City blood

"Want some of this?!" I yell to my brother over the shaky din of the front-end loader as he hauls his Dickey-clad lower half toward a location on the family farm that will make him some money. I shake a bright orange can of mosquito repellent at him.

He looks at me like I'm some sort of communist.

"NO!" he shouts at me, shaking his head. It's like I've suggested that he take out twenty percent of his paycheck to solve the mystery of why men leave the toilet seat up and why women always think they can change a man.

"They're eating me up!" I holler as a means of explanation for the intricate aerosol dance I'm performing as I glance at my bare legs. I scowl at the throbbing patches of skin where enterprising mosquitoes have already staked their claim. I squint my eyes, fan myself, and cover my limbs in sticky chemicals that supposedly will keep blood-sucking parasites at bay. The dogs, previously nosing pressingly into my creases, back off.

"You've been in the city too long," my brother tells me. I don't know what to say; I hardly consider Memphis a city in the traditional meaning of the word, and instead think of it as one big rural neighborhood with pizza delivery. I shrug off his comments and douse myself in chemical. The following day, my mother and I will spot a clandestine colony of honeybees constructing honeycombs out of sight behind plywood covering what used to be the door to the only bank in town and I will creep ever closer for a glimpse behind their buzzing curtain, but for now I will smack at a buzzing pest hovering near my thigh, wondering what's in the repellent that keeps the blood-suckers at bay. The sky contracts. The clouds pulse silently and lower to cover the horizon in a full-court press. I smile, content.

This is my home, even if I'm the only one in the entire family that the mosquitoes still bother.

The mosquitoes, I remind my brother, have always eaten me alive.

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Today the clouds hung low and common like weightless glaciers, suspended in the sky above and beyond me. I kept my gaze trained to them all day, mouth slightly agape like some kind of developmentally disabled infant with her hands pointed toward a mobile featuring the skies. I say that because a big blue sky like that makes me feel dumb and happy. It didn't seem real, the scale of it all. I wondered what it must be like to look into the near horizon and see an honest-to-god mountain or two. Every day. How that might affect perception for someone used to a flat plane. I think I might feel constantly watched if anything other than sky ever crept up around me. Or do the mountains push an illusion of privacy? I have lived in the flat lands of West Tennessee all my life and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to answer that question.

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We watched a movie this weekend, a cautionary tale: Don't let the machines evolve faster than we do. Wall•E is a Pixar flick with a calming political influence mapped in its bones. You watch it and you can't help but want to say shucks, we fucked it all up, and then feed and clothe the lowly artists who have to cope with the mundane storytelling and shading of each animated post-apocalyptic form. I watched with great interest all the sci-fi homages. Johnny-Five and Hal, yes. And likely more that I did not tap into or have forgotten or am too lazy to mention.

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We buried two small, quaint bundles of treasure today. Stickers and typing-paper explanations. The geocaching community in Saltillo is no doubt fledgling at best, but could be bolstered by the unbridled enthusiasm of two pre-teens, a millenial, and a baby boomer. Funny to think that I'd never given geocaching a single thought until this past week when a soon-to-be-honeymooning friend mentioned it and suddenly the world skidded into silly relief in relation to the idea that people were hiding tiny treasures all over town. I don't know; maybe it's easy to ignore that fact and remain happy but as far as I know, you ought to seek shelter under the nearest ban on allcaps and just enjoy the summer from then on out.

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Would it surprise anyone to know that I was totally drunk as this post was going up?

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Update, from the future!!!: I sobered up and edited this post ... extensively. Didn't edit out the stupid, though. That's going to stay for posterity. Honestly, sometimes I am amazed at the random shit that I will say or write once I've got a couple of drinks in me. I get mouthy when I drink. And lately I've been reading a lot of fiction, which tends to make me wordy when I write. Drinking while writing, well, I get mouthy and wordy and messy and then have to answer for it to my sober self the next day.

No comment required

Me: Man, I wish Savannah had some actual real, decent restaurants.

Oldest nephew, completely sincerely: You mean like Arby's?

You had to be there

While playing Apples to Apples tonight, the green apple card called for "cruel."

Someone threw in "Martha Stewart," which is funny for its own reasons, of course. After it was all said and done, the youngest nephew explained why he had done so: "Casey had told me that she was going to ban hunting!"

My sister did a spit-take.

Vacating

I don't know why I'm still up. Oh wait, yes I do. BECAUSE I AM A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT. And instead of packing and going to bed like any normal person about to fly down to Florida for a week of beachy funtimes and Radiohead, I'm uploading photos from the weekend to Flickr. And I haven't even gotten to today's MusicFest pictures. I guess they'll have to wait until I get back Thursday and then I'll just do one massive photodump, yay.



Saturday my cousin Keri got hitched. It was a sweet ceremony on the river in Decatur County as the sun set. We were mooned by some boaters (see above; click the photo and then check out the large size for details). No one wanted to catch the boquet OR the garter. Bunch of commitmentphobes, I tell you whut. Anyway, good times in Parsons complete with horribly vulgar things written in shoe polish on the couples' windshields. I hope Keri and Randy are together for the long haul. I'd hate for her to have to put another wedding together. Yow! That's a lot of work.

Okay, enough internetting. I need to pack and clean up the apartment so I'm not instantly depressed when I get back later this week.

I needed this

The sunset tonight was pink for twenty seconds, and then it dissolved into orange and blue. I know because I was outside -- paying attention for once -- my old softball glove on one hand and one of those pitted practice softballs in the other, readying to hurl it toward my brother, who was intent on hitting it over the bales of hay far behind me and into the pasture.

He never did hit it that far, but he did manage to get it stuck underneath the rusty old white car sitting beside the shed on my grandmother's property. It took four of us -- me, Evan, and the nephews -- hunting for that damn ball for ten minutes before it turned up. I can't believe no one got bitten by a snake.

I have successfully consumed three different types of meat today -- four if you count hot dogs as a type of meat all their own -- and I'm pretty sure the combination of meat and running around like a moron, trying to relive my glory days as a softball player, has rendered me very nearly immobile. I can hardly move. I'm doing the old-lady groan every time I get up. Everyone kept warning me: "You better scoot up; you're not as young as you used to be!" But I threw caution to the wind and hurled that ball from amazing distances of twenty -- no, twenty-two! -- feet.

All the aches in the world are worth it.

This weather is so nice...

I want to take it out behind a middle school and get it pregnant.

I was just lamenting last night to Ay that I haven't been to a single cookout this year, and just now my dad calls me to tell me that he's loading up the truck with fifty pounts of ground beef, ten chickens, and two hogs*, but that I may need to pick up hot dogs on my way to Saltillo. Along with triple antibiotic ointment for my mom's hand.

Yum!

* slight exaggeration

No, really

Just suffered through a round of "Obama is the antichrist!!! It is prophesied, omfg!!!" at the family compound. Chewed holes in my tongue but managed not to get worked up or say a single word.

Never realized how effing paranoid my family can be. Ho. Lee. Shit.

Anti-suckage

Oh happy day, I actually had a really good weekend. I know that this in no way has any bearing on how the remainder of my week will play out, nor does it indicate that the Universe is going to take it easy on me or anyone else for a while (the Universe don't roll like that, y'all), but I still would like to recount the ways the past few days have not pissed me off.

• The snow Friday was gorgeous, and gave me an excuse to go strolling through the park at midnight and again the next day, taking pictures of strangers building snowmen. I don't stroll in the park nearly often enough, snow or no snow.

• Saturday, Sarah came into town and listened to me pine and bitch and moan and kvetch about everything I normally pine and bitch and moan and kvetch about. She even endured my pleas to her to help me fix my life, all while politely refraining from pointing out that I was at a Circle K at 3 in the morning wearing fuzzy purple socks and red polka-dot shoes. She also introduced me to my new favorite band, Beirut:



• Sunday I woke up fully clothed and on the couch. At noon. Still somewhat drunk, but thankfully not technically hungover. I realized that I was WAY behind schedule — we were having a birthday dinner for my mom, dad, and youngest nephew later that day. I steadied myself and answered my phone. It was my dad, asking if I was on the road yet. Uh, no, I said with horrible wine breath. Well, dad told me, you best hurry up because we eat at 2. (It takes two hours for me to get there.) Turns out my mom had been assigned to call and tell me when we were eating, but never did. I had just assumed it would be late dinner, because I always forget that in the South, "dinner" means "lunch." Duh. So we trucked it and got the eff out of Memphis and I was only two hours late. No one seemed to mind too much, though. We ate at River Heights Café, which has to be the most overpriced piece of crap restaurant in Hardin County — no offense if you Google the place and find this blog, but yeesh: $10 for this? — but it has a killer view of the river and it's birthday tradition to eat there every spring. We Turnered it up for a while, demanding bowls of cheese and condiments out the wazoo, and then retired to Saltillo for an evening of shooting pellet guns and rifling through the bookcases in the hunt for my sister's high school diploma.

• The weather was absolutely gorgeous Monday, so I roamed around Triple T Farms, taking pictures of rusting heaps of scrap metal and decaying farm equipment. My family's land has to be my favorite place to take photographs, even if it's a little bittersweet to find beauty in decay (is that a song lyric?). The horses are great fun (even if the one named, ironically, Lady always, always, always farts in my general direction; this time she did it twice!) and love the attention. Osama bin Llama, not so much. He kind of sucks, even if he's fun to look at. Also, the random crap you can find on the Turner compound fascinates me to no end. I'm sure I wouldn't be so interested in it if it belonged to some random family. But when I step quietly over coils of barbed wire and oil cans and election signs and boxes of video tapes stored haphazardly in the shed behind my grandmother's house, I feel like I'm getting filled in on part of our story that no one might ever think to tell me. And that inspires me. I came home with 700 pictures to sift through.

• The paint on my car from the door that I was so pissed off about? My dad Magic Erasered it off. Seriously. THE ERASER IS NO-SHIT MAGIC, OMFG.

• On the way back to Memphis, I stopped at a gas station a few miles from my parents' house, and some guys in a truck pulled up beside me. The strapping young man on the passenger side got out and did a doubletake and said, "How YOU doin'?" like that gross dude on that commercial for sour mints or whatever. That made me laugh. And then he said, "You from around here?!" Which made me laugh even more. I normally would have shot that guy the dagger eyes, but I was feeling frumptastic and had no makeup on, so it perked me right the fuck up. I'll cop to it: I am a tool of the patriarchy sometimes. But come on, getting hit on by a teenager?! That's like an ego superpowerup.

Just another Friday in Saltillo: My family's neighbors busted for huge pot-growing operation

Who says nothing interesting ever happens in small towns?

From the story (actually, this is the whole story at this time):

TBI officials say an underground marijuana-growing operation was busted in Saltillo, Tennessee on a 600 acre farm.

Investigators say marijuana plants were found inside a metal tank buried in a field in the 1000 block of Five Forks Road. The tank is about 20 feet long and eight feet tall. More than 1,000 marijuana plants were seized, as well as several guns, $4,000 in cash and paperwork related to the operation.

Officials say they are not able to release any more information regarding the drug bust at this time.

Ooooh, I have more information. But it would probably be foolish to be spreading names and background info while the word "alleged" is still in play. What I will say is that this is the third time I believe, this family has gotten busted for their, uh, family business.

Hey, isn't persistence part of the American dream?

What a difference a decade and a half can make

I'm at my parents' house. All evening we've been watching old home videos that I coaxed my brother to get out of the safe. So far we've covered 1992 and 1993. I have been rolling in the floor laughing until I couldn't breathe and tears streamed down my face. There is a Fourth of July clip in which all you can see is some fireworks going off in the yard and our stupid fire-eating dog Bo trying his best to knock them over, while all you can hear is everyone in the family taking turns screaming "Bo! BO! BO BO BO BO BO!!!" at the top of their lungs. I lose my shit when my brother, who was five at the time, screams at that dog repeatedly in his little five-year-old way. He was such a ridiculously cute and precocious kid. Funny that when I was eleven, he didn't seem nearly as cute. In fact, I spend much of my time on film screaming at him and acting like a general ass. Especially when we're flying kites and I can't get mine to take off. I sit on the ground and pout, claiming that my kite and only my kite is a dud. Boo frickin' hoo, chump. Jesus!

You know, I always wondered why boys never liked me in elementary and middle school. Now that I have some distance and perspective, I understand with complete and absolute clarity and don't blame any of my childhood crushes for thinking I had cooties. Oh lord, the high waistlines, the poofy bangs, the headbands, the white Keds, the wedgies, the goofy teeth, the flat butt, the spandex, the sweater vests, the puffy paint and glitter, the drawl, the bark laugh, the stupid jokes. Yikes.

Why my parents weren't constantly smacking me around for being an ass, I'll never know.

Update, 12:46 a.m.



You have not lived until you have seen my mother and me cover "I Saw The Light" -- that wholesome ditty about adultery by Wynonna Judd -- in our matching white T-shirts crowned with hot pink bandannas, bejeweling, and fringe. And matching white Keds.

Have. Not. Lived.

Yeah, well I heard he favors diggings up corpses and re-killings them!

From one of many e-mails I've received from someone in my family who really, really does not want me to vote for Barack Obama:

Voting records show that he is also the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate. He is an ardent supporter of killing unborn babies. I have heard that he even favors killings babies after they are born. But that is okay because (1) he is a good speaker, (3) he is charismatic, and (3) he is black.

The above was written by some wack job named Jim Bramlett, a crazy evangelical you might get a kick out of Googling.

Stormy weather

I drove down to Hickory Hill to do some quality rubbernecking this morning (what? it's citizen journalism), but my efforts were thwarted by the Memphis PD, which had all the streets around the mall blocked off. Everyone else in the city seemed to have had the same idea as I had, though, as the streets were choked with traffic — the kind of traffic that doesn't really have any place to be in particular, but just wants to shuffle around and see what it can see.

Even though you couldn't see the major damage from the road (unless you managed to go westbound on Winchester, which I did not), you could still make out little clues everywhere that things were amiss. Bits of insulation blew across parking lots like leaves. Signposts were lying down or twisted. The trees that were still standing seemed like they'd taken a beating, and some of them housed bits of broken buildings.

So, I didn't park and hoof it around to Sears, where the bulk of the damage occurred. Instead, I maneuvered my way over to the World Overcomers Church just a couple of blocks from the mall to see if their pride and joy was still standing. And indeed it is. God smote the Sears and all the evil household appliances but left Lady Religiosity standing. Hallelujah and amen.

Last night was probably the most stressful night of work I've ever had. Previously, that title went to the night when I had to lay out all the zoned B section covers, jumps, and region pages (zoning was new and we were still experimenting with the best way to distribute the workload among designers; that was clearly not the best way, as it aged me five years that night). We had big Super Tuesday plans, and then the storm rolled through and got serious, and around the time they evacuated the entire building to the basement (for at least half an hour), we realized we were probably going to need to rip up A1 and focus on the storm.

And as soon as we tried to get going again, we were evacuated again. And the shit of it is that we were still expected to hit our regular deadlines. Which we did not. Because we're not machines, dammit.

One of our features designers called us from home and asked if there had been any damage to our building. As far as I knew, no, I told her. She said she was asking because someone had called her and said a Nashville news station was reporting that the CA had been leveled. ???

I'm beginning to wonder if Jackson is positioned in some weird vortex of tornado suckage that would explain why it gets hit nearly every year. My mom grew up in Jackson and said she doesn't remember it ever having the tornado troubles it's had in the past decade. Jackson's in a constant state of rebuilding after tornadoes.

Savannah and even Morris Chapel got their share of damage too. My sister's car's windshield was busted out by hail, and her husband's church (Sharon Baptist) was apparently leveled. Everyone in my family is safe, though, so I'm thankful for that.

Selected quotes from Holidizzle 2007

My 13-year-old cousin Tyler: Aunt Fran could barely talk last night! She was slurring her words together and dancing around the Christmas tree!

Mom: I was not! I was fully coherent. [pause] I was trashed.

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Aunt Cindy: Keri bought this birdhouse that, y'all, I swear, the front door to it looks exactly like a vagina.

Dad: So you know every time that bird comes home he feels like a pussy.

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Mom: I have a doodie story!

::::::::::::

Mom (in the hopes of embarrassing my brother in front of his new girlfriend Beverly): Uh oh. I feel a full moon coming on.

Evan (who has a propensity for mooning people at inappropriate times, if there is even an appropriate time to moon anyone): Uh oh, I think you want to see it.

::::::::::::

Casey (my 12-year-old nephew, entering the room with the white-wine bottle I had drained earlier): Ooooh, Aunt Lindsey, are you going to keep this bottle? Can I have it? I love saving bottles.

Me (looking at my sister Krissie): You'll have to ask your mom, but as far as I'm concerned, go for it. Just wash it out first.

Krissie (looking mildly dismayed): I don't care. Just wash it out first. (To me) He is just like you -- a friggin' packrat. He keeps bottles, scraps of paper, everything.

[Casey comes back into the room, swigging some light-colored liquid out of the wine bottle.]

Krissie: NOPE! HUH-UH. GO POUR THAT OUT AND PUT THE BOTTLE UP.

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Krissie (as an aside during a boisterous game of Malarky) : What's the difference between a corset and a girdle? And where does the extra fat go when you wear one?

Me: I think a corset rides higher and lower, and it's got whalebone or something in it. All the fat is shoved into the empty cavities of your body and it smothers your organs! They're both a physical manifestation of the oppression of women!

Entire room: GROOOOOAN.

::::::::::::

Heee heee. My family is hilarious. There was a lot of laughter yesterday. For several people in my family, it's been a really tough year. But we usually manage to come together and make each other cry laughing a few times a year. My only regret is that I didn't write down some of the other stuff that was said, like the conversation about bras and cup size, when I learned that damn near everyone in my family is a D or Double D except me. According to them, though, it's possible that I will just randomly wake up with a huge rack some day (if I ever have kids), which is what happened to all of them.

Ahhh, Christmas gives us such hope.

28 years

I want my mom's shirt, jeans, fingernails and hair. Oh wait. I've got the fingernails. Except I can't get mine to grow out that long.

And check out my dad, with the awesome trucker hat (before trucker hats were kitschy-cool) and that Grizzly Adams beard. And my sister with her sweet blonde hair and evil glowing retinas.

Happy anniversary!

If you're a deer in Hardin County, watch your back

I got off the phone with my mom a little bit ago. She said she had just been talking to my dad a minute earlier as he was driving home from work. She said she had rushed to get off the phone because, as she told him, it was cold and clear so deer were likely to be everywhere, and she didn't want him to be distracted if one ran out in front of him.

My dad has to drive home through a 40-minute expanse of country — just fields and woods as far as the eye can see. Or, at night, can't see.

And, sure enough, just as my mom had uttered her warning, she said she heard screeching tires and a thud and all sorts of harrowing stuff you don't want to hear from the other end of the phone. My dad had hit a big ol' buck. He estimates that he was a 14-pointer, at least. It crumpled up the front of the car pretty bad, but he was able to drive it home. He said he got out but was unable to find the deer.

Between the two of them, my parents have hit FOUR deer now in the past few years. My mom and the insurance company have a little running joke going because she hit two (or maybe even three) in the span of a month or so, and each time, the deer caused the exact same damage to her car.

So, what have we learned here? A) My mom's kinda psychic and B) Deer in Hardin County are not safe so long as Turners travel the roads.

Day 326 — Turkey Day

[for Thursday, Nov. 22]



Every year, it's different. Last year, we nearly burned the kitchen down with fiery turkey grease.

This year, both my parents were sick. My mom hobbled around in her pajamas, barely stomaching the rich and ripe smells of a dozen different dishes mingling. She was a good sport, and ate a bit of turkey and fixins. She even drank a glass of wine later in the evening.

My dad kept to himself, and was suffering from some kind of ear infection and tinnitus that was driving him mad. He had to go to bed early in the evening to prepare for work that night.

I sipped on Hogue white all day (White Harvest). There were no board games. There was clucking in the kitchen, and when everyone migrated to the den, we watched some harrowing video-clip show ("WATCH AS THIS MAN FALLS FROM A PLANE TO HIS DEATH!!!") instead of football.

It was all very low-key. A little sad.

I don't like seeing my folks feeling bad. If you're lucky (which I am, very much), you grow up with your parents as the rock from which all else can anchor, and when that rock crumbles or shakes the slightest bit, it sets everything off and you're forced to remember how transient everything is. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a major bummer.

That said, there was a baby there — Peyton, my sister's step-grandson. Look at him. He is a cutie bug, isn't he? Look at me, using idiotic phrases like "cutie bug." This is what happens when you surround me — an intentionally child-free person — with tiny babies for a week. First Lucas and now Peyton. And then later Thursday night I got to see Rylee, Phil's niece. She sort of squashed whatever tiny maternal pangs had been growing in me this week. That's only because she is three. If you have ever met a three-year-old, you will understand that sentiment.

Project 365

Thanksgiving, Turner style

Top two quotes from the afternoon:

"Gosh, it seems like every time I tell a story, it's about poop."

"Didn't you go to college so you could get a good job and not have to work holidays?"

Prep

I'm about to go wash up a bunch of berries and peel a couple of pomegranates in preparation for tomorrow. I don't have any big serving trays, though; it's probably best to just cart everything — washed and cut — to the parents' and then commandeer some of their many stray serving platters.

I was thinking today about a memory I have of a Thanksgiving Day back when I was, gosh, I had to be 11 or 12 — right at that age when you're still into pretending but you're starting to grow out of it bit by bit and there's a growing resentment at having to sit at the kids' table. I remember the weather was not quite bitterly cold yet, but it was overcast and windy and quite chilly. I was wearing a sweater striped horizontally with yellow, blue, orange, and green, with matching red stretchpants and a red headband. And, more than likely, white Keds. (At least, that's what I'm wearing in this memory; there's no telling if that's true. But the rest of the memory definitely is.)

My cousin, brother and I spent the afternoon outside on my parents' deck, pretending that it was a giant ship. I was the captain. The waters were choppy and I kept having to keep orders to my crew to keep us afloat.

Inside, the women cooked and cleaned and the men sat in the den, flipping through channels and watching football.

That's one of the few Thanksgivings I can really remember, a memory so bright and clear that it's hard to believe it's as old as it is. I'm not really sure why it has stuck with me the way it did.

Day 324 — Squares

[for Tuesday, Nov. 20]



Just got back from the grocery. Picked up lots of salad ingredients and fruit and cheese (note: nothing cookable) to take to the parents' Thursday. Sometimes I wonder if my mother feels like a failure for raising a daughter who can't cook for shit. Well, she shouldn't. That's all on me.

I hope my mom will be okay. She's been fighting a stomach virus of some sort for four days now. I will be carting a can of Lysol with me, just in case she's got something contagious.

In other, better news, Ashley had her baby today! No more calling him Peanut, I guess, as he's been officially dubbed Lucas Blake. I can't wait to meet him and eat his cheeks.

In other more domestic news, I am pissed off at my cats right now. It is 2 in the morning and they have, in the past fifteen minutes: Pounced the shit out of Felix, destroyed the pristine litter box, jumped into the sink to lick the dishes three times, splashed all the water out of the water bowl and tracked it onto my hardwood floors and oh so much more.

Project 365

Day 317 — Headless Angel

[for Tuesday, Nov. 13]



Well, technically she has a head. It's just not on her.

My sister gave me this several years ago when I was confirmed.

The poor thing got broken the last time I moved. It's high time I get some super glue, I think.

Project 365