Hatched
Tonight, I hung out with Marshall. We ate palaak paneer and dosai at Madras, grabbed a couple Zesto milkshakes and drove up I-75 to check out the Big Chicken, since neither of us had ever been. Yes, this is what you do in Atlanta at this end of the twenty-first century: You eat really good food, and then you drive.

And it feels perverse to admit I’ve noticed, but ever since the Katrina, Atlanta has had the most beautiful weather. Cooler clear-skied days and almost no humidity. Tonight it smelled like fall for the first time, and the wind through the car windows was a little too chilly for my t-shirt. We drove in silence for a good fifteen minutes listening to the New Pornographers’ album Twin Cinema with the windows down, peeling down the rollercoaster ride that the Downtown Connector feels like on nights like this: all irresistible curves and bright lights on either side like a midway.

And all that fat and refined sugar in my belly plus the good friend and the good music and the night made me think: This time is okay.

Something about every summer in this city feels like a battle, but as I surfed my hand out the window (as I was of course, utterly compelled to do), I knew this to be true: That when I pull out this cd in five or ten years, from a shelf in some strange new town, it’ll bring this all rushing back. And I’ll realize I was lucky. I’ll miss it: This night, the smell of your car, the expression on her face as she dances; that one at midnight on any given Friday, laughing open-mouthed, beer in hand, perched on the edge of a green metal lawnchair, those two with foreheads furrowed in concentration over the song they’re playing, and you and that day and that time; oh, tell that story and don’t forget the good part. I forget I am lucky; I’m blessed.

From: Administration
To: Media
Re: Relief Efforts:
Stop your carping about the shoddy job we’re doing, so we can get back to the shoddy job we’re doing.

Old Time Religion
In every little thing we do, we are just irreducibly homo sapien, aren’t we? Looking for groups and identity and the way to fit in.

This morning, I went to church. I’ve been going to this great big Unitarian Universalist church on and off since I’ve lived here in Atlanta. I first went there as part of an overall desperate search to feel at home in this town. As one of the few, the proud, (the confused, some would say – har) who were actually born and raised U.U., I thought this place might be a good place to start to find some sorta real community.

However, the degree to which the Atlanta Church, this Iglesia Gigante, resembles the church of my nostalgic youth – and how much I want it to – is up for debate.

My church growing up was much smaller than this place; it was actually a converted Victorian-era house. I remember standing in a circle with the entire congregation late one Christmas Eve singing “Silent Night.” (I was five or six, and I actually disrupted the whole beautiful, solemn moment when some wax from the white candle I was gripping dripped onto my hand and I screamed bloody murder. But that’s another story.)

At that age, the place was more a forest of familiar knees than anything else. Everybody knew me. It was my family’s support network growing up, absolutely. My dad’s poker buddies; my mother’s group of friends who came over to our house once a month to drink wine, talk and cry. I took for granted running around and around that old, creaky mansion, exploring its secret passageways with childhood friends, because no matter how creepy it felt when we dared each other to go into the old boiler-room without a flashlight, that room, like everything else, was mine. And no matter how long we played, or in what strange corner, some familiar adult hand would always find its way to my shoulder, some voice would always tell me my parents were looking for me; it was time to go home.

We never had a great minister at our church back home. We had good ministers, familiar ministers, but no great speakers, no amazing inspirators that I recall. But that was never the point for me between age of zero and fifteen.

Wunderbar
Once I was all grown up, though, it was the minister that kept me coming back to my chosen church here in ‘Lanta. A man in his mid-60s or so, a New-Englander who looked and sounded it: from his rather stern, rather pensive bearing, to the way he presented everything he had to say: as if it came from somewhere deep inside of him after many days’ thought (perhaps spent striding through some Maine or New Hampshire forest. With a walking stick, maybe. Like Gandolph.) He spoke with an authority which made it a good thing that what he said was actually of substance. Because while admittedly, I know nothing about his actual pastoral skills, his involvement with individual church members’ lives, I do know that when I came the first time to sit down and attend one of the services led by him, I left feeling transformed; some dark, doubting part of myself knocked down. And that’s what happened nearly every time I went to listen to him speak. Each week, his sermons renewed my faith in a humanity that has the tendency to leave any of us deeply disillusioned. Moreover, he made me feel just and good about my place in that humanity - about my purpose and principles, to coin a phrase. I didn’t bother with music on the way home from many of those services. I drove home in silence, thinking. Then at home, I’d find someone to talk with about whatever the sermon topic had been.

I won’t pay a lot for this muffler.
The senior pastor retired this summer. Clearly, his were not easy shoes to fill, and I went to today’s first service with a new minister with that in mind.

Now all in all, I’m sure New Minister’s a really well-meaning, err, person. But seeing a service led by him and the other Regular-Unleaded minister today, inspired a sad revelation: The old minister was the only reason I came to church.

The large congregation of mostly 40 and 50-something white yuppies and their kids? The folk songs the choir sings about doves and love and humankind? The quasi-“World Spirituality” practices mixed into each service? All of that I had just put up with, waiting, well, for the Word, or I guess, since we’re UUs, the word.

Maybe I was just feeling hypercritical today, but I found myself picking apart nearly every aspect of the service, the rumblings of displeasure in my stomach growing louder and louder till I had that horrible standing-on-edge-of-scenic-outlook feeling: What if I jump? Yes: What if I just stood up, right there in the middle of that octagon-shaped room and screamed, “Bollacks, bollacks, bollacks!!!,”

Bollacks to you, new minister-guy, when you gushed about how this congregation is sooo wonderful: Why, just days before when a Little Boy in a Wheelchair had died, everyone just rallied around the family like regular lay-ministers.
(Uhh, yeah. That’s what people do. When they care. When a friend’s child is more to them than just Little Timmy Wheelchair.)

And most especial bollacks to you, sir, for your FIVE-HUNDRED, yep, count 'em, DOLLAR hurricane relief check whose amount you made absolutely sure to tell us all, because people, it just Feels So Good to Give.

There’s more, but. I’m tired. Anyway, you get the point.

I’ve made some new friends at the church whom I’d like to keep up with. But today’s service made me think, Okay: Just because this is the largest congregation in town of the religion I like to call my own, doesn’t mean I have to call what they do Right, in my book. It doesn’t mean that just because I call myself UU, that I have to try to fit in with these people. It does feel slightly sad, but it’s also a relief.

Spanning time, every day from 9-5

Okay, so admittedly I had on my headphones and was transcribing an interview I did last night, but I swear someone just paged a Wendy Balsam, here at Small Publication. Maybe they were just looking for someone who drives a shifty-car.

The woman who loved beer feels a strange tragic presence.
This morning, I was riding around town looking for yard sales with Dirk. I was starting to feel queasy. This was due in part to Dirk’s manner of driving, which includes lots of sudden acceleration and braking. When he first hit the gas and swerved us hard into the curve where Scott Boulevard splits from Ponce, I thought, “This is it. He’s been feeling suicidal and now he’s going to take me with him for breaking his best friend’s heart.” But we survived, only for him to do the same thing again when he spotted a red and white Garage Sale sign off to the right. When he pulled us over to the curb next to what turned out to be only the dregs of a sale - a card table piled with faded baby clothing, a rusty wine rack and some sci-fi novels - I just sat for a moment. I could feel my paleness, the sweat beading on my forehead. Roiling stomach.

Of course, four or five beers the night before didn’t help. Here’s the thing that my roommate pointed out to me that did me in, and she’s right: It’s the Change-of-Venue Beer Order. If you start out at the Yacht Club with one friend, why yes, you’ll have a Hoegarden there and then when you meet some more folks at Estoria later on, you’ll order an Anchor Steam, which they don’t have so you order a Newcastle but the only size bottle they’ve got is Extry-Huge so you say Hell, okay. Next, with the threat of diminishing wallet contents looming, you order a PBR. Then you’re at the music venue down the street and so you order another Pabst there, because you just got there so it feels like you’re starting afresh. Except for the unique Pabst headache beginning to spread from temple to temple.

And so you wake up feeling fine the next morning, but by the time noon and your friend’s cigarette-smoke filled car comes around, well, the fact that he may in fact be feeling both suicidal and murderous does not seem half bad.

When we got back in the car after walking exactly one circle around the feeble garage sale, Dirk lit another Marlboro and I opened my window.
“It’s called air conditioning,” he said, hitting the button to close my window to a crack. “We’ve got that, now.” Then, as he lurched back out into traffic,
“I’m storing a gun in the car now that the city is filling with desperate, impoverished people.” I tried to wrap my mind around that but was feeling so queasy I lacked the energy even to tell Dirk I was feeling queasy. I was faintly aware that Dirk wanted me horrified or at least disconcerted by the new awareness of a deadly firearm under my seat or in the glove box inches from my sprawled, sweaty knees. Instead, the image of the desperate throngs of people marching up and down this very street had seized me and sunk me down deeper into nausea and immobility.

“I mean, my friend in Baton Rouge? He says it’s fucking anarchy and it’s just spreading. And I mean, they’re sending them here.” We swerved across two streets and Dirk swung the car around sideways in traffic and then into the Last Chance Thrift Store’s parking lot, where he narrowly missed an eggplant-colored minivan and veered into the next spot. We got out and I stumbled after Dirk—a fast walker--across the parking lot of a strip mall that feels faded and forgotten even though Last Chance is a very popular, if ill-named, thrift shop. Dirk pointed out a dead pigeon I was about to step on and I half-hopped over it. He opened the glass door for me.

“I mean I know that they’re just normal families and stuff, but with that many desperate people, I’m glad I have my gun.” I could feel the couple ahead of us with a baby both pretend not to listen. Dirk’s voice carries and he knows it.

The air conditioning inside the store felt good but my heart wasn’t in it. The light threw a dingy, yellowed wash over every rack of unwanted clothing, every shelf lined with abandoned television sets. I found myself staring at the customers picking through the detritus discarded by people who didn’t want it or collected from the houses and apartments of dead people. I wondered which shoppers were from Louisiana, which were from Mississippi. I didn’t need anything. I’d just spent the last fourteen days trying to fit the contents of boxes and boxes of my own things into one bedroom and a couple kitchen cabinets of a house already cluttered with stuff.

I remembered being five years old on Saturday morning errands with my mother, errands seemingly endlessly occupied with strangers’ driveways laden with clothing racks and tables covered with macramé and fiestaware –and then sitting in the shopping cart while she pushed it through Giant Eagle. I was never allowed to snack while we shopped, but I could pick out a toy or a record during the garage-sale’ing. We’d get home and I’d stomp up the stairs to my room with the record. Yank it from its worn cardboard sleeve. Then I’d listen to Thumbelina or Mr. Rogers and rock back and forth on the blue shag rug. It was pure joy.

First post from brand-new home internet connection
Now, is it just me, or is the world going completely to hell without even bothering with the hand-basket, with the American Southeast leading the charge?

I think half my problem of perception is that I’m immersed in them beautiful, beautiful Current Events all day long in my job at Small Pub’. Yesterday, I went down to southwest Atalanta to talk with refugees from just west of here who were pouring into this new Red Cross shelter. At first, I had a hard time getting past that irritating and so unique-to-this-time-and-place-in-history sensation that had creeped over me from too many hours of CNN: that Gee, this was just like a movie!

But somewhere between talking with one spokesguy who was obviously at a loss for the shelter’s long-term plan, watching a volunteer plead with him in the hot August sun outside, just to tell her what the hell she needed to be doing here to help out here, and talking to three or four people from New Orleans and Mississippi with one or two grocery bags of belongings and an identical far-away look in their eyes—yes, yes, it hit home. Which didn’t make it any easier to comprehend; just sadder.

My job consists of talking to people, getting information and, objective-as-I-can: describing the scene, relaying what they said. It doesn’t require explaining or trying to put anything into perspective. Which, frankly, in some ways is a relief: When the throngs of people are arrested for chanting in the lobby of City Hall after a law passes that bans panhandling in both downtown Atlanta and yes, the Martin Luther King Historic District, I can stick my mic in the faces of those who are crying and yelling. I can watch as city officials tell them they won’t get arrested if they just go downstairs and then, once they do that, the police arrest them anyway. Then I can jot a few notes down in my little notebook, drive back to the office, write it all down, realize it’s too long so take out the part about the police and the protestors, hit print, swipe my time-card and go home. Same thing with the stories about Atlanta mothers of dead soldiers in Iraq speaking out. Same thing with abortion protests on both sides. Same thing with a new law requiring a photo ID to vote in Georgia, (protested and protested against by every middle-of-the-road group from the NAACP to the League of Women Voters, who all point to research showing that by and large, the problem of voter fraud is not even touched by this law.)

I report on all this, then I leave. And again: the ability to do that without being required to process each and every thing when it happens is useful to my sanity. But I’m starting, actually, of course, to wonder how true that really is. Because of course, I’d like to make a difference in the damn world. I can’t be an open, bleeding wound about every single issue without completely losing it, but the approach I’m now required to take isn’t working, either. Instead of a bleeding heart, I’m being slowly, surely rubbed raw.