The Professor (motioning to the wall behind the cashier): I thought you couldn’t sell flavored cigarettes anymore.
The Cashier (pointing to a package that looks suspiciously like a pack of clove cigarettes): No ma’am. You’re mistaken. Those are flavored cigars.
Me: Thank god someone has found a loophole for the art students!
One of my favorite things–though I have a lot of favorite things–about living here is knowing women who can write like this.
Ashley Spurgeon who is hilarious. I think this may be her best “Nashville” recap ever.
And Jewly Hight who is just such a good writer. I learn so much from her both about her subject and technique every time I read her.
George Jones has died, which is a total bummer. It’s a major loss of a great talent. But if you can get on Twitter and search for George Jones, you’ll see plenty of fans with old disappointments and old country singers with unforgotten grievances. I don’t quite know what to make of it. But, in a way, it’s nice to see.
Which, I know, I think on other days, I’d find it appalling, but today it strikes me as an important corrective to the hagiography.
You simply cannot overstate Jones’s importance to country music. But that didn’t make him an unproblematic guy.
I think letting him be complicated and disappointing and a genius does actually honor his memory more than white-washing him in death would do.
Whenever someone launches into some diatribe about how terrible it is that there are all these fat people in the world, eventually, when called on it, he or she answers, “but being fat is unhealthy.” As if it’s a walk in the mental health park to hear people go on about how terrible you are and frame it as if it’s for your own good that they should say such shitty things to you.
But it’s almost always something else, hidden in the concern about health.
According to some liberals, being fat is immoral, right up there with racism, porn, teen pregnancy, and divorce. And, not only is it evidence of my immorality, it’s a sign of my hypocrisy. I think this is a version of slut-shaming, actually, since my actual morality (or lack-there-of) doesn’t matter and my actual state of hypocrisy doesn’t matter, but what matters is that I appear to be an immoral hypocrite due to the body I have, just like I’m open to any charges of being a “slut” regardless of my actual state of sexual activity or prowess due to my body. In both cases, this body marks me as having appetites that are out of control, and, of course, it is always someone’s job–church, state, assholes–to try to bring me back into right behavior (never mind the underlying assumption that “fat” and “lives in a red state” and “is your ally” are apparently mutually exclusive in this set-up). And, you know, any time you complain about that assumption–that it’s anybody’s business to try to force someone else to not be fat–you get the “but it’s not healthy.” Like I said, as if it’s really healthy to be shamed about your immorality and used as an example of all that’s wrong with your region.
And I can’t help but feel like this discussion about how to attract more techies to our area also butts right up against how my body is a marker of what’s wrong with our region. One of my favorite things about Nashville is how easy it is to be outside. I love our bike lanes and how being at the park often feels like a community event. The weather makes this a wonderful place to garden. The online community makes it easy to arrange pick-up ball games or runs or what-have-you. And I am all for making it even easier to be active around town.
I’m still going to be fat. So, you know, there’s not a techie who’s going to look at me and ever say “there’s a fit and healthy person.” I don’t believe this should be a problem. After all, this techie is not my doctor and not me. His opinions on my body, only informed by his aesthetic judgment of me, are tough shit for him. If he’s got the thing he needs in town to take care of himself how he’d like, then whether I have “properly” availed myself of those things is not his business.
And I’ve known Rex a long time and find him a genuinely thoughtful and caring person. And still he says,
But, to get back to my point, we are moving into an era where being healthy and fit as individuals and as a community and region is not a “nice to be;” they are “have to be.”
And there are certain eating and lifestyle patterns in our region that make it an even greater challenge that require us to place a very high emphasis on making it easy to get outside and walk, bike and play.
Apparently, it’s not just good for our personal health, it’s good for business, also.
So, if I fail to be “fit” I’m now fucking it up for the business community? It’s now my fault if the right kind of people, the people we really want and need in Tennessee catch a glimpse of me and decide that I’m too ugly for them to want to live here? I’m ruining the whole fucking state now?
This idea that some people’s aesthetic preferences for other people’s bodies should be catered to in order to woo those people here is alarming to me. Why would we want to encourage people who think that their aesthetic preferences are so important that other people should change how they look to please them to move here? If we knew techies had a hankering for big titted blondes, would we be saying that everyone in Nashville had to get a boob-job and a wig?
Or would we be saying that their personal aesthetic preferences don’t get to run the world? I’ve been following a lot of the ongoing talk about gender in the tech community, and as difficult and painful as it is, it seems to me that the idea that the whims and preferences of some that are alienating to others don’t go unchallenged is passing.
I would encourage the tech community, then, to take those lessons about how to treat women and to apply them more broadly to the notion that, while you can craft a landscape that meets your desires, you cannot insist on it being peopled only with those who meet the aesthetic standards you hold for yourself.
At some point, this isn’t about attracting the “right” kind of people to Nashville. It’s about treating all people, regardless of what we look like, as belonging here and not as problems that have to be solved.
I just read about this book on I09. And, of course, I’m the second person to request it at the library!
The mystery person who checks out all the books I want to read before I do strikes again!
I pretty much cried the whole way home from it. And I can’t really put my finger on why. It’s kind of because those women are so brave and so very young. And kind of because the song they got busted for, which was supposed to be evidence of their religious hatred, is like Liz Phair’s “Help Me, Mary” if the building she was singing about was her church, not her home, and the thieves all Putin. You know, mixed with some Sex Pistols.
I’ll have more thoughts later, but man, it was good.
This morning, as I was coming into work, a person tried to change lanes right into me. I yelled, and swerved, and avoided getting hit. And then like five minutes later, it occurred to me that I should have honked.
But you know, I wish science would look into the feeling you get while driving that a driver is going to do something stupid. Because what saved me, really, is that I was already watching that person closely, because something about the car–which was just a red late model Toyota Camry, nothing strange–pinged my “keep an eye on that car” sense when it came onto Clarksville Pike from the Ashland City road. So, when a half a block later, it tried to enter my lane right where my car was, I was not surprised. I mean, I was surprised, but I already was watching that car for signs of idiocy.
But I’m not sure what about the way the person made that turn tipped me off that there could be a problem.
Southerners, let me tell you something you may not know. We Midwesterners, especially those of us who either grew up near the Chicagoland area or who have family there have a secret barb we throw at each other. Say you are somewhere where you would not expect to meet another Midwesterner–in this case, we could say, right ahead of you in the checkout line in Kroger.
And the Chicagoland person might not recognize you as being from the Midwest, so he or she will say “I’m from Chicago.”
We then say, “Oh, really? Where?” You might not recognize this, but this is how we signal, “I suspect you’re being a douche.”
Now, here’s the important thing to know. At this moment, there is a non-douchy reply. A non-douche right then is either going to ‘fess up to the city he’s actually from–”Well, I’m actually from Aurora, but it’s been so long since Wayne’s World, that I usually just say Chicago” or they’ll give you a neighborhood or a set of cross streets (which may be in Chicago or in the suburbs)–”I grew up on Michigan and 119th.” or “My Grandma lives off of 151st.” And you have a general idea then of where they’re actually from, with all the attendant stereotypes that go along with that. But right away, they’re going to respect that you asked “Where?” because you have some familiarity with the area.
But there’s always some asshole who will still try to just say “Chicago” or worse yet, “It’s too hard to explain. You wouldn’t have heard of it.” These folks always seem to think there’s some great cultural cache to living in actual Chicago, which they want you to believe they have, but they’ve moved out to the suburbs (or have always lived in the suburbs) and are just borrowing your opinions on Chicago for their own cred.
If you press them, they will eventually confess to being from, say, Lockport. And then they kind of sulk, because now they know you know they’re not actually from Chicago.
I mention this, because it may be necessary to start this nonsense here. I read this in The Tennessean this morning:
“I certainly explored the idea of going on Music Row, but it occurred to me that people don’t really care where your office is. Not everybody is on Music Row anymore,” O’Sullivan said. “There might be people that will say it’s not a good idea to be there, but to me, Franklin is Nashville. It’s just another ZIP code.”
I like Franklin a great deal. It’s not Nashville. If people want to live in Franklin, more power to them. It’s charming and has a lovely, walkable downtown and is full of history stuff I love to go look at. If people want to work in Franklin, again, no problem. I drove down to Franklin at the height of rush hour on Friday morning. It’s a lovely reverse commute if you live in Nashville.
But it’s not Nashville. It’s its own lovely place with a lot to offer.
You start calling it Nashville and I’m going to laugh, openly, at you when I realize that’s what you’re doing.
The folks at High Garden Tea over on Fatherland helped me figure out as accurate a recipe as possible for what would go in a tea a rootworker in the 19th century would have given a werewolf to ease his transition from man to wolf. They took into account all kinds of stuff–its availability back then, whether it had a slightly different use (obviously, no one tries to set bones with boneset anymore, for instance), and how easy it would be for a black woman in Nashville during reconstruction to get her hands on it.
What they came up with is really bitter and kind of medicinal tasting, but not quite as hideous as you’d think something with an herb known as devil’s claw would be.
Anyway, I then bought a cup of it over to Chuck at East Side Story, which he made the other guy in the store also try. So, you know, that’s at least three of us who don’t have to worry this month about the pain of being a werewolf.
Due to Project X, I’ve been thinking a lot about the rumors of Adelicia Acklen’s supposed status of being a witch, which comes and goes throughout time. I think I’ve decided that it’s tied to three things.
One is that, even if you had slaves because it was just what white people did, the level of Adelicia’s first husband’s involvement in the slave trade was kind of beyond the point where you could pretend like it was a benign institution. And, when he died, that all became Adelicia’s money, all earned on the backs of a massive slave trade. Her husband really was the boogyman. “Well, we don’t sell our slaves. We don’t mistreat them. We don’t split up families. etc. etc.” But Franklin did. The things that even slaveholders acknowledged were wrong were how Franklin made his money. So, there had to be some way of making clear the Franklins were somehow different than everyone else, not just at the far end of a spectrum they were all on. She’s a witch.
Two is that Adelicia signed prenuptial agreements with her other husbands that protected her money from them. It’s kind of an enormous–though not unheard of–no-no for a woman to keep control of her assets, especially when she has no children who need that money protected for them. Heaven forbid a woman not just be a conduit for property transfer between men. Definitely probably witchy.
Third is that Southerners believed in a version of what would become the Prosperity Gospel. What they were doing was moral and right and sanctioned by God, as evidenced by how well it made money for them. And here’s Adelicia–cousin to Rutherford B. Hayes, mother to a Louisiana congressman, the wealthiest woman in the South with access to every medical advance of her time, and she couldn’t keep kids or husbands alive. But if wealth is an indicator of God’s blessing, how do you make sense of Adelicia’s suffering? If you need to believe that your wealth is an indication of God’s blessing, that your life is as wonderful as it is because you are doing God pleasing things, what do you do with this example that completely contradicts it? Oh, right, she’s a witch. God doesn’t actually love her.
I think that this explains not only why people sometimes think Adelicia is a witch, but why the rumors come and go. It’s a rumor that needs something going on in our time that we’re uncomfortable with. For instance, I heard the witch rumor after I moved here, in the early 2000s, right after a decade of Dead Man Walking–the book, the movie, play, opera, etc–all set in Angola penitentiary, a place that would not exist if Adelicia hadn’t sold the Angola plantation to the state of Louisiana.
And now, we’re not only in the era of prosperity gospel, but back to talking about whether rich people deserve everything they have, whether they somehow work so much harder than the rest of us–whether, in fact, people’s monetary value does reflect their value as people. So, it’s not surprising that stories about Adelicia are turned again to her being evil or occult.
Me (to the JJ’s cashier wearing beads): Happy Mardi Gras.
JJ’s cashier: Oh, is that what they say today?
Me: No, they mostly say, “Show me your tits,” but I thought that would be awkward coming from a stranger.
The Professor (to me): Especially because you don’t have any beads to give him.
This morning, the Butcher locked his keys in his car, so I had to meet up with him in his work truck to hand them off. It was all I could do to not play hookey and ride around with him all day. It smelled slightly of burning oil. When he went over the speed bump, he flew up in his seat until the seatbelt caught him and sent him back down into the cushions. And the whole thing sounded like a burping dragon. Not to mention that the drive shaft hung low, like a dachshund’s belly, which is probably not that safe. But it seemed like a good day–driving around in that smelly thing, in the sunshine.
I keep thinking about that dude at the store, able to size someone up before he even gets up to them. Able to remember numbers he’s heard just once. And how that didn’t maybe seem like that great a life for him, like it hasn’t actually been a benefit.
Did you know someone broke into The Goddess & The Moon and stole jewelry? I feel like it takes some kind of cosmic chutzpah to rob from a woman who can curse you. Not saying that there aren’t people in Nashville who can’t lay or remove a curse more powerful than T. could lay. There may be. But I do believe that, unless you already know one, you’re not going to find him or her. T. has to be the most prominent powerful magic worker in town. So, if she does succeed in cursing you, you pretty much have to go back to her to get it removed.
That’s pretty hilarious. “Hi, I’m the guy who stole all your jewelry. And then my life went to shit. Um, what would it take for you to fix that?”
Ha ha. Notice how my brain is thinking about this stuff in order to skirt right up to the edge of things it is not allowed to think about. I’m on to you, brain, on to you.
So, I was up at the store trying to get some shit framed and they are chronically understaffed (I debated about naming the store, but I go there often and like it and the people who work there are lovely and it’s not their fault they’re perpetually understaffed, plus I’m about to tell you a story that could get the guy I ended up liking in trouble, so… no name).
I’m waiting for someone to come help me and a woman and her two kids join me. They’re getting a Hatch poster framed. Since there’s nobody there, she goes behind the counter and starts pulling frame samples off the wall. When someone finally comes to help us, I insist she goes first, because mine–the tarot cards–are rather complicated.
The guy helping us is almost immediately snotty to her, telling her that her one choice of frame is crappy. I was a bit taken aback but she seemed completely oblivious and then she proceeded to be atrocious to him, but in that really smooth, almost subtle way. She complained about the price, telling her daughter that she’d framed a poster for her “at that other place” for half the price. And then, when the guy told her she could pick it up in a couple of weeks, and she was all “And how will I know to pick it up? Am I supposed to just check in every day?” and then her little son was all “But I thought you needed it by Valentine’s day” and she was all in a stage whisper to the kid “Well, I guess it will just be late” before the guy could tell her “No, they would call her.”
So, at first, i was like, oh god, if he’s that hostile to her, he’s going to loathe me with my big complicated thing. But he could not have been nicer or more helpful and got me all set up and even stayed after his shift ended to do it.
And I know, reading this, it sounds like he was the aggressor and that it went downhill from there. But watching it play out, it didn’t seem that way and it became clearer and clearer that he had been trying to be preemptively hostile. Somehow he knew that this woman was going to be an enormous pain in the butt.
But I don’t know how.
I wonder if it was that she went around behind the counter when there was no employee there to get the frame samples? I mean, that seems like a huge issue. Customers do not go on the same side of the counter as the drawer. That’s just a big no-no.
I’m not sure, though. I feel like I missed some important social cue. And not that he handled that cue all that gracefully, maybe, but he recognized a good five minutes before I did that she was a pain. And now I wish I knew what he saw.
This:
The sponsors say they’re merely legalizing what is already a pervasive practice.
“Let’s be honest. There’s not a parking lot in Tennessee today that doesn’t have a gun inside the car,” Faison says.
Parking lots with weapons in glove boxes include the grounds of the state capitol. Faison admits to keeping firearms in his vehicle while in Nashville.
“I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll tell anybody that,” he says. “I’ll tell the highway patrol. Listen, that’s just part of life.”
Faison, however, would still be breaking the law even if his legislation passes, at least as written now. While the Cocke County representative says he’s “carried a gun all my life.” He says he’s never sent in the paperwork for his handgun permit.
“One day I’ll probably get caught if I don’t get a permit, and I’ll get in trouble,” he says.
He tells the media that he illegally keeps a gun in his trunk while at the state capitol, a gun for which he does not have a permit. This is a man who feels free to make laws that I have to follow. Fuck him. Under this logic, why isn’t weed legal in Tennessee? Hell, you’re a million times more likely to need weed to cope with driving in downtown Nashville than you ever are to need a gun.
Here’s the thing. There’s just an enormous unbridgeable gap between people who think they need a gun every single place they go because shit could break out at any moment and people who don’t. As much as I appreciate that people who carry would like non-gun people to acknowledge that there are safety issues, I think non-gun people would like some acknowledgement that, if you’re a 36 year old white guy who works in a building that already has armed guards, you’re not actually in that much danger from life. Which means you certainly have time–plenty of safe time–between the moment you decide you want a gun in your car and the moment you should actually put a gun in your car to get the proper permit.
Yesterday, someone at work was laughing about this.
Some things make me feel like I am wearing a disguise I forget I have on. People look at me and assume that we’re the kinds of people for whom that must be so foreign and weird.
It’s a strange feeling–not being the person the person who’s speaking to you assumes you are.
Somehow I missed out on all this stuff, but I’m up to speed now:
(As a late Christmas present to myself, I bought those Tarot cards. Ridiculous, I know. But necessary. I mean, come on! Did you see the Naked Man?! It’s brilliant.)
Somehow all this cool shit I’m massively in love with has started happening here.
I don’t know how it happened. I woke up one day and lived in the city I’ve always wanted to live in.
Keeping in mind that I love Will Pinkston like you love a Burmese python slithering through the Everglades, munching on small deer and scaring the shit out of the tourists. I love him with a mixture of “Holy fuck? What the hell is he doing?! Why is he doing that?!” and “Please don’t make me get too close to that.”
The Tennessean today has a great and bizarre story about Pinkston getting in some bizarre fight with everyone at Megan Berry’s house.
Things escalated, with each man now blaming the other. Pinkston called the incident a “heated conversation where I cleared the air, and then Bill Freeman left.”
The gist of the conversation included personal insults and expletives. At one point Barry entered the fray to instill calm, and eventually Freeman and his wife decided to leave. At that point, an angry Pinkston turned his focus to outgoing party chairman Chip Forrester. After another few minutes of intense conversation, Forrester said he and his girlfriend also left the party.
Freeman said he didn’t recognize Pinkston when the 40-year-old school board member approached him about his son’s firing. Freeman said his son left the state Finance and Administration Office on his own accord and was not fired. Freeman said Pinkston crossed a line.
“I felt he was a bully,” said Freeman. “The fact is there’s really nothing he could bully me over.”
Pinkston said he approached Freeman for a frank, but polite, conversation about the rumors regarding his son’s former employment with the state.
“It was quite the holiday moment,” Pinkston said. “Freeman has been telling people from all over town that I had his son fired from state government.” Pinkston said he played no role in the matter.
Forrester said he and his girlfriend left the party after Pinkston seemed “out of control.” Several partygoers declined to comment, but acknowledged the incident created a scene.
And then! Then he admits, “he expressed his lingering frustration with Forrester and Freeman for the direction they’ve taken the state party.” Gosh, yes, if only they’d taken the party in the direction some mean hothead thought it should go! What bad things could come of that?! And this is the nice, improved Pinkston. This is Pinkston trying to get along with folks now that he’s on the school board. This is Mr. “It’s for me to find ways to work with people” Pinkston.
I mean, it makes you wonder if Bredesen just kept him in a cage and threw raw steaks at him before or what. Because if this is “trying to be nice,” his regular old self must just be all piss and vinegar.
(The thing that’s most hilarious about this is that the Republicans have redistricted us into a party whose most reliable districts are urban and black. And the white guys all bemoan how the party needs to spend more attention on “outside of Nashville.” Where they hate Democrats. It’s important to realize that these dustups are happening–and more publicly–not because either of these groups of warring white guys has a good idea for what direction to take the party, but because the era of the white dude Democratic party is over. Our parade doesn’t look that way anymore. But at this second, there’s not someone who looks more like the people who actually vote Democratic–black people, women, gay people, young people who live in cities, etc.–who can get the support of the Executive Committee and step up to be Grand Marshall of said parade. So, we have these two factions fighting over who gets to lead a bunch of people who aren’t going to concede parade leadership to them.
My bet is that what happens is this–the TNDP continues to flounder. They continue to have amusing public shows of ass to the state. And Democratic politicians start to just bypass them as much as possible to get done what can be done with a smaller apparatus.
To switch metaphors, maybe it’s more like two drunks fighting over who gets to drive you home. It’s not unreasonable to shrug your shoulders and hitch a ride with someone sober. Look for Democratic politicians to just get their own rides.)
1. Here’s the problem Rocketown has: these are their defenders in the comments. This is now the problem all people who aren’t comfortable around gay people have: you can either get more comfortable, decide that being uncomfortable isn’t worth fighting over, or these are your allies. It becomes a double-problem when your reason for being uncomfortable around homosexuality is that you’re Christian. Because, surely, if you are Christian and you find yourself on the side of the most hateful people in an argument, the ones wanting any excuse to keep hurting people, it must give you great pause. Even when Jesus admonished sinners, he never took a stance that would have left them publicly more vulnerable to harm. That the “Christian” stance is “leave those gay folks out in the cold” is a problem and its the kind of problem that Christians are going to have to wrestle with for themselves. Because, right now, a lot of people–many of whom are also Christian–are protecting people from Christians. Protecting from. If that doesn’t bother you as a Christian, I don’t even know what to say to you.
2. The Roy Herron thing. I think it just basically means that the troubles continue for the Democratic Party. Folks are rightly worried by a guy aligned too closely to Chip. But that the viable response you have to that is a guy too closely aligned to the bad old “Let’s just pretend we’re Republicans Lite” days is also not good. I mean, what does Roy Herron think a Democrat is? On the third hand, it may be that the Democratic Party does end up running some Republican Lites, because they figure out that they can’t win on their primary ballots, but have a shot at winning in the general. (I don’t think this is going to be true for a few more years, though. Republicans need to get a bit more codified.)
3. $900,000 for nothing? Lord almighty. As much as it pains me, you can’t say that voters were wrong to toss Democrats out on their ears. The level of lazy, genial corruption is just staggering.
4. But that kind of lazy, genial corruption is human nature. And a problem Republicans are going to have is keeping their members from indulging in it. If Tennessee threw Democrats out solely because it’s become a more conservative state, then Republican corruption won’t matter. But if Tennessee at any level threw Republicans out because they thought they were going to get more moral people, then Republicans succumbing to the temptations of office is a huge problem for them. And one they should not forget.
My mechanic doesn’t take appointments, so, if you want them to look at your car, you best be in there before seven in the morning. The only thing nice about driving into Nashville at 6:45 is just how beautiful it looks in the early dawn light. Blah. So, they then dropped me off here at work at 7:20.
The kids who go to school in the suite next to us (long story short, they’re high schoolers with developmental issues who go to school and work in the area) were standing in the hallway, and one of the kids was over in the corner, his back turned to me.
“I… have…. a… secret….” he mumbled. I pressed the button for the elevator, because, if I have learned on thing in my life, it’s that people who are doing creepy voices to themselves in a corner are never about to say something you want to hear.
“I… killed…” And now I am freaking right the fuck out. Should I get on the elevator? Should I wait and see who he killed so that I can tell the police? Am I standing next to a murderer or what?
“Mufasa.”
Mufasa?
“[mumble mumble] Simba!”
Oh, okay, The Lion King. Carry on.
