On May 28, 2003 I wrote an entry about Wagamama’s in Manchester, England and described a waiter as follows: “one young gent had a mohawk Frank Gehry could have designed.”

Kelefa Sanneh, writing this weekend in the New York Times about Christopher Carrabba of the band Dashboard Confessional writes the following: “his slicked-back hair looks like something Frank Gehry might have dreamed up.”

Hmmm.

You know, for whatever reason, I can’t suppress the confessional, autobiographical nature of this blog, as much as I’d like to pretend that it’s primarily about professional and intellectual issues. So be it. It’s both.

After spending Friday night and Saturday morning with my mom, I drove down to Columbus to visit my sister and her family. I had lunch on Sunday with most of my relatives on my dad’s side (minus my dad, who was still in Greece) in Columbus. Lima beans, jalapeno cornbread, squash, deviled eggs, potato salad, and fried chicken. Being a tree-hugging, bunny-loving vegetarian, I declined the chicken and devoured two helpings of everything else. Oh, and pound cake. And something called “blueberry crunch.” And, of course, sweet tea. And some leftover pizza. And some more of that blueberry crunch.

My sister and I did our once-every-few-years drive around Fort Benning, where our family lived for a couple of tours of duty in the early ’70s. I had a strange moment when I realized that the MP who checked our IDs as we drove on base was probably no more than half my age. This was not so much a realization of how old I am as it was a realization that when I go to the places where I used to live, I think of myself as being the age that I was when I lived there.

We drove by our former homes, and while about ten years ago we were surprised at how trashy the old neighborhoods looked, this time they looked much better. There’s actual grass in the yard instead of just dirt. The magnolia tree that grew next to our house at the bottom of Austin Loop is gone, however. Something that seems weird to me now, but which I had completely internalized as normal when I was a child, is the fact that there is a nameplate on the front of all the houses on base with not the name of the family who lives there but the name of the soldier who has been assigned that house. So, for example, when we were kids the nameplate would have read “Major Williams.” Geez, and I sometimes whine about the hierarchies inherent in academia. Imagine going home at the end of the day and seeing your position within that hierarchy plastered on the front of your house. And all of your neighbors are enmeshed as well. I don’t know how we didn’t all go crazy being so fully embedded in military life 24/7.

Edward A. White elementary school is still there. I went by a few years ago and talked with the principal, telling her about the time capsule we had buried in fourth grade, to be dug up at the turn of the century. She had had no idea what I was talking about but had been willing to give me a shovel and let me dig around out in front of the school.

Driving off base we went by my grandparents’ old house at 45 Ross Avenue, where they lived from before I was born until the late ’80s. If there is any building in the world that has a claim on being a place I would call “home” it is this address, for most of my life the one constant thing that I knew would always be there. We went there all the time when I was a small child. I went there for long weekends when I was in college. Now, if this blog were a novel, the following would considered a clunky and obvious metaphor. The house is empty, the yard is overgrown with knee-high grass and weeds, and the neighborhood has clearly taken a turn for the worse. But this blog is not a novel, and the dilapidated state of the house signifies nothing beyond the state of its own decay.

I came back to Newnan last night and helped my mom haul some stuff to Goodwill this morning, clearing out much of her garage. I bought her an iced cafe americano at the newly arrived Newnan Starbucks. Her reaction: “Hey! That’s really good!” I’m staying with my dad tonight and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening it’s on to Atlanta.

Red dirt. Strip malls. New development. Pine trees. Pickup trucks. My parents retired to Sharpsburg, Georgia (from Mons, Belgium) about thirteen years ago. Sharpsburg is between the larger developments of Newnan (home to country music star Alan Jackson) and Peachtree City (a planned city that for a while was largely a bedroom community for Delta Airlines employees). Sharpsburg is just a few miles down the road from Senoia, which is where they filmed much of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Two years ago my parents divorced, after almost forty years of marriage, so now my visits home involve the kind of complications that friends of mine have had to deal with for years. Who do I visit when? How do I navigate between one place and another?

My dad travels the world working for a philanthropic organization called Global Volunteers, and he’ll be home from Greece tomorrow night. Around the time of the divorce, my mom opened a metaphysical bookstore (what some might call a New Age bookstore) in Newnan. It’s the place to go for lectures on spirituality, meditation classes, reiki healing, palm reading, tarot reading, chakra consultation, books, incense, prayer beads, crystals, or just hanging out and talking.

I have a conflicted relationship with the state of Georgia. On the one hand, almost my entire family lives here. When I was a child, my family lived in Athens and Columbus for a number of years. I went to college here, and lived in Atlanta from 1985 to 1994. On the other hand, I was born on the other side of the country, in Seattle. And living now in Kansas City, I find myself missing Maryland more than Georgia.

The politics of the peach state are not exactly the most progressive in the country. To be fair, though, the civil rights movement had a strong foothold here. Martin Luther King was from Atlanta. Jimmy Carter, of course, is from Georgia, and there are not many who have done more for human rights in the last couple of decades. Millard Fuller’s Habitat for Humanity started here. There’s a strong LGBT community in Atlanta.

There’s an interesting tradition of art and music associated with this state. There are good colleges and universities here. Things are more integrated, racially speaking, than one might assume from the South’s stereotyped reputation. But people still say really stupid things about race, class, and sexuality. Well, name a place where that doesn’t happen, I guess.

In some ways it pains me not to live here, but when I did live here I never felt like I belonged, and there was more than a little pain associated with that feeling. Part of this is perhaps the legacy of growing up in a military family that moved every 2 or 3 years. You never belong anywhere. Yes, I know, break out the violins. After living in Maryland for a few years, it became easier to come back home (ha! see, I used the word “home”) to Georgia and not feel uncomfortable because I was no longer trying to fulfill some kind of (surely imagined on my part) state-wide expectation for behavior or attitude. How can an entire state make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable? I don’t know.

Still thinking this through.

Otis Redding. Little Richard. Allman Brothers. B-52s. REM. Outkast.

Flannery O’Connor. Alice Walker.

I belong to the South. I don’t belong in the South.

Often, I am too cautious. I don’t pursue things because I talk myself into thinking they’ll never work, or they’ll be received negatively, or … any number of reasons.

I’m trying to be a little less cautious. So I’ll go ahead and announce that I’m working on a idea for a kind of poetry blog. Details will be forthcoming at some point in the future. I think it will be cool.

While you wait (with baited breath, I’m sure), check out the website for UMKC’s “magazine of writing and art,” New Letters.

Oh, and Poetry Blam was Jeff’s idea for this embryonic idea (slam+blog=blam). But I’m not making any promises about using it or not using it.

This has been a pretty long stretch of silence for me on here. But offline, I’ve been getting some good work done on the article growing out of the paper I delivered at SHARP that I hope to have sent off to a journal before the fall semester comes. So that’s where my writing energy has gone, I guess. Outside of writing these entries, I find writing hard going, but I guess that’s true for just about everyone.

I leave for Georgia today to visit family and to do a bit of research at Emory University‘s libraries. Pitts Theology Library has a copy of the microform collection called “The People called Methodists,” which contains useful stuff for me. And the Special Collections and Archives at Woodruff Library has a lot of valuable material on Methodist History.

Best of all, I’ll get to see my homies, Chuck and Mike.

I might blog the trip, I might not. We’ll see.