Southern Nights
For Maximum Effect, imagine the voice of Johnny Cash or Mickey Rourke saying this to you.
What is it about a pedal steel and a banjo that go so well with a cool summer night in the South? Is it the way the crickets and frogs sing along? Does it have anything to do with the setting sun or the way the moss wafts in the breeze? Do they help sing the sun below the horizon to it’s watery bed beyond the treeline? It’s all of these things and a lot more.
As the light fades the humidity lifts and the lightning bugs illuminate the darkened forests, their lights seemingly cascading in time to the song of the frogs and crickets and nightingales. If you wait just long enough you might hear an old owl join in. After the light fades the air becomes cooler and you can watch the mist settle amidst the pines an grasses like someone laying a velvet blanket over Mother Earth. As you sit there on the porch, leaned back and feet up, you can hear someone behind you pouring something cool and wet. You turn around and are met with an ice cold silver cup, swimmin’ with a pretty brown liquor and a sprig ‘a mint.You take a sip and enjoy that moment where the ice cold liquid turns warm in your throat and you can feel that streak ‘o heat run right down to your gut. That same someone, that same sweet smelling someone wraps a blanket round one of your shoulders and then wraps the other corner over their own and sits down beside ya. Their scent mingles with the mildly musty, damp, earthy, patchouli smell of the earth and you could swear there’s never been a sweeter scent in heaven. God himself must be jealous.
That’s about the time that pedal steel comes back in and stirs your senses anew. Seems like they’re playin’ your heartstrings now. That someone next to you inches closer, rests their head on your shoulder and and breaths a sigh. You can feel their warm breath run down your collar, a stark difference from the damp cool of the evening. You pull ‘em close to ya, whisper something in their ear and take another swill of that mysterious odor; you let it fill your lungs and burn in your memory like a forest fire. Damn if this isn’t what a banjo and pedal steel were made for. True Southern comfort.
-dedicated to someone who has yet to enjoy the sensuality of the South.
Office Escape
So here I am, “working”. Despite this civil subversion of my natural right to be “free” I am pretty stoked for the remainder of my day which follows “work” (being in quotations because, as you can see, I am not really working). I plan to make full good use of this amazing Richmond day (they ARE quite rare- what with the mosquitoes and humidity and heat advisories).
I plan on breaking out of here at exactly 3pm, kicking in the mouth whomever opposes my speedy and likely stealthy exit from this office. Think the office escape scene from either Office Space or the first Matrix movie. Yeah, just like that. I WILL jump out of a window if I have to. I am not above self-defenestration.
From here I plan on making a speedy route to my favorite camera shop where awaits me another indignity of the purely elective sort. I am to retrieve a disc of files featuring converted slides which I turned in to have scanned over to disc. I was not aware beforehand that this would cost me $50. In that sense it may be argued that this was less than elective. Whatever. I want those pictures in a digital format.
Moving on and leaving the better part of the contents of my wallet behind me, I will make my way home where I shall have a victory deuce, a slight sandwich and I will pack my camera bag for an evening of photographic excellence on the town- possibly ending with a brew at Richbrau. I foresee good times on the horizon. Now… how to get out of here without being seen?
