...barracks ethics made her off limits and as much as Pierce disliked the machine gunner from New Jersey and liked the little dark haired girl from California he couldn't act on it. He wasn’t a Blue Falcon, he wasn’t Jody. Normally...
Turns out even twenty-two years old, three thousand miles from home, drunk in the parking lot of a foreign motel I’m not that guy.
I get it now. I understand why New Englanders flee south.
I was a redneck kid with redneck friends and it’s hard to sneak a cigarette in High School but it’s easy to sneak a dip. Shop teacher didn’t even pretend not to notice. Smokeless tobacco ruled the high school bleachers. I started, like all St Tammany Parish kids do, with Skoal Bandits
I was staring at that stack of journals, knowing I needed to write something for the first of the year and wondering if I could find some inspiration in Memaw’s words.
...doesn't receive."
He makes a circuit counter clockwise around the perimeter of the yard, checking the tree where he saw a squirrel, the rock wall where he heard a chipmunk, and under the shed where he knows the rabbits live.
We both hid a part of ourselves behind a soldier’s body armor and camo paint and when that didn’t work we retreated behind the smile of a beer drinking buddy.
After thirty years how it all ended doesn’t matter. Those missed signals, my idiot roommate, Lorrie’s unrequited crush, a strange new soldier, and the United States Army don’t mean a fucking thing...
The inevitable Graham Platner rant.
So I kept walking, on to Chinatown long enough to see street signs with golden dragons on top, then back East toward the blocks that held hundred thousand dollar watches, Ferrari’s and the AKC French Bulldog people with their hard silicon faces.
It’s a song about a man facing heartbreak who retreats to the winter woods. It’s a song about healing heartbreak on a cold morning with a Browning Auto 5. It took me back to Bienville Parish. It took me back to the first weekend in October. It sounded like my father’s voice.