Christmas

I wonder if I should get my brother’s girlfriend something. Maybe the Butcher and I could go in on something? I don’t know. It’s weird.

I really like her, though, which, in some ways, makes the whole thing tougher. But George Jones and Sam Houston finally found women who straightened them out. Maybe it can be done.

I have Mom, Dad, and our other brother taken care of. I’ll get the boys Amazon gift cards. The Little Flower is probably pretty much fine with anything, I imagine.

So, that just leaves the Butcher. I have no fucking idea what to get him.

And then people are going to ask me what I want. And, I don’t know. I just want to feel not unmoored. But I think that just takes time.

Warm

It’s so warm in the office all I want to do is nap. I know this means I should go turn down the heat, but I’d really rather nap.

Walks

One thing that I wish I could learn to do for myself is to walk no matter what. I always feel better and more human after a walk and yet, I spent much of last week and all weekend meaning to go for a walk but not doing it. And thus, by yesterday, I was feeling rather crushed under the weight of my own “blah”ness.

This is another thing Sadie did for me that I didn’t quite realize. She gave me a reason to go out and move around, if only because she had to go out and move around in order to shit.

I woke up dreaming of Jack Macon. Not of him as a person, but how I wanted to write about him as a real person. One thing, just at the level of language, that’s so vile about the word slave is that it always puts you in relationship another person without quite being upfront about it. To say that Jack Macon was a slave makes it sound like a class issue almost, like it was just a caste he was born into. You can’t be a slave without an owner, but we use the word so that the person doing the slavery is left invisible, unindicted. But I don’t think that saying he was enslaved by William Macon is right, since he was, in fact, born into slavery. There was no moment when he wasn’t a slave and then he was enslaved. Also, he was first the slave of William’s father. But I think I might say that he was held in enslavement by William. To me that gets at the most honest fact of Dr. Jack’s life–that, even as he could come to Nashville and open a practice, he was still never, ultimately, free. His things were not his own. His money was not his. That office was, in the end, not his office. It was all William’s, as was Jack. There was no disentangling of Jack’s fate and fortune from William’s.