Wahoo! It's a heat wave in the south!

It’s hot, stifling hot in our beloved city, more like Dante’s Inferno than Statesville. If the heat keeps up much longer I’ll be writing stories about people sitting around in their underwear fanning themselves with wooden sticks that have funeral home advertisements stapled to them as they sip mint juleps and lament the loss of the old plantation, Bellpork, where the cotton fields were hoed and everybody danced and clapped and played the banjo while they sat under huge magnolia trees.

When it’s this hot in the south crazy things can happen like maybe the deputy shoots the sheriff over a game of croquet and an hour before Bob Luke goes to the gallows he finds out his wife was actually his half-sister and remembers he left a bag of groceries ( with milk) in the car. You might even see snakes in church.

I go to a large southern Baptist church in the city and we shun snake handling, end-of-world-visions and ladies with big hats and wide hips who sway and clap in the aisles--- but five degrees hotter and things could change.

This past Sunday was a scorcher but the sermon was excellent ( be vigilant, don’t drift away from obedience) but deep down I wanted our pastor to come down to the congregation, whip out a western Colt 45 pistol and say “ Look, numbheads! Git right or git out—don’t make me say it again!”

I know pistols aren’t allowed in churches in the south but nothing says “I’m serious about my theology” like a loaded gun. Shucks, if Pastor Cartin suddenly fired a shot into the ceiling right after the announcements and just before prayer I think we’d all be more focused, possibly enlightened--- maybe even speak in tongues.

This morning my air conditioner went out, 15 degrees higher and 10 minutes later I was overcome with a desire to play my banjo. I was banging out chords to “Suwannee River” when a whole passel of liberal Democrat demons came out of my body-- I saw a likeness of Obama in the carpet and my eczema cleared up. Poof! Just like that.

The heat is driving elected officials crazy—er.

The Representative Anthony Weiner (Democrat/married) couldn’t take it anymore, came out of his clothes and showed a very personal side of himself on the internet and had to ‘fess up that he was having online affairs (canoodlin’) with several young ladies. Odd to think about it but a massive electrical grid failure might have saved the man’s marriage.

Republican governors Schwarzenegger and Mark Sanford have illegitimate kids and mistresses and you have to wonder what were these guys thinking? It’s the day of the internet and news travels faster than corn through a goose and there’s nothing like wandering chickens coming home to roost to make you wish you’d kept your coop zipped up tight.

I intend to push on despite all the heat and bad behavior and keep raising my chickens in the spare bedroom, paint scripture verses on the roof of my house and sell cantaloupes off the front porch. We’ll have to just pray the serial killers don’t start marrying flag burners and the place gets over run with criminals and other congressional incumbents.

In the meantime we southern boys thrive on heat and there’s nothing hotter than a barefoot momma. So fix some cool sassafras tea, sugah pie, and come sit by my side if you love me. We’ll read Garden & Gun together, cook some possum and then go shoot some RC cola cans.

I’m motorcycling out of Fathers Day

Father’s Day is here and therefore I am gone. I have taken the weekend off and I’m not even going to cut the yard. I feel my roots calling me back to the sea, the beautiful sea and all I need is a ship with good sails, a barrel of hard tack biscuits and the bright northern star to steer by.

But I’m in Statesville, North Carolina about four hours from the coast.

So I’ll climb on my black BMW motorcycle and head for the Smokey Mountains due west and pick up some county road and ride for a couple hundred miles. I’ll throttle up that 1100cc engine and let it run free like a wild stallion until I finally come to some small country gas station where the parking lot is hard packed dirt and they play music by Waylon and Willie and the boys. Don’t call me because I don’t have my cell phone with me, just chewing tobaccy, Mr. Samuel Colt, a thick roll of twenties, spurs that jingle and a dog named Yeller. Well, actually I have mainly my health insurance card and allergy meds.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Now folks, that’s Man Talk.

Father’s day has been bought and purchased just like Christmas and I’ve decided I’m not buying into it. I’ve got enough cologne to make even Congress smell good and I have enough neckties---I only need about two-- for making arm slings or tourniquets for snake bites. So it’s just me, the motorcycle and the open road.

You see things on a motorcycle unlike anything viewed from a car. In a car you sit in a compartment and even though you don’t realize it you see everything as though it was on TV. The scenes are all framed with no smell and no real sense of dimension while you sit still watching images go by. It’s like trying to watch life on an old 35 mm movie film.

But on a motorcycle you are part of the scene. The asphalt whizzing by six inches below your boot is what you were walking on five minutes earlier and it’s now so blurred you can’t focus on the small rocks and cracks that make up the road—yet you could put your foot down and touch it at any moment.

When you ride a motorcycle you converse only with your thoughts and hour after hour a man has plenty of time to ponder his sins and decide which ones to repent of and which ones might need a little more time to bake before they’re done. You women do not need to do this because you are better than us men. Men know this.

As a father I’ve hit plenty of fouls and few homeruns. Mothers have the best batting score.

So I’m taking me and my sins and heading west. I’ll join up with other fathers camping by a creek bank and sit by a crackling fire at night and share stories. It will be good to be with people that know the same songs I do such as “Me and Bobby McGee” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain”. We’ll sing about being lonesome and about rivers gone dry. Come morning we’ll pack up and ride through small towns without stopping and pass people in their cars, people sitting on their porches and I’ll see the envy on their faces. The journey is its own reward--- revel in the freedom.

I’ll be back on Monday. I have a dental appointment.

Spring time is excellent for writing, so do it

Spring is a wonderful time of year as we tend to become one people, leaning a lot more towards unum than pluribus. The dogwood trees explode with reds and whites and suddenly we feel magnanimous and artistic and have a desire to bask in the glow of photosynthesis and gather our family together, smile, hold hands and run uphill to a huge green meadow and twirl around and around with our arms outstretched and sing “The hills are alive, with the sound of muuusic!”

Or something like that.

Here in the south spring comes after Mothers day and southern boys throw tackle gear in the back of the pickup truck and take their mothers fishing. You both sit on the creek bank passing around a plug of black chewing tobacco, your mother takes a big bite and begins to talk about the years when she was a show girl in Vegas before she met your father, about fantastic men she met in their tuxedos driving fancy Stutz Bearcats, how they carried swollen rolls of fifties and loved to spend them and how she met Mel Torme and while they were at dinner one night she said she loved Christmas and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Suddenly Mel looked like he had been hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, said something about a great line for a song and ran out of the restaurant hollering for a piano and left your mother holding a tab for $63.78.

Yes, I admit it is quite a shock to hear about your mother’s wild and rascally years--- but then everyone has had them. Life isn’t just for men, so get over it buddy boy.

This time of year everyone becomes a bit dizzy with an urge to change their lives. I, for example, am tempted to grow a goatee, wear a red beret and change my name to Jacque L’Hudson but I probably won’t do it-- I’m just saying.

In spring a person’s thoughts naturally turn to what you would rather be doing with your life other than what you are doing now and according to my email everybody wants to be a Writer or an Artist. Winning the lottery is a dim hope, becoming a reality TV star is a wispy fantasy but the desire to write novels seems to be on the mind of about seventy percent of the people and the others want to write poetry.

And you thought you were the only one? Ha! You are just one in a million. The reason the economy is tanking is because no one wants to pick cotton, tote a barge or lift a bale. We’d rather be moody and self-absorbed in an intellectual way.

Your mailman wants to be a writer ( I dropped the stamps, took her in my arms and from out of nowhere her Doberman bit my….) and this does not improve postal service.

Your plumber wants to be artistic and tap dance so he does a Buffalo shuffle up your driveway, spins and hands you an invitation to his recital and says “toilet clogged again?” So you go to his recital and try to avoid saying stupid things like “That number flowed nicely!” or “So, you clog too?”

I really did go fishing with my mother one time. She reads my column and no doubt will take exception to my artistic license about her chewing tobacco, Mel Torme and Vegas (I love fiction). She may write a rebuttal or put it in a poem but that’s okay, it’s spring—she can get in line and write with the rest of us.

If you're a celebrity, what the heck?

If you travel through enough airports at some time you will see famous people and experience a catch in your throat when you turn a corner and realize you’ve come face to face with Neil Diamond, Ric Flair, Tom Brokaw or a big heavy set bald man waiting in line for his baggage who you think use to be a national weatherman for a network morning show—and what do you say? You desperately rummage through your bag of knowledge for a hammer and nails and attempt to build some sort of compliment--- which is hard to do when you’re blinded by the light.

As a birthday present my youngest sister arranged for me to have a private meeting with Garrison Keillor, author of books and a radio show called “A Prairie Home Companion”. He was performing at East Carolina University and I was taken backstage after the show, introduced and left to stand in the presence of a celebrity. I tried not to babble.

Garrison ( he insisted ) and I talked about his work with Meryl Streep, how I got the nick name ‘Joe’ ( he laughed ) and then discussed ( no kidding) the tip of a Bic ball point pen. Later his assistant led me away and my feet never touched the ground. I felt I had just received 10 commandments. Joe Moses.

The American people are simply awed by celebrities--- which works nicely if you’re Kyle Busch a NASCAR celebrity who makes his living going in circles. You can blow through a residential area at three times the posted speed limit and instead of being thrown to the ground, handcuffed and led away, you’re simply asked to go home and do some community lectures, please. Tell kids about the danger of driving at high rates of speed even though you yourself make millions of dollars doing it.

You and I would might have gotten matching handcuffs.

Such is the practice of law and government now---some are allowed to stand in the sun and breath fresh air while the rest of us galley slaves chained below deck continue to row the boat by the rules. Double standards exist because as a colleague told me, “That’s just the way it is now.”

And that in a nutshell is why we ultimately have corruption. We accept it. What the heck?

If you work in public administration long enough you will meet some wonderful people. You’ll also occasionally smell putrid whiffs of narcissism and feel the bully whip of discrimination flay the skin off your back as you try to row faster. It happens—but what the heck, as long as it’s not you, right?

Oddly instead of outrage this all brings on a deep sense of sadness.

When authority has double standards and plays favorites, whether to leniency or to discriminate, there is a slow tearing of the fabric of society. We’re all connected and our actions affect each other. Government that rules by preference and whims rather than by law and professional process infects the community with apathy and complacency.

Somewhere a history teacher prefers to skip the American Revolutionary war and says, “What the heck?” A minister somewhere prefers to stop preaching about the sanctity of marriage and says, “What the heck?” You excuse someone due to their political connections and a surgeon somewhere says “This guy’s a nobody and his heart is 69 years old, why fix it? I’ll just sew him back up-- what the heck?”

And maybe one day a NASCAR driver decides to take a 128 m.p.h. ride—through your child’s neighborhood. Oh, what the heck.