The Drift Away

Washington Reid Patrick III 1979-2014

My nails have the dirt they'll press on and around you caked underneath them. I grabbed the dirt with my bare hand. No shovel. I held it aloft and envisioned you in the iteration I knew best, the boy I joined on so very many escapades. 

And now I've borne your weight with other men who knew that boyhood form of you, and the versions of you in the times since life took you and me on separate journeys. I stood as holy men intoned, and widow and parents wept. Tears of my own welled and rolled, as I made witness to their pain.

When you and I were acolytes, peeking behind the curtain of that venerable church, where the man after whom I'm named has lain so long his headstone has been engulfed by the soil, I never considered I'd see you put to eternal rest in that same place.

I released that fist of dirt and it thudded impotently on the lid of the metal sarcophagus we'd put your coffin inside and lowered to finality. Water was welling in your grave.

Fare thee well, my friend.

A Lesson in the Bigger Picture of Outrage

For all of you who are so vocally against Mr. Duck for what he said, please think of the repercussions of your spewing wildly. 

He is a multi-millionaire whose primary source of income isn't affected in any reasonable degree by your outrage. His main consumers, in fact, will probably BOOST their purchases of his duck call products to support him. Plus they'll double down on Duck Dynasty merchandise purchases and viewership.

Outside of income, the man and his family and their entire social circle are not affected in the least, socially, by your outrage. Do you not understand where he lives and what people there think about "liberal" opinions?

Who are you outraging to affect? He and people who think like him aren't going to pay you the slightest bit of attention anyway. You and the people who think like you already think like you. There's a middle ground of people who don't think at all, I suppose, but what's the real point in shouting for them if they are too dumb to have an opinion?

In summation, you've shouted, upset your FRIENDS who disagree with you (because the people you're debating with are hopefully friends and not complete strangers you let have access to your facebook wall), and further enriched a millionaire and entrenched him as someone "brave enough to speak his mind/beliefs even in the face of losing money" to a base of people who hold that as a cardinal virtue.

If your response is, "I don't want to be friends with people who think that", guess what? That's fine for this particular issue, but the bigger problem with holding to that is that if you require all your friends to think exactly like you do, a) you're whittling your potential friends to an unnecessarily small group of people who are redundant since they're not bringing any insight and b) sweet christ, how sheltered do you need to be from being displeased?  You're living in the exact bubble that Mr. Duck is. Way to go, dodo.

None of which is to say that you should casually accept bigotry or "hate". But I'd wait until an idiot sounds a call to action rather than sounds off on his underdeveloped opinion. The reasonable, intelligent thing to do is take note when someone says something you vehemently disagree with and treat them accordingly. If you were a fan of Duck Dynasty, stop watching and participating (buying merchandise, promoting it, etc). Be (moderately) quiet about it so as not to give them the reactionary bump/boost.

Or you can continue to bleat and ego-masturbate in your comfortable self-righteousness.

(edited 1/5/2014 because of an egregious attribution of of The Walking Dead to A&E instead of AMC...sheesh)

The No-Sided Conversation

Things had gotten weird between them.  That wasn't really it. They'd gotten "uncomfortable."  He thought. But that was the bitch of it.

He wasn't sure.  Maybe it was all in his head.  But it didn't feel that way.

They were friends. "Glorified acquaintances," if he were honest about it.  Their circles overlapped from time to time.  Still, he liked her and that was the also the bitch of it.

Had he made her uncomfortable by being too flirty with her and crossed a line?  Had he simply been uncomfortable because he didn't know the right place to be with her flirty/friendly-wise and she picked up on his discomfort and became uncomfortable simply because he seemed to freeze up around her, as if she were doing something wrong?

It felt like they were on a feedback loop of emotional negativity and defensiveness, but without a real reason.  Perhaps.

Relyea Avenue

"Excuse me, sir. I'm a local attorney, and this is the house I was born in and I haven't been here in twenty years, at least. We moved away when I was six.

"May I look around? Walk out on the dock?

"My father built it, around when I was born."

"What's your name?

"Yeah, that's etched in concrete in the garage. 

"Go ahead.

"I know how memories go."

The house is different. Better. Renovated. When I was a child it was dark; trees bound it
and kept it in near perpetual shade. Now they're cleared away and it's lighter and not some '70s nightmare.

That's the spot on the driveway where I dropped the glass bottles, when I was three, and they exploded and I jumped up and down, barefooted, in the shards, and screamed, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" and was forgiven for cussing because I was bleeding and crying.

Between those two trees, there used to be a platform my pop built for me for a zip line he set up across the yard.  He dug a pit beneath it and filled it with leaves, in case I slipped and fell.
And I protested and railed against the pit, as a four year old, because I'd never fall, and promptly was saved by those leaves on my very first attempt to get on.

The grass on that spot on the lawn is grown back, but, literally, for years, it was bare, scorched dead, from where my cousin Mari set down a sparkler on top of a bag of fireworks on some 4th of July. And I remember being tossed over someone's shoulder as everyone sprinted away in all directions from the blast and I watched it erupt into an explosion of a million white hot sparks, like the Death Star met its end on our lawn.

There's the tree next to the dock I used to climb, and there's the pluff mud where, when it was low tide, because I was so small, I could carefully walk out onto it for a ways without sinking in too much, but, if I did, I got the hose before I was allowed back in the house. I didn't know anything could be that cold.

The dock! The dock! The dock! There's where I stood and Pop helped me fire a gun for the first time. He helped me hold and aim and squeeze and I shot the pluff mud and the M1 Garand nearly broke my shoulder and I cried and "I'm going to count to three and then I'll give you something to cry about! One, Two, Three!"

And look at that! Raccoon droppings on the dock. Pop hated raccoons scat on his dock.
He even rigged a trip wire to a car battery to fry the little bastards, until my mom found out and made him take it down because she envisioned a pile of dead neighborhood kids, who'd attempt to sneak onto the dock at night. So Pop left triscuit crackers coated in tabasco out there, thinking aversion therapy would keep them off the dock, but all that really happened was we couldn't sleep because raccoons screamed in the trees all night as they shat fire.

The boards are spongy, as though they can't handle an adult me. I fell off the dock plenty of times. 

There was that one time at a party, when I was a baby, seated on the edge, next to the creek. "James, don't let him sit so close, he'll fall in."
"He's fine."
I wasn't. They turned their heads for an instant and in I went. Pop ripped off his watch and tore out his wallet and launched in and brought me up. And when I learned to swim years later, the family friend who taught me,  who held me as I worked on my form,  would always tell folks how I trembled and trembled in her hands.

And I walk back to get in my car and leave and that was then and this is now and I have  marsh and pluff mud and saltwater and lowcountry in my veins and bones and I'll find my home again.

I will.

Thanksgiving 2013

I run to clear some space
or justify gluttony later.

I bathe. I iron. I dress.
I heap the plate with yellow:
potatoes, macaroni, yellow rice casserole; 
then brown: turkey and stuffing.
Oh, fine, I'll get some salad.
3. 2. 1. Go!
Inhale food, not air.
Ow. Ow. Ow.

Up from the table,
down to the couch.
Along comes beer.
and now for intermittent wakefulness,
as gladiators smash into each other
interspersed with exhortations to:
shop, shop, shop!
and
spend, spend, spend!
and get out the house ASAP!
to join the maddening crowd
to buy unnecessary stuff
that people we love don't really need
for the next time we have time off to see them
instead of staying home and 
spending time with them
instead of staying home and 
spending time with them now.

NO!

I couch and beer and smile
and laugh and listen and tell
and nap and am covered in
nuclear fire-hot dogs
and this is how it's
supposed to be.

The Forum Pt. 2

As The Forum was technically out of the purview of the school, I was free to publish whatever I wanted.  I was strongly encouraged to get a faculty advisor.  I selected the Wills professor who liked to make sex party and heroin jokes in class.  He said this edition was one of the funniest things he'd read, period, but he couldn't advise me to release it in this version.  I took his advice because, you know, I needed a job after school.  Five years later though, I present to you my unfettered vision:
 
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The Forum Pt. 1

 

The pinnacle of law school-dom is being an Editor in Chief.  There are only a handful of publications (USC has Law Review; ABA Real Property, Trusts, & Estate Law Journal; Journal of Law and Education; and the International Journal of Law and Business).  Editors in Chief are some of the brightest legal minds of their graduating class. 

My law school grades were not abysmal, but they were roundly mediocre.  And I had (have) no fervent desire to practice law.  However, my third year of law school, I was the editor-in-chief of the law school's satire newspaper (no, I didn't invent it).  The Forum had a history of existing but no one publishing anything.  I managed to get two issues out in the fall.  I joked that the other Editors in Chief could have their successful careers, trophy wives, and respect of their peers; I had more readers (non-parent division) than all of them combined. 

Without further ado...

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