You will all be better off when you realize this. All of us are the same. We have our goals, our ideas, our opinions, and our destinations. Everyone wants to be recognized. Everyone wants for their art to be liked, their opinion to become everybody else's, and their destination to be the home of their future. Everyone has a blog with 3 followers and a painting sitting in a taped up box under their bed. We have our gardens in the summer and rotting vegetables in the winter. We all have our own recipe. We all want to be wanted, loved, and liked. We have a steel exterior that tells the world that what I'me saying isn't true, yet our pillows and the dark say different. No one wants to die alone with a smiling dog. They say an average person is remembered 50 years after their death. We all want at least 100. No one knows anyone in a Potter's Field. If you did, the person wouldn't be their. Everyone wants to be known and understood. We all want kids on our porch on Halloween, yet we want our kids to have the cutest costume. We all want our homes to be placed in Southern Living or for someone to tell us it could be. We all want the longest funeral processions, but we don't wanna die to get it. We also want everyone to pull over and take off their hats. When the funeral is long over, the cars are all in the garage, and another person is lying in the same hearse; we want the grass cut, the weeds pulled, and another person wanting to do it.

Southern Folk Artist- MoseT

Mose Tolliver- Watermelon

Montgomery, Al

Mose Tolliver-Montgomery, AL

Self Portrait

Rick Bragg in Retrospect

I remember my mother wiping her eyes as she turned page after page of Rick Bragg's novel, "Ava's Man".

"This is writing", she would say.

She would laugh at times, cry at times, and punch the wall at times. Words that can sit you on the porch of your childhood or bring back memories of your legs without a razor are in my opinion, writing. Reading it, she told me stories of teeth and Pale City, Alabama and her father catching fish the size of small cars. His writing did just that for her. It sat her in places she didn't want to be, it sat her in the arms of her Grandmother, Grandfather, and in the arms of her Daddy without the smell of whiskey on his breath. It moved her. I love Rick Bragg for that. I want my writing to make a woman cry, laugh, and sing. I want my writing to move someone.

I read "Somebody Told Me" my freshman year of college. It still sits in my senior dorm room today, ragged and torn. It is covered with notes about Kelly Clem and the tornado that destroyed Piedmont, Alabama. I love it. I have quoted from it and I have read it at least 4 times. But I must say, I didn't read it that many times because I am some crazed fan of Rick Bragg's, but I read it over and over again because that is the way I strive to write. I want to bring back the smells of your childhood, the hardness of the church pews, and the sourness of the hard candy that the elderly woman gave you for being quiet in church.

Southern Folk Art

Michael Banks- Guntersville, Alabama

Abstinence give or take

This post is going to reek adolescent male immaturity and human self-loathing. I warn you. It's frustrating though, I have seen a man live his life the way us humans assume God would like him to. He never smoked, he never drank, cursed, rambled, or gambled. He never had premarital sex. I doubt he even thought about doing it. As far as I know, he has never even watched a porn flick, all wide eyed and mesmerized at its disgusting beauty.

I must admit that I am frustrated at God. I am sure God doesn't care. He is probably laughing at me. But although I am frustrated, I know one thing... God never promised me or the man in which I speak a home anywhere near the grand city of Comfort, California. That is with God or without God.

To be frustrated with God is a very humanistic idea though, but still I am frustrated. It is probably a sin to be frustrated at God or with God. To even ask the question, what does it profit me to be abstinent, is even more human, but we all ask it to some extent.

I know all of this. I hear it from the pulpit every Sunday, "all us humans do is ask the question, why me? why me? why me?, it's about God and everyone else, but ME! The world teaches us to ask that horrible little question, WHY ME, GOD? It's bad, steer clear of it."

But dang it, why him? He has given everything in his life to God, a career in the ministry, no money, a son that is the clichéd preachers kid, and just about everything else you can imagine. All of that health and wealth bull shit you hear on TV, just don't sit right with me. I have seen the exact opposite get naked and take a bath right before my eyes.

You might be saying as you read this. "Well, the man that you are talking about must be in sin. God does provide a healthy and wealthy life for those who believe." I will kick you in the face.

I have seen a man give everything in his life to God. He remained abstinent until he was married and never thought about doing any different. The man was diagnosed with prostate cancer, had his prostate removed, can't get a hard-on, and his wife is now a wino because the lack of intimacy just isn't there. So here, I am going to be human. I am going to be an immature adolescent who just doesn't understand what I am sure you do understand. Why him? What does it profit me to be abstinent? What did it profit him to be abstinent? I have his genes, his fathers genes, my mothers genes, her fathers genes. I never even met her father and I wasn't old enough to say I love you to his father, but yet, there it is. I am being over shadowed by the past, by scientific rules and tendencies that will probably be the death of me.

A girls post-breakup routine

Go make some mistakes.

Say yes to the first normal guy that asks her out.

Sleep with him.

Go to the church of some off the wall religion.

Ask for forgiveness.

Take a trip to the east coast.

When she gets there, she should call the guy she slept with and tell him it sucked.

The guy that left her will be waiting on her when she gets back.

Poppy Z. Brite- Untitled Bird Doggerel

I only catch the freshest fish

Instead of eating trash and poo

Thank God I am a pelican

And not a crappy gull like you.

A call out to some of the people that worship the same way I do.

I fear that one day some archeologist is going to dig up my bones, study my teeth, and then talk about what a shitty human I was. It will probably be the same archeologist that finds the steeples to our churches, the vaults of our banks, a stethoscope or two from our hospitals, and a few faded yellow school buses buried deep under "The Former United states of America" soil. Well...that is not what I want. Don't put words into my mouth and then proceed to call me a communist, member of some whack-job terrorist organization, or God forbid a socialist that secretly wishes death upon American/democratic ideology.

I just know that the archeologist will see the lines of poverty running straight through our Churches. He will read our literature about missionaries in Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and China and yet again, see the lines of poverty that run strait through our schools, Churches, and hospitals. Our fault or not, our tax dollar or not, he will question why the line in which I speak is so apparent. I applaud over seas missions and understand its importance, but why are so many of us willing to go overseas, yet cringe at the idea of social organizations that help the people living next door? I am not not naive enough to believe that every citizen claiming to need help actually needs it or that they are all doing their part to live a better life for themselves and their children. However, I do believe it would be even more naive to believe that every American citizen claiming to need help is screwing the system.

I find it sick that our churches often claim responsibility over the physical, mental, and spiritual health of some 3rd world aborigine, while some of the worlds poorest and unhealthy are living on street corners and in gutted out school buses in our own back yards while we complain about a 2 cent tax increase on candy bars, cigarettes, or coca cola.

If you are not willing to help out your neighbor, yet you travel to a 3rd world country for no other reason than to feel the breeze coming from your fellow church members kissing your rear- ends, stay there please and die of malaria while you are at it. I am tired of seeing Alabama teachers getting screwed over and our nations poorest staying poor for our own selfish ambitions, while we claim to love God and pledge to spread his word. If it wasn't for faith, I would laugh at you too.