Sitting here in the New Year in the cold winter weather on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River, I find my mind wandering off to all the warmer places I've been and even used to live in the days and years past.
I even miss some of the colder places I've visited, although this is as far north as I've ever lived "officially" (if you don't count the homes of friends and lovers I camped out in in the past.)
It's not that I don't love living here in our little large city in Eastern Tennessee, or that I regret moving here from our little Island on the Georgia Coast last spring, it's just that after spending an entire summer with not much of a sun tan for the first time since I was six years old, and now after spending half the winter with cold weather and the threat of snow--but not much real snow--that I sneak a peek at the National Weather Service Website for St. Simons Island and I see that it's 59 degrees down there--and the same website confirms why my sock encased feet are cold here in Knoxville because it's 30 degrees F with another "chance" of snow over a four days period later this week.
(someone remind me to get out my snow making equipment...)
I don't mind the cold, as long as it snows and it's a usable snow--something you can sled or ski in or on.
Or at least something that you can drive a few hours away from Campobello or Greer or Greenville or Spartanburg (and now Knoxville) and follow a County Snow Plow up a random mountain, park your truck, and proceed to slide around taking ski lessons at midnight in a 16 degree fog of snow?
If it's not just a little sledding snow and you don't live on a ski mountain, I say the next best thing is to get a doozie of a winter storm/blizzard that shuts most everything down, and after the rest of the public all get home after buying all of the bread and milk and cigarettes and peanut butter on the grocery shelves, that when the snow stops falling you can creep out in your giant white four wheel drive Suburban and wander around on back roads and up Saluda Pass or up to the 6,800 foot top of Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina and shiver in the parking lot taking pictures all by your lonesome.
I've done all that...and I found it to be an extremely satisfying experience.
Then there was the year I escaped from Atlanta after my house burned down, and I ran away to Mexico Beach Florida and lived on the Gulf of Mexico for a winter.
Everything I owned at the time would fit into my TRUCK.
It was actually a very liberating experience....talk about getting rid of old "baggage"...
I got away with only having to live through a few nights that went below freezing down there, and there's something inherently soothing about wandering around totally alone on the beach in the winter with grey sky overhead.
Many times my buddy Dave the Guitar player and I would drag our PA speakers out on the deck of the Lookout Lounge on the Bay County Line in January and He strummed and sang while I played the Harmonica and sang along.
We only drew a crowd of a few dozen locals most of the time...but today I'd pay to spend a Sunday night in January wearing flip flops and shorts doing exactly that. We actually got paid back then to do something I only started doing in the middle of my crazy, screwed up, fun life.
Did I mention the 32' Sea Ray boat I bought down in Hollywood, Florida and sailed around on and lived on in the intercoastal and the Keys and had stolen by pirates and sank? I never heard from that boat again after leaving it in a marina expecting it to be put into dry dock for some repairs on one of it's two giant Chevy V8 engines, but...
That experience was worth EVERY SINGLE PENNY in the end...when it's all said and done.
talk about making enough money to buy Miami and pissing it away so fast...
While I'm on the subject of boating...do you know anyone else but me that's rented a giant houseboat in the Keys...ran it a ground not once but TWICE in one day in a storm (within twenty feet of the same spot) after breaking anchor, sank the outboard powered dingy, and almost lost his girlfriend over the stern and off the bow a couple of times while she was chasing the dingy or handling the anchor and I was in the cockpit trying to steer into the wind with one of the two twin engines dead?
You can't PLAN stuff like that, it just happens...especially to me.
Fun...FUN...FUN...
More recently the time spent living on our little Island was rather sedate by those earlier lively standards. Other than continuing my real estate investment folly's and starting to ACT IN COMMUNITY THEATER...ultimately giving up imitating "Slingblade" and ending up taking over the set building and management duties for two different theaters.
I was proudly and largely USELESS back then ...my existence revolving around the theater, condo swimming pool and the beach (and some local pubs and taverns.)
So now here I sit in Knoxville, tanless and boatless, ass falling off and hair falling out, within three miles of the mighty Tennessee River--a body of water that can take me all the way to Mobile or New Orleans and on to the mouth of another "Mighty" River--the Mississippi.
How far I've sunk...How low can I actually go?
I'm a disgrace ...settling for owning a house instead of a giant fiberglass hull, and actually taking a full time job working for another man/company for the first time in over 18 years?
WTF? (what the heck...in Christian terms)
Well, not to worry...the Hull's still out a ways in the future, but
Please understand if the blogging suffers a bit along the way because I'm looking at 12 & 15 hour days marketing instead of steady 8 hour stints, but I'll still be looking at the news and thinking about saying/writing something worth reading...until then
...Y'all have a good one.
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