It is not an anachronism, it is a healthy, breathing organisim. Lots of moving parts, inhalations and exhalations, caresses and shoves, duality. It has always been about duality, but it has always had a way of compensating with love. Because, above all else, the South loves itself.

And we love the South.

The south sometimes needs to be described by what it isn’t. It isn’t, for instance, a bunch of rebel flags and haters. It isn’t a bunch of truck driving rednecks. It isn’t drunk and stupid, and it isn’t all about NASCAR and college football.

But it is, too, and that’s alright.

Because the southern psyche accommodates differences, broad differences. It is wise to the idea that ideas can live in opposition to each other and that those ideas thrive as a result. College football is a game of substance that most of us would die trying to play; NASCAR is a race of tactics that depend of quickness of mind and technical dexterity; drinking is a moderator of ideas and ignorance often is the opposite of what it appears to be; people who drive trucks often do so because they need a truck to do useful things with their lives; haters are everywhere, and the remind non-haters where the conversation actually stands so they can adjust their vigilance accordingly; and rebel flags are symbols of solidarity that have been appropriated by people for the wrong purposes.

There is nothing wrong with solidarity.

That is the combustible (rapidly renewable) energy that is the South. What does it mean to be a southerner, where is the South, what are the nuances that make the south Southern? We’re talking about a large piece of land, one that touches oceans and gulfs, broad rivers and ancient mountains; one with latino influences, one with obscure mountain cultures, one with cities and small towns. We’re talking about a black/white/brown/yellow/pink south that in the shake-out is colorless, or at least a color that would be hard to define.

This is our SOUTHNICITY.

Because being a southerner has never been about figuring out who you are. Its about figuring out everybody else.

I got the call two Sundays ago.  We were at the farm. Wind was blowing and the air was cold, and I saw a message show up on my voice mail from my neighbor who has no reason to call me on a Sunday unless something has gone wrong.  Bad AT&T coverage at the farm, so the message took a while to get there.  I rested against the fence, staring at the grass while I listened to the message, rubbing my forehead between my thumb and index finger.  I hung up, still staring at the grass, but not really.  After a moment my eyes focused on a mustard colored stroke in the mat of green.  Laying there was a 3B pencil, the kind we use for hand drafting or sketching.  Totally bizarre and ironic.  A pencil in the middle of a pasture in this situation, like it was dropped from space just for my amusement.  I’m not making that up.

They took everything a teenage kid would want.  They left the fax machine, they left the phones, they even left some checks sitting on our admin desk.  But they got the computers, all of them. And the camera. And the server.  And the backup.  That’s the one that hurt.

We had an off-site back-up from June.  Thankfully, because if we hadn’t, we were done. But 9 months of work have just evaporated.  I’ve gotten used to redundancy:  I have email that shows up in 3 different places, backup files on my workstation and on the server and on the backup drive (which was next to the server), and now I’ll go looking for something and think, “oh, well I’ll just get it off of the…”  and there’s nothing there.

The alarm was on, but it didn’t work.  Not the motion, not the glass break.

We pulled ourselves together, though.  By late Wednesday, we had a couple of shiny new workstations and a new server back up and running.  We figured out where we stand, whats there and what isn’t.  This week we should be clicking.  There’s no point in getting pissed.  Its gone, and that’s it.  There’s no ‘undo’ button for this.  We just have to move on.

I’ve got that pencil with me.  I’ve been carrying it around in my briefcase.  Now we have an off-site back up.  So should you.

For Ally

So I read your post and, in a complete time-I-will-never-get-back coincidence, Reality Bites was on HBO tonight after I watched my 24 recording.  So, on the front end of this, I concede any high ground that may be in question.  Anyhow, everybody had gone to bed, I had half a beer left and had just finished Bauer-Hour.  So I watched it, figuring it was as relevant as anything else I would find on TV, and there was a chance that I had some buried memories that watching it would unearth. Which it didn’t, but no surprise there: the 90′s were rough.

Here are a few sage observations that came out of that experience:

Ethan Hawke, icon of a short, meaningless period in film history: The fact that the goober that is Ethan Hawke’s character could EVER have been reasonably acceptable to a paying audience is astounding, almost as astounding as the groovy hair and hipster drag he was wearing.  It would have been much more believable if he’d gotten his ass kicked midway through the movie.  He earned it.

Winona Ryder: that she pays her bills by scamming her dad’s gas card was a precursor to both our current credit crisis and her penchant  for borrowing things that didn’t belong to her.  Or stuffing them in her purse.  But to hell with all that:  she deserves respect for her waifish sexiness, and she isn’t a bad actor–at least, not a bad actor in the dramatic sense.  But she doesn’t seem to find her way on to movies sets any more.  Maybe they’re worried about her stealing the slate or a camera or something.  Still, she deserves a break, maybe one that lands her in prime time.  It worked for Charlie Sheen, it works for Keifer Sutherland, why not Wynona?  Just stay away from the folks at CSI.

Parents: just never understand, that’s why we have movies like this.  Which is a very good reason to be pissed off at them.

AIDS: Whatever happened to middle-class white kids being worried about AIDS?  That and nuclear war: clearly no longer problems.

Soundtracks: They are rarely strong enough to carry a movie.  Possible exceptions:  The Graduate; Harold & Maude; Garden State

Irrelevance: The movie gets at best one thumb up, but only for giving us a rose-tinted snapshot of youth and for keeping the bar low for good coming-of-age movies.  Its a genre that needs to maintain some relatively-low standards to ensure youth is still accessible to the low-brow masses.  This one suits its “Gen X” audience just fine, treating them fairly as the meaningless, incoherent assemblage of same-aged people that they are.  For me, Dazed and Confused hits the same notes with a little more of a groove.  At least the 70′s gave the writers some common ground for the characters:  drinking, fighting, and sex, all of which make for good stories, and all of which Reality Bites trades for emotional bubblegum, bad music, and the Gap.

Ben Stiller: Directed it and acted in it, I didn’t remember that, not sure I should have.  It starred him, Ethan Hawke, Wynona, Renee Zellweger (her first film appearance), Evan Dando (The Lemonheads), and Janeane Garafalo, and a few other bit parts from today’s familiar faces.  Noticeably absent:  Kevin Bacon.

Writing about this movie: took something valuable from my soul.  Time, lost forever.

After it was over: I immediately had a craving to watch Singles.

Christmas Eve Dinner--14 People

January was a month without that came on the heels of a month with plenty.  So I took January off as a ‘resolution’, regrouped, ate lots of vegetables, dropped a few pounds and all of that.  Its February now, and I’ve got a glass of wine in front of me and I’m feeling a little bit of my old muse.

It’s romantic to think that spirits inspire great thoughts.  Maybe it comes with being southerner, since the pens of many great southern writers danced with firewater in their cartridges, spitting it out on the page in a flurry of torment and wisdom.  That’s our legacy.  I’ve plugged my way though some Faulkner lately, but its slow going, and that may have something to do with my new year’s resolution.

After a month or so off of the blog I should have something wise and new, but I don’t.   Here’s a round-up of things that are around me now, though:

24: Jack’s back.  It’s like football season in the winter for me, I can’t get enough of it.  Weak?  Maybe, but I haven’t missed a single episode since the first one aired (save one, but I caught it in re-runs).  It’s simple, fast, and mindlessly complex, which is pretty advanced for network television and especially for FOX.

John Stewart:  My media outlet.   He watches the news so I don’t have to.

Riverboat Gamblers  Something To Crow About: My son likes punk rock, and not by training.  He just likes it.  Particularly, he’s a Dropkick Murphys fan.  So I got on a brief punk kick, and came up with this one, one of those iTunes finds that goes all the way back to 2003.  Really it’s not punk, it’s just rock.  With song names like “Hey, Hey, Hey”, “Cut-Cut-Cut-Cut”, “Dead From The Neck Up” and “Ooh, Yea”, its straight up. and like 24, its fast and simple, with enough kick to keep your attention, and no matter what music-snob glasses you don, it’s better than the Jonas Brothers.  My son knows rock, score.

Tortoise: is headed to Bottletree in Birmingham on February 13, and so am I.

AppleTV: My new favorite toy.

iPad: could replace the iPhone, if I can only figure out why I need it.

Objectified:  A movie from the makers of Helvetica: The Movie (yes, about the font).  It breaks down the state of Industrial Design through a series of interviews with leaders of the industry.  For industrial designers, it may be a 101 class in trends and design thought, who knows.  But for me, it was a great insight into some innovative approaches to design thinking.  Even better:  it was watchable.  Worth putting on your Netflix list (or ordering on your AppleTV).

John Edwards: is an idiot.  I know she’s a filmmaker, but dude, don’t film it, the kid will be proof enough.  And Tiger Woods sends his thanks.

Facebook Doppelgangers: Don’t we love shiny objects?  I spotted a Hasselhoff.

Nor would we have this blog by photographer Chris Hornbecker. Basically, it appears his New Year’s resolution for 2008 was personal mandate to take a picture every day zooming out 1 mm at a time.  He seems to have done it until he ran out of lenses.  Mr. Hornbecker has an eye, as it turns out, so its a good browse.

Click on the photo below and it will take you to the first image, taken at 14mm (wide).  You can proceed from there until your supervisor tells you to stop, all the while wondering if you will make it to the gym for the entire month of January this year.