On Jimmy Eat World And Those Nights In My Car

            Last night I went back in time.

            Not literally, of course.  Last I checked I don’t have access to a DeLorean and my Flux Capacitor is still not finished.  But in a figurative sense I absolutely went back in time last night.

            Get this ya’ll.  I was driving home from seeing a friend of mine in Tallapoosa and had just got off the interstate.  I’d been playing the guessing game with the radio in the half-hour it took me to get home when a voice from the past reached out to me.  It was those same familiar chords and the quick, barely audible voice of Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World that came to take me back to the days of old.

            Ya’ll I was a total loser in high school.  You remember that kid who wanted to wear band t’s because he thought that listening to Motion City Soundtrack made him cool?  That was me.  I was seriously addicted to some mid-shelf pop-punk/emo/indie rock (if you don’t get the slash line you never used Purevolume).  And here I was now suddenly taken back to those times.  These days I consider my musical taste a bit more mature and intellectual (read: douchey and pretentious) and I fancy myself to be above the regular pitfalls that affect most lonely adolescents.  But here I was confronted with the memory of my past as it blared through my speakers and I knew in that one instance there was only one thing for me to do.

            I rocked out.  Hard.

            Ya’ll my car was swerving every which way all over West Stewart Mill Road.  And I didn’t care.  It was fun.  What ever happened to fun rock music?

            Nostalgia can be dangerous.  I know.  Every year on November 6^th I’ll call or text my friend Ryan to remind him that it’s the anniversary of the day my senior year that we lost our state cross country meet.  For whatever reason I hold on to some silly, barely meaningful race from high school and hold it up as a massive world event that must have had far reaching ramifications.

            But it can be fun also.  I got home that night and thanks to the magic of Spotify I was able to go back and listen to my own holy triumvirate of late 90’s and early 2000’s pop-punk/emo/indie rock.  You may know them as Jimmy Eat World, Saves the Day, and The Get Up Kids but to me they were so much more.

            So here I am back in Douglasville not even a week and already I’m rocking out to Jimmy Eat World on those nights in my car…aw hell, I just hope that maybe since the past is all coming back I’ll sprout a couple of hairs on top of my head too.

Dear Mr. Wolfe, I Have Come Home Again.

            So I said I was going to start updating the blog more and I went out and took a month hiatus.  Even more disturbing is that nobody seemed to notice.  Oh well.

            So what have I been up to the last month?  If you don’t know then you aren’t up to date!  I moved back to Georgia (yay) and now I’m living with my parents again (boo).  I turned twenty-five which makes the whole living with mom and dad thing about three hundred times worse, but it is shelter and they are good parents so I don’t suppose I have too much room to complain.

            Florence was a great place for the last three years.  For the first time in my life I was able to live in a place where I felt like I actually belonged.  Until of course I didn’t anymore.

            The times change and people change with them and our “homes” can change in the process.  I started feeling that Alabama was wearing thin on me and I’m sure there were plenty of people in The Shoals who were ready to see my leave.  So we had our drinks, told our (mostly dirty) jokes, and said our goodbyes. 

            Thomas Wolfe wrote this really amazing novel that was published after he died called “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  I’d have to say I agree with him.  Home changes and the people who were there change.  When I left Douglasville, Georgia in August of 2008 I was dating a girl I was about 30% sure I was going to marry (that’s a lot for me) and moving to a town in north-west Alabama that I had never been to in my life.  Suffice it to say I’m different.

            I’ve grown.  And I do mean physically.  If you knew me in those days I was still relatively thin.  These days with my super distorted self image I view myself as the size of a house.  And all my hair is falling out so there is no doubt that I have aged something opposite of gracefully.

            But I have grown spiritually, emotionally, and mentally as well.  The things that once bothered me don’t anymore and the things I once enjoyed spending money on seem frivolous these days.  I still have to ask myself the same questions every day and I do get largely the same answers but now my reasoning behind why I feel the way I do is so much deeper.  And I have so many great friends to thank for all of that.

            So here I am.  Back at “home,” whatever that is.  My parents are older and not used to have people in the house.  I’m older and not used to having to live with other people.  The neighborhood has changed.  People have come and gone and even those that stay aren’t the same people they were back in the summer of 2008.  A POS economy will have that effect.  So really I haven’t come back home at all.  The world is different and the people I love and care about are different.  Some of them are dead.  Some of the ones I used to love are out of my life.  And some of the people I love now weren’t in it back then.  So I look forward to this next chapter in life and I don’t see it as a step backwards or laterally but rather as one moving forward.  Because places and people change and life moves on.  The sun rises and sets and our world spins and babies are born and people die.  The only constants are death.  And taxes.  And me rambling.

Over 1,200 Words on Books.

            I love to read.  And not in one of those I-am-so-much-smarter-than-you ways either.  I sincerely love to read and have my entire life.

            When I was a little boy growing up in LaGrange, Georgia my parents didn’t let me have video games.  While most kids in my generation grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, and the like I missed out.  I had one friend who had a Sega and I’d play at his house but that was it.  Instead I spent my hot Georgia summers playing outside and pretending to be the characters in the books I read.

            Is it to hackneyed to say me and the neighborhood kids would pretend to be Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn?  If so I don’t care because we did.  We didn’t have three hundred television channels back then even as it was starting to come into style.  Maybe it was just that one section of Troup County but we filled our days playing baseball, exploring in the woods, and pretending to be from someplace besides Georgia.

            The first author I loved was Matt Christopher.  He wrote these sports books for children like Little Lefty and Catcher with a Glass Arm that I fell in love with.  They were stories about young kids playing baseball and football and doing all the things I imagined I would do when I got to middle school.  I don’t think anybody today knows who he was but I can say that other than my baseball cards these Matt Christopher books I had are still some of my most prized possessions.

            My mom, being the teacher she was and still is, also bought me these classics for children.  I don’t even remember who made them but you’d recognize them if you saw them.  They couldn’t have been larger than a 3x5 note card and contained watered down versions of all the classics like Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, and Little Women.  I remember years later reading The Count of Monte Cristo in high school and absolutely being shocked that their were lesbians in the novel not because I was homophobic but rather my children’s version of the novel casually left that part out.  When I was in third grade the boy who lived behind me and I read the children’s version of Annie Karina and took the accelerated reader test at school on it.  Suffice it to say that some parts were left out so we missed out on the seventy some odd points.

            When we moved to Atlanta my reading slowed down.  I finally had video games to play and my interest changed from battling dragons and hitting homeruns to these weird creatures roaming the earth I didn’t understand called “girls.”  But late at night when it was silent in the big house my family moved into I would hide out in my closet and read until my dad came up and told me it was after midnight and I needed to sleep.

            In high school my life again changed.  I started running and now my world was obsessed with that.  So naturally my favorite book became the John L. Parker novel Once a Runner.  It’s easily the best novel ever about track and field and probably one of the top sports novels of all time.  Everything about Quentin Cassidy spoke to me and I wanted so badly to be that person who let loose demons with their swift kick and just wailed on.

            As I got older my favorite books changed.  At varying points I was obsessed with The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Fight Club, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises.  I was a teenage boy and I liked boy books (except TPoBaW, which is a total chick book but this nerdy kid gets laid in it and that appealed to me in ways only my fellow nerds can comprehend).  There was this anti-war book that I kept going back to called Fallen Angels and even though I was a young Republican at the time I just couldn’t believe stuff like that went on in the world and I can say that Walter Dean Myers novel helped to slowly shape who I am today.

            Then college happened.  My first semester of college I was surrounded by all these artsy kids in theater and visual arts and I wanted so badly to fit in with my jock tendencies.  Then, like a visit from Hermes, it all made sense.  I would be the bookish kid who read a lot!  And because I was in college I would be this pseudo-writer and wear thick rimmed glasses and try to use big words and read important books.  But who to read?  I went to the one name I knew as being an intelligent writer.

            I started my love affair with William Faulkner’s novels.

            The first Faulkner I read was The Unvanquished and after that I was hooked.  Was it over my head?  Absolutely.  But somehow through my perseverance I started to make sense of the actual stories being told, these narratives that spilled all the dirty little secrets of humanity out on the page as if George Wallace’s deepest secrets in his heart were exposed, and how they all happened in this one county in Northern Mississippi.  Pardon my French, but this was heavy shit.

            And because of Faulkner I started looking at other writers from the past.  Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Conner became my guiding lights.  Somebody told me I needed to read Notes From Underground (I was in college after all) and suddenly I was addicted to Russian lit and I was a kid again laying awake in bed at night imagining myself in these remote places dealing with my own demons and helping different people put theirs to rest. 

            At some point I was told that reading and writing is an active conversation that keeps going and I needed to read modern writers so I read what I can now say is my favorite novel ever, the Pat Conroy masterpiece of Grit Lit Prince of Tides.  Every December I read this book to commemorate the 24 hour time span that I started the tragedy of the Wingo family and set it down, completed.  And thanks to Pat Conroy and his now thirty year old novel I realized that there were great writers who are still alive and I pressed forward, exploring as much as I could.

            Today I read what everybody reads and some stuff they don’t.  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen my be my second favorite novel ever and even though he’s from St. Louis I consider him pretty close to a southern writer.  Heck, Missouri is joining the SEC next year.  Michael Chabon keeps me going back for more and I think that Thomas Pynchon is a god walking amongst mortals.  I read Cormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell because that Faulkner thing is still going on.  After attending a writers conference I re-discovered Joshilyn Jackson and decided I was being a sexist the first time around with her so I would give it a second time and have enjoyed it.  John Brandon, between his two novels and work with ESPN, is slowly becoming a favorite of mine as well.  This summer I even dusted off my old Hemingway collection and went back through those.

            The point of this extended ramble is two fold.  First, I needed a new blog up since people kept asking me about it (if you think I’m above self promotion you are sadly mistaken) and secondly I wanted to write about something that I still love.  Oh, and I’m moving back to Georgia soon and I have no idea how I’m going to fit all my books into my car.

In Search of the American Dream or Maybe Just a Jimmy John's.

            I am not Tucker Max.  Some of you are going to read this and say to yourself “that Justin Haynes just thinks he is Tucker Max.”  I’m not.  I have no desire to be.  To prove to you how un-Tucker Max I am let me give you two quick reasons why this tale I’m about to unfold is not at all like that.

            First, I am not the lowest form of pond scum.  I don’t run around in my X-Small Affliction t-shirt with my backwards baseball cap and listen to bad music.  Nor am I some constantly drunk frat boy chasing tail like a twice run over coon dog.  I’m actually a pretty nice and respectful guy.  Which brings me to point two.

Nobody gets laid in any of my stories.  Ever.  I used to think that was my friends fault but I came to realize I was the common denominator in all of that.  I found out most women can only listen to so many theories about Star Wars before they decide dudes like Tucker Max are at least worth the time.  So there will be no illicit sex in all of this.

Now that I have buried the lead like Moses let us begin.

Austin, Texas.  Spring of 2011.  On a Friday night on Sixth Street Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop saved my life.

About a month ago I was driving down to Auburn to meet my sisters and stay with them for a football game.  As I was going to be their guest and I would be arriving late I called to see what their plans were for supper.  My sister Lauren told me that her fiancé was getting sandwiches from Jimmy John’s for all of them to eat and that if I wanted one I needed to call him and let him now.

About two hours later I was driving through Bammerham when I got a text message from Justin, her fiancé.  He said he was about to go to Jimmy John’s and get food for everybody and wanted to know what I wanted.  I didn’t want anything but I did start thinking about the last time I ate at Jimmy John’s and decided it must have been years.  Then I remembered.

It had been earlier that year, on a Friday night in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest, so cloaked in a booze ridden haze that I had completely forgotten the day existed.  I am not a forgetful person and I sure as all get out hadn’t forgotten a single thing from that trip.  Or so I thought.

I left for Austin at around 7 p.m. on Thursday night with three friends of mine.  I’ll go ahead and change their names for protection: Cody, Justin (there are a lot of us in the world), and Trent.  The drive was going to be twelve hours straight through and once we got to Austin we’d show all those Texans how real, deep fried in cornmeal Southern Boys like to party.  We had heard about Austin.

If you’ve never been let me explain quickly what Austin, Texas is.  It’s the capital of Texas disguised as a college town.  It’s not one of our nice, quant little southern college towns where all the women are in the junior league and the big social gathering of the week is at the Baptist or Methodist church, but rather one of those real college towns where people stand on street corners smoking joints in plain sight of cops and there are more bars than Dollar Generals.

So here we were; us four, dyed in the wool, shaded on the back of the neck gentlemen headed for the land of cowboys and hippies.  We rolled through Mississippi, Memphis, Arkansas, and into Texas like Turner Ashby's finest raiders getting louder and more brash about what we would do all the time.  Never mind that we were dead tired.  We were piloting on adrenaline and we knew we could make it.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that when we rolled into Austin, Texas at seven a.m. on Friday morning we had made it.

Of course check in at our hotel wasn’t until later in the day and the minute we saw that hotel light our adrenaline became a thing of the past.  So naturally, like any good road trip posse, we tried to sleep in the car.  It worked no better for us than it did for anybody else, ever.

After about an hour or two of not sleeping we decided to head into town and see what was going on.  And we started drinking.  I remember most of what happened the next day because I ran out of money and sobered up pretty good but Friday I was fueled only on adrenaline, southern charm, and reading too much Hunter S. Thompson.  We were, by God, in search of the American Dream out there!

We got to Sixth Street around ten a.m. and had our first drink at about 10:05 a.m.  The rest of the day we walked around and listened to music.  I DO remember seeing Billy Gibbons, lead guitarist of ZZ Top, at a nice BBQ joint called Iron Works that was a ways off from Sixth Street.  But mostly we just listened to music and drank.  At one place we saw the fantastic Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and had free margaritas.  At another place we just had drinks.

Sometime in the afternoon we decided to return to the hotel so everybody could take a nap.  I, of course, was still searching for my American Dream and on the lookout for The Beast so I skipped the nap and went to the hotel bar and drank several beers and flirted with two different women.  It was a good day.

At around five in the afternoon I started to give out when I saw Cody, Justin, and Trent coming down the elevator for Happy Hour.  Too late now for a nap.  We went back in to town and that’s when events become cave paintings to me.

At some point after it was dark I do remember Cody making me buy an energy drink from one of those places whose sole existence is to sell crap to rednecks and you always laugh at them until you find yourself inside one and realize how redneck you are.  The energy drink was bright red and in a much larger bottle than any energy drink I had ever had.  Cody told me he used to drink these when he was living in D.C. and doing Cody things like rock climbing and hunting bears with his own teeth that he pulled out himself.  Cody’s kinda a cool dude.

I was re-energized just long enough to realize how drunk I was and that I needed food.  I panicked.  I suggested the next place we see, no matter what, let’s get food.

And there stood Jimmy John’s beckoning to us.  We approached and had the realization that, by God, we were meant in this world to eat at this Jimmy John’s.  The fates and intervened and all would be right.  So we got sandwiches.

I sat on the curb out front of Jimmy John’s on Sixth Street while all these weird cowboy-hippies went by me.  My feet lay in the refuse from the constant party that week that was flooding the street and my mouth dangled open as I inhaled the food, to tired to chew.  Girls with antennas on their heads hawked “Keep Austin Weird” t-shirts and guys rode bicycles up and down the street, splashing moisture from that raw heat up onto my face.  It was the best sandwich I ever ate.

And so I sat there in Bammerham traffic listening to a man on the radio have people call in and complain about how Auburn cheats at football and how ‘Bama is the one sacred thing left in the world and I knew they were wrong because as sure as I’m standing here today Jimmy John’s saved me from certain death (or something like it) in the land of sagebrush and sages.  Put that in your American Dream pipe Dr. Thompson and smoke it.

The Renewal of Justin's Low Class Blog Spot (sorry Mom)

            I’m sorry mom but it has to be a drinking story.

            Let me explain.  When I first started this blog idea of mine there was much fanfare, at least amongst my friends because they would be able to see inside my fascinating and slightly morbid mind.  I promised my mother I wouldn’t put anything embarrassing about my family or myself on the blog and for about a month during the summer that worked okay.  But then something happened.  I wrote a couple of blogs and realized my life really isn’t that interesting.  So I let it go.

            Recently some of my friends have been asking me when I was going to write another blog.  I evaded answering that question because I knew the truth was I really didn’t have anything that interesting to say.  Sure I could rant about my ultra radical political beliefs or evangelize about my ultra radical religious beliefs but I do want to be able to fly on planes in the near future and not have guys in crappy old cars sit outside my apartment listening to my every call to 1-900 numbers on lonely Thursday nights.

            But still all the while I knew I had to come back to this and say something.  But what to say was the question?  Starting a blog and then not really going through with it (again) is like a relationship that goes bad and doesn’t really end in a break up but rather a parting of ways.  And then one night you’re out and so is the ex-thingy-whatever she is and you know you have to say something profound but you don’t know what to say so you spend the whole night drinking yourself into a state of disheveled philosophizing on par with W.B. Yeats and proceed to ramble off some simplistic A-B rhyme scheme about her snowy white bosom and how it’s similar to a new born fawn and then you wake up the next afternoon in your apartment with a parcel pinned to your shirt with your tab from the night before, a maxed out credit card,  and a handwritten note from your ex-thingy-whatever saying she eloped with a homeless man after leaving because he wasn’t guilty of the one unpardonable crime in her personal religion. The crime being nothing other than being you.

            So I started down that path.  I was writing and writing and in my mind it all seemed so clear.  I was laboring over each word and sentence and my bright, shining sword of a memoir would light the path ahead for all literary minds in the future.  It would carve out a new niche where we used tales of our childhood to teach important abstract concepts like love and honesty through wonderful Old Testament allusions and adjective laden imagery.  My fingertips were like little pistons powering through the vast array of the English language and, by Jove, crafting a beautiful piece of prose that would make James Joyce sob at its rich text yet terse enough that Ernest Hemingway would smile and nod approvingly like if I were their bastard literary love child.  Then I went to bed.

            I woke up and re-read what I had written.  All fifteen pages of it.

            It was not a drinking story.

            Somehow I had compared the smell of freshly laid asphalt to motherly love.

            Let me repeat that.

            I compared the smell of freshly laid asphalt to motherly love.

            I deleted the entire writing in two strokes.  The first stroke was to highlight the mass of gobble-de-goo and the second was to hit the backspace key.  Delete isn’t really the right word.  I aborted it.  I eradicated it.  I went Conan the Barbarian on that smoldering pile of stench and literary shit and prayed to Crom that he never let me write something so horrible again and if he did he could go to Hell.  Then I watched Conan the Barbarian for good measure.

            It was terrible ya’ll.  And worst of all I compared my mother, my sainted mother who puts up with all my crap and is always there offering emotional and spiritual comforting and consultation, to one of those giant trucks that passes over asphalt after it has been laid.  She deserves much better than that.

            She also deserves better than a son who is about to write a blog about some drunk romp through Texas with three other mother’s sons.  But we are who we are and the number one rule in writing is to write what you know.  So I apologize in advance to my mother for what is forthcoming.  And to all the rest of you I hope this makes you happy because after my momma reads this I am going to have bible verses and prayers texted to me for the next month and four hour long phone conversations about the eternal resting place of my soul.  But I wouldn’t expect anything less from the woman who somehow managed to get me through adolescence without killing anybody or getting somebody knocked up.  After all, she is kinda like that big asphalt thing, smoothing over all my imperfections and forming me into something useful for everybody.  Or at the very least not too harmful to society.

On Beer, Friends, and Stone Temple Pilots

Sorry it's been a while guys.  I've been on a two week vacation between Handyfest and going to the beach.  How about a fun little blog to bring it all back?  I didn't proof read this and don't really want to cause it's not that good.  But hey it is something.

On Beer, Friends, and Stone Temple Pilots

            Monday night I found myself sitting inside of one of the handful of bars we have here in Florence.  I was sharing pitchers of beer with my good friend Trent and our other friend Justin was sitting beside us not drinking but still having a good time.  While we talked about NASCAR (Justin and myself) Led Zeppelin (Trent and I) and ‘Bama football (Trent and Justin listening to me tell them they were stupid for cheering for such a crappy team) a Stone Temple Pilots song came on the radio.

            “Who is this,” Trent asked me?

            “Stone Temple Pilots,” I said while Sour Girl came out of the bar speakers.  “Can you tell me the girl in the video?”

            “Sarah Michelle Geller, dude.”

            It was one of those moments where a small knowing and non-sexual smile was shared between the two of us.  As we talked more and more about STP I found out that Trent was nearly as big of a fan of them as I am.  And there in lies the story.

            It’s taken me years to be able to admit this but now that I’m twenty-four and feel somewhat comfortable in my own skin I can.  When I was in high school I ran track and cross country.

            Some folks might say “oh gee Justin why would you be embarrassed by that” and the answer is pretty much the same.  I lived in Georgia and last I checked Georgia was still in the south and everybody who is from the south knows only one sport really matters.  I’ll give you a hint: it’s not track or cross country.

            But as a senior I weighed 119 pounds.  So no matter how much my father wanted me to play football it was never going to happen.  Instead he was stuck with this skinny runner kid who was somewhat socially awkward and had a really bad mop top hair cut and wanted to fit in anyway that he could.

            One way I found that I could fit in and even stand out in those days was through the music I listened to.  My best friend in high school was this guy Ben.  Ben had an older brother who was in a pop-punk/emo band (it was the early 2000’s) and he had all these cd’s.  At the time Ben probably knew more about rock music than I did but part of the reason we were such good friends was A) we both ran and B) we both liked rock music that wasn’t on the radio.  We made mix CDs of bands like Lagwagon, NoFx, Alkaline Trio, and Brand New.  In some weird way we thought we were cool because we didn’t fit in with everybody else but rather listened to the Jimmy Eat World’s and Get Up Kid’s of the world.

            But we still liked rock music.  And that’s where Stone Temple Pilots come in.  Somewhere around my junior year of high school I bought the Stone Temple Pilots greatest hits CD which is a good investment if you want to know a lot about a band without investing in their full collection.  Ben and I would ride to and from practice and we wore that CD out.  I remember doing long runs in the afternoon at the beginning of the school year were we would be soaked to our bones with sweat while we hacked and coughed up our lungs from pollen and dust that littered the pine infested trails we ran on in those days.  And always after those workouts we would jump in the car and ride back to Ben’s place listening to something like “Interstate Love Song” or “Sex Like Thing.”  It was good times and helped to stall our awakening to the harsh truths that lay beyond High School.  Instead of worrying about colleges or work we worried about whether Stone Temple Pilots was better or worse than Everclear.

            Almost all of us have a soundtrack for our lives.  We’ll hear a song and instantly we are taken back to a place.  Some of us have songs that we feel describe our relationships while other songs may hold a specific memory attached to them.  Who knows what songs were playing when they had their first kiss, their first dance, or their first time?  Everybody remembers those things.  But for each of those there is the background music to the times in our lives when we were younger and more carefree.

            So as I sat in the bar in Florence, Alabama which is some four hours away from the town my friend Ben lives in I couldn’t help but think about those days.  We’d talk about how hot some of the girls were we ran with (if you ran with us you know which chicks they were) and how if we could quit “being such pussies” for one race all the things we’d accomplish.  And we do it with background noise from Chico and Robert in the backseat while STP blared through the speakers.

            But those days are gone.  Ben and I don’t see each other or speak to each other but maybe once or twice a year now and we sure as hell don’t have any memories involving any bands anymore.  But new friends and adventures always come along.  So while Trent and I poured another Yungling we once again engaged in that age old question of whether Stone Temple Pilots was better or worse than the Nirvana’s, Pearl Jam’s, and Alice in Chain’s out there and whether or not the band was better when Scott Weiland was on heroin or when he was sober.  And new memories were made over a soundtrack from the past.  Maybe these will be better or maybe they will be worse.  It’s always hard to replace old friends no matter how good the new ones may be.  But then again “Empire Strikes Back” is better than “New Hope.”

Captain America, the NFL, and Drunk Songs (don't worry, we didn't buy weapons from China)

            Greetings ya’ll and welcome back to the Low Class Blog Spot.  I’m hopeful that this is the first of many blogs that I’m going to write that we’ll call “Bar Talk” or something along those lines.  The main goal is to give some thoughts I have and to hear the thoughts that some of you may have.  As always comments and suggestions are welcome in any form whether they are on the blog, on facebook, or through twitter.  Hopefully this doesn’t bore you too much, but if it does I’m sorry. 

These blogs will be different from the long form writing I plan on doing.  I’m also planning a separate section to come along later.  Perhaps later is tomorrow or maybe it will be never.  But for now this is what you get.

Anyways back to how it’s different.  We’ll have five sections: The Appetizer; which is going to be a short discussion on who knows what, The Main Course; which is going to be the meat of the blog, The Dessert; well it’s the sweet thing to come along at the end, The Drunk Talk; where we make list and talk about stupid things, and the One Night Stand; something we might regret tomorrow but really like tonight.  So let’s begin!

Appetizer

            Not sure if you’ve seen yet but Captain America: The First Avenger is set to come out tonight at midnight.  Do we really need more superhero movies?  I hope I’m not alone in feeling that Hollywood has completely lost their way in the last decade or so.  1999 was such a great year for films and then it seems like after the turn of the century the movies have gotten gradually worse.  Sure there are still some gems out there but by and large everything is a retread of something else.  Remakes, comic book movies, and “reboots” are the norm.  I’m tired of it.  And I’m not saying we need more art house films.  Lars Von Trier is always going to make weird stuff that most Americans don’t care about.  But can we at least get something on par with American Beauty?  Not saying that Sam Mendes isn’t a pretentious prick (he may be, I don’t know the man) but that movie was a smart movie that EVERYBODY saw.  Whatever.  Let’s eat.

Main Course

            Today’s big news story in case you have been hiding under a rock is the NFL lockout.  It looks like finally there might be some resolution to this which in a way I am happy about it.  Everybody loves football and the NFL really is the best football you’re going to find in the world.  The issue I take with this is that it is the main headline for today.  My problem with this being the big news is two fold.

            My first problem is I don’t think either side is really happy with the deal that appears to be in place.  And that’s a problem.  As long as one side feels like they “lost” tensions are always going to be there between the players and the owners.  Now I’m not a genius in these lockout situations but it sounds to me like both sides are unhappy with what they are settling on.  What is really needed is for the owners to say no more 18 game schedule, that they are going to invest more into player safety, and that they are going to work with the union to set up a better retirement package for players and former players.  Football is a rough sport and player safety and health should always be at the forefront.

            The players need to realize though that the owners have to make money.  And sometimes that means rookie contracts will be less than what they are and that maybe you will be franchised more than once in your career.  What we love about the NFL is the parity.  And if we get rid of the franchise tag and start driving the prices on signing rookies and free agents up even more the league will lose parity and turn into the NBA.  One of the best teams of the past decade has been from the microscopic market of Indianapolis.  They drafted good players and kept them long term by winning and then the money they made from all the winning they re-invested into their franchise.  So if Peyton gets slapped with another Franchise tag I don’t see a problem with it.  He’s still going to get his money.  And you shouldn’t see a problem with it either.

            And the fact this is even a story has bothered me.  Right now we know that the owners have approved the deal but we don’t know what the players are going to do.  There seems to be a lack of direction on both sides and I think it is clear that Roger Goddell is way over his head and needs to reexamine his role in the NFL.  He’s a puppet for the owners and has no respect from the players.  Then again the players themselves can’t seem to get organized so it’s like splitting hairs in trying to find who the blame lies on here.

            My real issue though with this is the coverage it is getting.  Forget the fact that the sports coverage is through the roof.  We’re in the middle of one of the best baseball seasons in recent memory yet ESPN continues to force feed us football.  With all the constant talk about football I feel like the season never really ended but just rolled over.

            Forget about the sports journalist for a while though.  I’m talking about the coverage this is receiving in the main stream media.  Our country is in an economic crisis and there are serious political issues in South-East Asia and the Mediterranean.  But what do most of us American’s care about?  Whether a bunch of football players get to play this year so we can make fun of our friends in fantasy football.

            I get news values and I understand this is the story that we want to read about and see.  And that is what makes me sad.  Our country should be more educated than this.  There is an entire world that exists outside the United States and we pretend to be ignorant to it.  Hell we even ignore the problems here in our own country.  But who cares really?  As long as you get Tom Brady number one in your fantasy draft the suffering of millions world wide and the political upheavals that will shape our foreign policy for the next fifty years mean nothing.

Dessert

            Has anybody not seen Black Swan yet?  I’ll go ahead and say it.  Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman are sexy together.  But aside from that the movie itself is amazing.  Darren Aronofsky once again is cementing himself as one of the premier directors in the world.  Hopefully more and more Hollywood types will follow his lead and see that truly thought provoking films can be successful.  Here’s to Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life continuing to have a successful run.  I’ve heard stories of people demanding their money back but hopefully that has been few and far between.

Drunk Talk

            So my good friend Matt Barrett suggested I make a list of my favorite songs to listen to after one to many Dr. Peppers and I feel that diabetic shock creeping in (my mom reads this, do you really think I’m going to say after I’ve had to many beers and I’m fall down drunk?  Of course not).

            In order to oblige him I give you, in no particular order, the “Justin’s doin the Justin thing again” playlist:

1)      Water in the Well-American Aquarium

2)      Devil’s Waitin-Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

3)      MaryJane-Chase Fifty Six

4)      Good to be Home-The Everybodyfields

5)      Wayside/Back in Time-Gillian Welch

6)      Dublin Blues-Guy Clark

7)      Women Without Whiskey-Drive-By Truckers

8)      Codeine-Jason Isbell

9)      Kiss the Bottle-Jawbreaker/Lucero/Foo Fighters

10)  Crystal Chandeliers and Burgundy-Johnny Cash

11)  Boomer’s Story-Ry Cooder

12)  The Hardest Part-Ryan Adams

I hope that helps all of you out next time you’ve had one Dr. Pepper to many and you feel a fun night coming on.  Of all of those my top three would be either “Kiss the Bottle,” “Women Without Whiskey,” or “Dublin Blues.”  Look ‘em up!

One Night Stand

            I want to thank anybody who is an ignorant city councilman in any city in America.  I’m not going to name names or through out blame but racist, xenophobic politicians I’d like think went out of vogue sometime in the 1960’s.  And while voters will agree there will always be people who get elected based on their looks and then open their mouths and show how dumb they are.  Sure China sold weapons to North Vietnam.  But America sold weapons to Iran, Iraq, and The Taliban.  The difference is neither Iran, Iraq, nor The Taliban is trying to bring jobs to economically depressed regions of the south.

The Coat of Henry Edgar Williamson

            In my parents house underneath the bed that I slept on when I moved back home is my Great-Grandfather’s World War One coat.  The coat itself isn’t anything remarkable:  it’s a forest-green long coat made out of wool that looks like any other U.S. Army coat issued during that time.  What is remarkable is the story behind the coat.

            My Great-Grandfather was named Henry Edgar Williamson.  He was born halfway between Ashland and Millerville, Alabama in 1893.  He came of age at a time in America when the issues of the day were prohibition, suffrage, and what the best way was to icrease the American sphere of influence around the world and how we would assert ourselves as an international power.

            Then on the 28^th of June, 1914 the Archduke of Austria and heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.  In the blink of an eye Europe was engulfed in war.  But for a young man—barely twenty—from a farming community in East Alabama I find it hard to believe that the immediate reaction was more than a shrug of the shoulders as he continued to labor.

            In time though The Great War, as it came to be called, reached America’s shores.  There was panic in the streets of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.  Conscription became a volatile issue much like it would with Vietnam nearly half a century later.  Men don’t like to die for causes they don’t believe in and hate it even more when they die for the ones they don’t give a damn about.  And certainly no son of the south was going to die for any Yankees, much less a bunch of Europeans.  But while I’m sure the old veterans in the south complained about how the young men from Alabama were betraying their real country, Henry Edgar chose to serve after he was drafted into the army.

            And this is where the story of the coat comes in.

            According to my grandfather after his father and his fellow draftees were processed into the army the young men from Clay County, Alabama were sent about an hour up the road to Fort McClellan to begin the initial phase of their training.   My great-grandfather Henry Edgar Williamson would have begun the slow transformation from citizen to soldier.

            After about a month or two at Fort McClellan the new soldiers were sent to Camp Shelby in south Mississippi to finish their training.  In November of 1917 they finished their training and were pronounced “ready for combat” by the men who decide that boys are ready for combat.

            I have no doubt that the young men from Clay County, Alabama were ready to not only do their country proud but also see to it that the Germans remembered the Volunteer County of Alabama.  However, in their haste to move the soldiers to New York and then send them France to fight in The Great War, the army issued the new soldiers a coat to keep warm and forced them to ride on a train from Camp Shelby, Mississippi to New York City in December.  This was before global warming mind you.  It was cold.

            My grandfather says that his dad told him they had to stand on the train while the traveled north because they were packed in so tight.  The government could spend money on a million different things it seemed, but it couldn’t put these poor young soldiers on a passenger train and then the army forced them to travel over the Smokey Mountains in a boxcar like hobos.  Many died on the way to New York and the conditions caused many more of the soldiers to become ill.  Henry Edgar was one of these.

            He was not a weak man let me be straight about that.  But when riding in a boxcar in freezing weather day and night for nearly a week it is hard to not catch pneumonia.  And so he did.  His condition was such that by the time he reached New York City to begin the final phase of his journey he was unable to continue.  Those Yankee doctors thought he was dead.

            So they laid my great-grandfather on a cot in a room with all the other men who died on the ride up.  He was left in his army issued coat that did not protect him from the bitter cold of the Tennessee Smokey Mountains, much less France.  He was left for dead 4000 mile away from home in a land that many southerners in that time period felt was just as foreign as any country in Europe.

            Only he wasn’t dead.  My grandfather tells me that Henry Edgar lay on that cot and was aware but was too weak to move or speak.  He spent the night on that cot again in the cold with just his coat between him and the elements.  And the next day the dead bodies were moved to the morgue.

            I can only imagine the fear he felt as they wheels of the stretchers carrying the deceased made their squeak over that frozen New York floor.  As they came to his cot and prepared to load him on to his death bed a miracle happened.  Some will say it was divine intervention and others will say it was one Yankee finally paying attention but the attending doctor checked Henry Edgar’s pulse.  Although weak the doctor did feel it and declared “this one is not dead, take him to the infirmary.”

            Over a period of several months my Great-Grandfather healed and was finally discharged from both the hospital and the service and sent back to Alabama without ever setting foot in Europe to fight in The Great War.  He was allowed to keep that coat as he rode by passenger train back to Ashland, Alabama.  He would end up living out the rest of his days on the land he had always lived on.  He died on Christmas Day of 1988 at the age of 95.

            Sixteen million, five hundred forty-three thousand, one hundred and eighty-five people around the world died in The Great War.  Of that number one hundred seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-five were Americans.

            My Great-Grandfather could have easily been one of those men who died.  One errant riffle shot or lacking the ability to get a gas mask on fast enough or even being trampled as the boys went “over the top” could have lead to death in The War To End All Wars.  But he didn’t die.  He got sick on the train ride to New York and because of that he married Anne Frank Pitts and had they had eleven children and one of those eleven was Billy Frank Williamson.  And Billy married Betty Jane Jones and they had my mother and she had me.

            It’s funny sometimes to think about how close we walk to the razors edge in this life.  One misstep here, one miscalculation there and we can be dead.  Driving our cars, the things we put in or bodies, the places we go for vacation can all kill us.  What’s even more sobering to think about is that humanity has always walked along that razor sharp edge between life and death.  And it always will.

            So when I go back to my parent’s house I hug my mother and father.  I play with my dog and give my sisters a hard time.  And every once in a while I pull out that old coat.  It’s put up in one of those vacuum sealed bags that keep it from going bad and rotting.  Nothing gets to that coat.  But I pull it out and look at it and when I hold it in my hands I am holding a piece of my Great-Grandfather Henry Edgar Williamson in my hands.  A man whose influence reaches across three and four generations of our family.  And I am reminded when I hold that coat that we should be thankful for everyday we have and everyday we have had.  Because sometimes something as common as a United States Army issued coat can be the most important thing.  It can be the thing that ensures the survival of your family.

            Coats cover us and keep us warm.  They protect us from the elements.  My Great-Grandfather’s coat is nearly 100 years old.  And as long as his memory lives on and continues to cover our family and keep us all warm I don’t see the coat going away anytime soon.

Welcome To The Low Class Blog Spot!

            One day I want to own a bar.

            Anybody who has ever spent more than fifteen minutes with me knows that my only real life goal is to one day own a bar.  It’s going to have a huge, oak bar that runs the length of one of the walls.  It’s going to have some of the finest beer, wine, and spirits that people can ever ask for.  The food is going to be amazing.  Yet because it’s MY bar it’s not going to be one of these snooty up scale bars.  It’s going to be my bar; my own low-class juke joint.  That is my life goal.

            But this is just a blog.  What does any of that have to do with what you’re reading now and hopefully will continue to read over time?  Well, let me explain.

            So after weeks of talking about it and asking the opinions of friends, family, and random people I meet at the bar I figured the time was right to begin this experiment of mine.  What exactly do I want this to be?  Well, I want it to be a blog where I can talk about things that interest me.

            Okay so that is a bit vague.  Let me try to explain this all a bit better.  I write.  I am a writer and all that that implies.  I make minimal money (sorry mom) and try to experience life as much as I can.  And I love to tell stories.  Whether they are my stories or the stories of people I know or even the stories of people I’ve just met I love to tell stories.  It’s one of my true passions in life.  Another one of my passions in life is telling my opinions about any and all things I care about.  Among those things are sports, music, movies, art, literature, and life lessons.

            So that’s what I want to talk about with this blog.  It’s going to be stories and random thoughts.  Basic bar talk if you will.  I am a firm believer that some of the best conversations you can have about anything are the conversations you have when you’re talking to people in a bar setting.  So let’s just kick back and enjoy this. 

We’ll talk about sports and music and all sorts of other small talk things.  If you have a sports topic, an album, a movie, or anything else dealing with the “Justin arts” as I like to call them let me know and we’ll talk about it.

We’ll talk about food.  I love to eat and if you want me to eat someplace and write about it please let me know.  I already have a short list of places I want to write about and I promise you there is not a single Applebees in America that I want to write about.

We’ll make list.  We all do it after we have a beer or two (or five or six) in us.  We’ll make fun practical list and more fun absurd list.  Some of the best conversations of my life have been debating the hotness of blondes in the studio era in Hollywood.  So if you want a list let me know.

And of course we’re going to tell stories.  Lots and lots of stories.  They’ll all be stories that involve people I know or myself.  Sometimes it might be about a trip or a party that we just had.  Or it might be something that happened five, six, seven, or more years ago.  A good story is a good story and old friends never really seem that far away when we talk about them to our new friends.

Some things we won’t talk about include politics and religion.  If you want to brow beat other people take that else where.  Life is to short for people to be mad at each other I believe and since I’m the owner, C.E.O., operating manager, editor, and writer of this little blog what I say goes.

So sit back and read up and let’s have fun with this.  I don’t know where it’s going to go or what’s going to happen here but I do know it’ll be fun.  Mainly because I’m fun.  And maybe you’ll learn something.  But even if you don’t have a drink, chill out, and welcome to Justin’s Low Class Blog Spot.