The View from Cadiz, Kentucky

I've been sick since this past Wednesday--the flu, I think. I was on a recruiting trip to Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville that rainy day, and by the time I returned to Johnson City that afternoon, I was chilling. And I mean chilling, not chillin'. By the time I got home from Praise Team rehearsal at church, my fever was 102.5. The next day I taught a slightly abbreviated class and put in a slightly abbreviated day and that night ran a fever of 102.7. On Friday I stayed away from work altogether. Saturday saw a fever running from 99 to 101 all day long. I slept a lot, and by the time Saturday night came, I got almost no sleep. So, Sunday morning found me at church, playing my guitar and singing on only a couple hours overnight sleep and, I'm sure, the same fever. Sunday night again--102.7. I knew I had to leave for Denver today, and I thought I wasn't going to make it. But sometime during the wee hours of the morning--around 4:00 a.m.--my fever broke as dramatically as a TV fever in an old jungle movie. I woke up to find my pillow and hair and parts of the bed covers around my shoulders soaking wet with a cold sweat. So, while I move slowly and didn't leave Johnson City until the middle of the afternoon, I did actually make it out.

I passed through the east side of Nashville around sundown. Sorry, Mark. I initially thought I might just come to your place on this first leg, but I didn't want to bring any lingering sickness into your house. I also didn't want to shake your house all night with this wracking cough that is left over from the flu. So, my neighbor here at Cadiz Super 8 will be the only one to suffer besides me. (I'll stop in Nashville for supper Sunday evening, if that's okay.)

Once I decided I couldn't inflict myself on my Nashville friends, I knew I was stay in Cadiz. I hadn't been here in a good while, not since leaving my first job at Murray State University. Cadiz is the jumping-off point my family and I used when we lived in Murray. From our ancestral home in North Carolina, we would travel I-40 to Nashville, take I-24 up to Cadiz and then go west through the Land Between the Lakes to Murray, a place that some young professors leave because it's somewhat remote. I left too but not for that reason. My little family--the three of us--enjoyed our life in Murray, where it was just us to ourselves without all the other family now so near to us. Had things worked out differently professionally, I think we would have been happy there.

That's enough for now. I'm going to crawl in bed and try to get some sleep between fits of coughing.

A Friday in October

Nathaniel Hawthorne


The world outside looks as if it would be cold, but it's not. The sky is gray. Some small rain falls now and then. The trees are beginning to color up a bit. Gusty breezes break leaves from the tree limbs and drive them to the ground and along the sidewalks.

An uneventful morning. I took the CRV to get the oil changed and the tires rotated. The place where I have this done--Jones OK Tires--leaves its waiting room TV on Fox News, which I despise. So, this morning I brought my mp3 player and sat listening to music and reading a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a result, I didn't hear my name called when my vehicle was ready, but I happened to look up and notice the guys behind the desk looking around the waiting room. Indeed, they were looking for me.

At the office for the rest of the morning. Friday is research day--sometimes academic explorations, sometimes creative work. So, a little writing. Responding to emails from my Information Research Technician--she says secretary. Reading an American magazine from 1741 (edited by young Benjamin Franklin, no less). Listening to my favorite autumn music--two of Jethro Tull's 1970s albums depicting life in the English countryside, Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses.

To lunch at 1:00 or so. Huevos verdes at Amigo (beans/rice/flour tortillas), with chips and salsa, coffee and ice water. More reading of the Hawthorne bio.

Back in the office to write this.

This afternoon I'll write an email to the father of a prospective honors student. Given the email I received from him yesterday, my response will be somewhat complicated. I'll get to that soon. Then I attend the dedication of a bench and a couple of trees to my predecessor in this position, who died in this very office last December. (I hope I survive the position!)


This evening wife and son and I will travel to South Carolina to visit other son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters. Tomorrow the boys and I will attend a football game--The University of South Carolina, currently ranked seventh in the nation, will take on Vanderbilt University, not ranked.



Jethro Tull





255

Free Hugs Campaign. (music by Sick Puppies.net album out)

I posted this last October, but it bears repeating!

Serio-comic

Yesterday's post was serious. Today's about a related issue is comic. Sorry for the waffling.

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=92042

Walking the Erwin Linear Trail

A couple of hours before sunset this beautiful October Sunday evening, I left my house and drove about 15 minutes east through the mountains to the town of Erwin, Tennessee, home of a wonderful recreational feature called the Erwin Linear Trail. It's sort of what it sounds like—a paved trail that runs in a line more-or-less parallel to I-26 in Unicoi County. Used to, you got on the trail near the McDonald's and followed it south for a couple of miles. It runs down through the woods, alongside a stream (Martin's Creek) and a small river (or large creek), through some wetlands. Now a section has been open that runs a mile or so north from McDonald's—alongside streams and natural ponds and through the woods. That's the part of the trail I wanted to try out today. I took that north-of-McDonald's section to the end and back—close to two miles—and then walked another mile or so (and back) along the southern section. Altogether, I walked for a little over an hour, covering close to four miles.

I forgot my walking music at the house, so I walked au naturel and thought of all kinds things—my wife and son, church, old friends who returned for a visit today, a struggling young couple with two children and a difficult life, this morning's music (which turned out really well and seems to have touched a lot of people).

But not all my thoughts were so light and breezy and positive, as those who know me might expect.

The setting put me in mind of a recent event near where I live—the arrest of some 40 men in two local parks on charges from assault and drugs to disorderly conduct and indecent exposure. The bottom line: these men were using the wooded areas—and possibly the restrooms—in the parks for homosexual activity. They met, probably in twos and possibly by chance opportunities, in a place they called "the Man Cave" and there did "whatever they do," as a friend of mine I know put it. How this place came to be established and known about, I don't know. It might have been via the Internet, or it might have been via hearsay, word of mouth (as the newspaper says).

As I walked the family-friendly Erwin Linear Trail, I met men walking or bicycling alone, walking or bicycling with their wives or their children, and I thought about the men caught in this recent sting operation. The men looking out from the controversial photo gallery published along with names and charges in the Johnson City Press and the men I was meeting on the trail looked the same, for the most part. I wondered what signal might be given to invite some sort of off-trail liaison. Would it be something subtle or something blatant? I wondered if maybe I'd been given the introductory signal and missed it because I wasn't looking for it. I've been offered drug contacts on big city streets, and those range from the not-so-subtle touching or snuffling of the nose to the outright question. Did these 40 and the possibly many, many more who didn't get caught communicate the same way?

So, 40 men went down in the sex sting, and their names and pictures were printed in the paper. I'm not sure I agree with the newspaper's handling of this. Certainly the park was the wrong place for this kind of behavior, but if they were to "get a room," then I would have to let go my desire to judge and let God handle it. The paper argues that the full disclosure of names and pictures was necessary to warn wived and girlfriends these men might have, but I'm fairly certain that these interested parties could have been informed in ways that wouldn't also have informed those with no stake in the matter. I know a lot of mean and ignorant people out there feel threatened by such men and would like to see them dead. One of the men, by the way, has already committed suicide because of this event the Press's publicity. The lives of most all are certainly ruined at one level or another—among them a local pastor and a man apparently teaching in the city school system; I've heard that a third man worked at the university where I teach. Were these men pedophiles, I might (or might not) condone such publicity. Their prey would be children who aren't able to defend themselves if lured into a compromising situation. But these men were, apparently, consenting adults, whose major mistake was to choose a public space in which to carry out their consensual activity. Certainly in this day of deadly STDs, these men's actions posed a threat to others with whom they were intimate, but those who need the information about their behavior doesn't necessarily include their neighbors and friends and coworkers . . . or me.

Another curiosity that played in my imagination was one particular old guy that was arrested. The ages ranged from 26 to 85, with most being in their 40s and 50s (around my age). But the 85-year-old! Whether this man was openly gay or not, what must his life since the early 1920s have been like? Probably he had gone to school with boys his age. Probably he had served in the military during World War II. Probably he had gone through a long career of working with other men. And then probably he had lived several years in retirement, with time on his hands, time to think and obsess.

Oh, well, enough of this. I made it out off the Erwin Linear Trail without incident, and I suspect that will always be the case there. Next time I'll take my music so that what's in my head will be as beautiful as the evening light and cool air through which I walk.

http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/Detail.php?Cat=HOMEPAGE&ID=60342

Ruining October

I have a proposal that I think fitting for political campaigns that culminate in second-Tuesday-of-November Election Days. My proposal is this: Candidates for political office may not campaign except for the six weeks prior to the election. Leading up to this six week period, candidates should do their jobs, whatever these might be, especially if they are already in elected office. We don't elect people to spend half of their term campaigning for their next "run" for whatever office.

I realize that this would ruin my beloved October, but I can control how much crap I let into my life by how much I watch TV or read the newspaper. (The only thing I can't control is the constant of eyesore of political signs alongside the roads I drive.)

As much as we're hearing about the next presidential election, you'd think that it was just month away. But no. It's over a year away! What we're suffering through now is only going to get worse as we move out of 2007 and into and through 2008.

I don't know that I've shown many people this poem I wrote, but I think I'll share it now. You might not like it, but, hey, that's all right. We're still friends and in this together.

God, Bless America, Our

administration is a constitutional cancer,
our
malaise a hybrid strain—arrogance and ignorance;
our
economy is immoral,
our
religion made for television;
our
indigestion is chronic,
our
culture dead;
our
albatross is the American dream.

October Again

I've written this before: October is my favorite month. I love the chill of the air. Even when it's hot, a certain chill can be felt right at the edge of the heat. I don't think that the year offers us any bluer skies than those in October. And in geographies where the seasons change, the landscape becomes beautifully colored as the leaves change.

This changing of the leaves is beautiful, but I also know that it is a kind of death. In this, October becomes a strongly symbolic month, and it leads me into reflections that I don't necessarily have often through the rest of the year. October is an edge between life and death, a beautiful curtain between this world and the next. I can walk in it. I can ride around with my windows down. I can think.

When I was a songwriter, I used to record on each completed lyric the day and/or month and year that it was completed. Sometime in the past I went through those songs and found that a great number of them were written in Octobers across my career.

I have recently been too much away from my writing. Hopefully October will help me get back in the swing of things--if it doesn't distract me with all of its bittersweet charms, that is.