Culpeper Tells, Winter Talks Back

The Traveller's Angel and I jaunted east of the dirty, sacred river, barrelling up I-64, through the deep Appalachian darkeness of  the West Virginia Turnpike at night. We left River City Friday afternoon on a warm and sunny afternoon in order to make for the second day of Culpeper Tells!, a brand new storytelling festival in Culppeper, Virginia.

Culpeper is a pretty litttle town that has, over the past gfew years, built itself back up from devestation. The town has survived four earthquakes in the last year. The Big One, though, happened in August 2011. The town of Culpeper  built itself back from a 5.8 magnitiude earthquake. 

We had the opportunity to see some tellsers we've seen before, and to hear a few we haven't. Naturally we signed up for the story slam. But time ran out before the Kentucky contingnent could storm the stage.

We left Culpeper Sunday morning and rolled down VA 17 towards Norfolk to visit The Kid. And, as is almost always the case when I travel, winrter was at my back. The storm warnings blew up behind us, ad we hit the coast a good couple of hours before yet one more last hurrah of winter rolled through dropping ice, snow, and sleet in a wide swath from Loiusville to the coast. 

The North Atlantic coast may not seem the most romantic of destinations in March. Even without the interminably long winter  weather, it's still chilly, windy, and rainy.  But it's been a while since I've seen The Kid's smiley, shiny face. It's also been a while since I've seen Will, the boyfriend -- who is a nice guy, in spite of the fact that no one will ever be good enough to date my daughter.

We're staying at a Super 8 -- the same one I managed to stay in when I was here in January 2012. That trip was a very different one. I was here then to deliver bad news, among other things. I was convvinced that I was on my way to disappearing, convinced that, with the dissolution of my marriage that I most certainly would disappear, because I had convinced myself that no one weould see me the way my ex had seen me. 

I didn't know that I was on the road to put myself back together. I didn't even know I was broken. 

Amanda travels well. She's smart, pays attention to her surroundings, and drinks up new experiences. She wants to see everything she can,learn everything she can, experience all that she can. Although we've known one another for nearly 20 years, I like to think it has taken that long for me to get back to her. That it's too me 20 yeasrs to see myself in a proper enough light that I could allow her to see me. Some processes take longer than others.

And now I am here, with her, visiting The Kid -- who isn't really a kid, I guess -- and even though the North Atlantic winter is lingering outside, I am basking in the wearmth of a deeper, lovelier and more permanent light. The light where all the stories and poems and songs come from, where road unrolls under our feet and there is blue sky ahead.

Losantiville Lines: Down River Chorus, Version 1

The world is already cut up and we are snarling over scraps
deliberately dropped by a pale paternalistic hand
to keep us wanting and to keep us from wondering
what it is on the table we're not supposed to see.
--'Philosophy of a Dog', Cincinnati Daybook

The semester is over at NKU... or, over for me, at any rate. The last class meetings were this past Friday. Endings are always a bit anti-climactic; at least they are for me. In a writing classroom, all the real work is done well before the official clock runs out.

I enjoyed being back in the classroom again, and hope to do more of it. Of course, I also hope to dig back into some good old fashioned honorable muckraking. And I am preparing for another jaunt -- the sometime ago writ of toot off to the northern country, North Dakota and maybe Montana. Specifically, I'm making plans to visit Williston, ND, and maybe Rigby which, according to some map or another, is the geographic center of the North American Continent. I would also like to visit the northern part of Montana I didn't get to see when I was out there last year -- that vast part of the state that's on the northern side of the Rocky Mountains, sweeping up to and past the abstract line that has been determined to be the Canadian border.

Travel enough and you begin to realize that the lines on the map are more of an idealized abstraction than a reality. It is our insistence on making them hard lines that they become and stay hard lines. Ask the Dakota Indians, the Lakota or Sioux where the boundaries are, you have a very different map.

The truth is that maps are constantly being drawn and redrawn. The maps in our heads, private and collective, are always under revision, and are under constant threat of erasure. We map out our individual landscapes and change them based on changes in employment, marital, relational, and any other number of personally significant mile markers, totems, and landmarks. We redraw collective landscapes based on war, and the exchange of property and the delineation of those multi-national corporations whose arbitrary lines are not the same as those inscribed on geopolitical maps.

These revisions and erasures happen all the time.

And yet there is no end to the call to defend these lines. I can't help but notice among Facebook memes the harbingers of doom and death. So much money is made on the backs of our cultural fear and paranoia, and yet rather than look to see who is profiting (Defense Industry, gun manufacturers, makers of better police gear, private security and private army corporations, big oil, lobbyists, and the politicians who are more effective beggars than any panhandler I have ever seen or met.) we perpetuate the cultural death march.

Though I have spent the winter more or less stationary, I have spent the time wisely; and I am looking forward to what life has to offer and to teach me. Being a traveller is not always about being on the move. Sometimes it's about standing still and feeling the rhythm of the world as it reverberates in your bones, calling out those ancient songs and poems that only your voice can give life to.

Location:Louisville, KY

Two Clips: A Story and A Song

Some Prominence

Done Laid Around

Scratching the Itchy Foot

The first part of the trip will be to go visit my daughter, Stella. It's been a couple of years since I've seen her and I want to make sure she's not taller than me. Stella is 17, focused on getting out of high school alive as well as intellectually and psychologically intact. She's also starting to look at colleges and is looking for a job.


That used to be an easier thing: finding a job. When I was a kid, all you had to do was go fill out a McDonald's application and you could have a job. There was poverty, there was unemployment -- but a kid who wanted to earn money and begin that lifelong love and hate relationship with the IRS had a reasonable shot at finding some sort of demeaning, dignity impugning, soul killing job that paid very little and left none of  the feelings of satisfaction often talked about in pre-employment literature.


Right now in America, there's 4 people for every available job. And that doesn't include the 15% unemployment rate for veterans returning from the wars they fought to keep Halliburton in business. Unemployment benefits are stretched, and there are those -- we call those sons of bitches REPUBLICANS -- who would cut off unemployment insurance and let people starve. We also have some folks -- we call those assholes DEMOCRATS -- that are going along because their mommies keep their balls in a silk bag in the back of an armoire. Right now we're living in a country where we have The Haves and The Have-Nots. Right now we're living in a country run by politicians who are signing away our freedoms. Right now, the banks and corporations have taken over.


Right now, it's only getting started.


And right now, there are stories to be told. Someday, we'll have historians explaining to our grandchildren what all this recession bullshit was really about and what the long term impact of shrinking civil rights and banks on the national tit was. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll have talking heads and history memes on social networks, lost in the shuffle between the Two Girls, One Cup video and the latest free social networking game that eats up computer speed and distracts people from seeing the world for what it is.


Re:visionary is my way of trying to tell the real story in real time. There are stories to be told, songs to be sung, poetry to be written. Re:visionary means,  for one, revision. Life, like a poem draft, often  requires revision.


For another, it means Re(garding) Vision. How I envision my self, the country, other people, the world. 


And I'm hoping you like what you read.