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.