs or [...]

Briefly on O’Donnell

In a way, I find the whole thing kind of baffling. It’s hard for me to understand what kind of guy would have a naked woman in his bed and be all “ew, pubic hair” and then brag about it in public. Does he not understand that women’s bodies have a lot of variety? I [...]

Me on Set

The Butcher took this picture.

28. The Couchville Lights

Back then, they had a way of raising children as if the Devil was in them and your foremost job as a parent was to drive him out. Not every parent took this way, but it was considered best if you minded your own business if that’s how your neighbor chose to raise his. Even [...]

Adventures in Chattanooga

We drove to Chattanooga and it was lovely! We got mildly lost going to Channel 9 based on Google’s bad directions, but the Butcher refound us and there we were. It was cool, but disconcerting how calm the TV people are. Y’all know me. If there is fretting to be done, I am doing it. [...]

Brian Austin Green?!

I maybe should not be in charge of casting. Ha ha ha. Go check out my interview! (An interview with me, not me interviewing Brian Austin Green.)

27. Dutchman’s Curve

There was a noise many folks mistook for the whistle at the prison and then an incredibly large explosion and then it was quiet. Just the sound of the wind rustling through the corn. You’d think that people would start screaming and crying out right away, but that’s not so. You need a moment to [...]

The TNDP Does Campfield Wrong and Other Things

–I think Stacey Campfield is a vile fucker who never met a piece of legislation that stuck it to women (and babies he doesn’t like) that he couldn’t wait to skip down the hall and get Senator Bunch to co-sponsor with him. But suggesting that Campfield would put guns in the hands of convicted rapists [...]

Tomorrow

I went to Walgreens to buy make-up because the make-up I wear on the infrequent occasions I wear it is some eyeliner and some lipstick. And yet, when I go to be on TV in Chattanooga tomorrow (WTVC 12:30 their time), I need to wear something fitting for the TV lights. So, I was standing [...]

26. The Last Unhaunted Spot

Most people don’t notice ghosts for the same reason you don’t notice your own breathing. Air slips in and out of our bodies without us having to think too much about it. Our souls slip in and out of our bodies without us having to think too much about it. All the noise and motions [...]

At the Heart of the Matter

Rachel says: It is not my job to be your source of abstract relief. I sure as hell don’t owe anybody a tool they can use to blame my dad for his own suffering. I think this gets to the heart of a lot of matters. I’ll be thinking of you and your Dad, Rachel.

Mother Jones Thinks It’s a Racket, Too

They’re talking about the Anti-Muslim Ponzi Scheme operating here in Tennessee. It strikes me that there’s something interesting about that quote at the end–about joking that Muslims are wife-beaters. If you work with any women’s organizations here in Tennessee, you know that it can be very hard to provide services to women because of the [...]

Nine

I had to start. It is just too much of October to me and though it’s fine and reasonable to do it whenever, I needed to start now, while it was still October. I don’t know how that’s going to work, how I’m going to work nine nights in a row, but once you’re in, [...]

25. Lock One Park

Here, behind a low stone wall, down a little traveled road, in back of a church on Trinity Lane is Lock One Park. It goes without saying that there used to be a lock here on the Cumberland River. And before that, Eaton’s Station, within sight of Fort Nashboro, which most folks, back in the [...]

Some People Don’t Get to Vote for Gary Moore and I am Sad for Them

Is Gary Moore a genius or does he just have someone on his campaign staff who is and, if it is the latter, can we put that person to work for the TNDP? Check out Moore’s latest mailer. It’s basically “Do you want someone who sits around in his parents’ house eating Red Hots by [...]

Ponzi Scheme of Evil

I don’t know if y’all saw this over at Pith, but I was discussing how it turns out that the lead lawyer for the assholes trying to stop the Murfreesboro mosque is also the president of the assholes trying to stop the Murfreesboro mosque. It seems legal but hinky. I mean, lawyers have to eat, [...]

24. The Goodlettsville Gal

They say there’s a gal in Goodlettsville who can speak to the dead as easily as I might pick up the phone and speak to you. She is young, maybe 19 or 20, and lives out in a hollow along Brick Church Pike. They say everything in her house must be brand new, because anything [...]