Friday, July 13, 2018

Inside The Sane Asylum...Parish roads

*I am getting close to my home. Sabine Parish that sits sandwiched between the Louisiana and Texas state line. The Parish where I learned to love and learn and cherish and understand freedom.***

It’s morning in Louisiana. I’m driving. I tend to ramble when I’m driving, especially in this part of the world. Parish Road 21 takes me through green. Green everywhere. Large live oaks that have stories to tell. Rusty tin barns. Corn fields with perfect rows, that disappear into the green of the forest.

American flags are hanging from most mailboxes, horse trailers, workshops, treehouses, and semi-truck garages. Wet clothes  hanging on a fence. An ole dog laying in the shade. 

There are plenty of curves ahead, winding through the landscape. They take me past Faith Chapel Church, Providence Primitive Baptist Church, New Chapel Baptist, First Assembly of God, and a heap of other three-room meeting houses with well-kept cemeteries. And behind the cemetery’s, more green fields, and behind the green fields, cows and beyond the cows, the green of pine forest.

There’s the Perry Antique Store—which used to be a gas station one hundred years ago. It sits on approximately thirteen million acres of flat earth. Old men sit on its porch, chewing the fat. Watching traffic.

There are ancient mobile homes with brand new Fords parked out front. There are brand new mobile homes with ancient Fords. I pass red-dirt-road offshoots that lead to God-Knows-Where. Horses in front yards. Cattle in backyards. Weathered brick chimneys, standing in empty fields. Telephone poles with fading signs that read: “Elect Edwards for governor, for a brighter Louisiana.”

I pass small towns, small communities. Ebarb, Piney Shores, Zwolle. Converse is about as big as a minute, but they have a nice baseball field. Baseball is serious business in Converse.

I pass bumpy creek bridges—I have to slow down to drive across. There’s a crumbling red house covered in green vines—probably older than the late great Kathryn Tucker Windham. Bass boats sit by the highway with for-sale signs. Farm-implement graveyards stretch clear to China.

There is a man, burning trash in his front lawn. There are manmade bass and bream ponds. Overgrown yards with rusty swing sets and children’s playhouses, with wood rot. Rusty mailboxes with flags...I’m getting close to home..

Today we will talk about independence, freedoms, melting pots, mending fences, family...some arrived on different oceans, on smaller boats, from different ports, to a place where nobody wanted them.  Years latter, their children are physicians, shrimpers, grocery store clerks, farmers and all that is in between. It is possible, if you want it.


As Americans, we export and inspire a notion of freedom and openness, the dream that we sell as a promise. Sometimes, we make a mess of it. We forget what it is we are dreaming, and what we are selling as an ideal. It's all still an experiment, but we need to do better. I think we will. I have that hope. That's what is on my mind today... Doc

Entry Note To Self...God only knows

Journal Entry: 7/13/18
God only knows
Warning, adult content

After my walk this morning, I was craving some Ice Cream. I settled on yogurt, God only knows why.

I ended up at this little yogurt joint named The Frozen Frog. God only knows why the name. And God only knows how many flavors they have. Real cute little names. Lilly Pad Lollipop, Toad Road Caramel, you get the picture. I love orange flavors but not the artificial ones.

It brings back anxious moments of when I had my tonsils removed. The laughing gas the doctor gave me had this artificial orange taste. I didn’t like the taste of it then but I couldn’t say anything. One, I had my mouth open like the lips turned back on Winnie the donkey, and two, well the gas just made me not give a shit...I guess.

I didn’t remember much after it was all over, but I do remember the doctor’s words as we left his office, “For three days he can only eat ice cream.”

Of course my Mom stopped and bought a three day supply of ice cream on the way home. I had to stay in the car due to fifty feet of gauze packed in my mouth and I just wanted to sit there and try to remember what just happened. I also remember her words to this day, “I bought your favorite.”

You guessed it...ORANGE.

Then it all came back to me. The orange that taste horrible, not really giving a shit and there was this other thing that pisses me off till this day.

While I was in “The Chair”, the nurse was listening to this little transitor radio. I know many of you do not even know what those were. They are so old the spell check did not even recognize “transistor”. See how it spelled it wrong above?

Well, on the T Radio, Unchained Melody was playing. One of the greatest songs of all time and wouldn’t you know it...every time I here it play, to this day, I taste orange...

The Orange flavor still does not sit just right, so I avoid it and go for the coconut flavors. I don’t listen to the real radio that much, so I can control my music. But there are some days, to this day, I still don’t give a shit...God only knows why...Doc

Image by: Christopher Bryson

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