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A friend sent me a video compilation of the 100 best movie insults. I enjoyed watching all of them but they all fell flat when compared to a few I have had the pleasure to hear personally. There are several types of insults, both intended and unintended. An insult can be delivered in anger, disguised in humor, masked as love and caring, or just thrown out like a fast ball. The preferred delivery is as personal as your fingerprints…

Early Thursday, May 30. Robert Clark and I strike out on day two of our western South Carolina explorations. As I drive into Carolina we’re both quiet, thinking.

“Her sun went down while it was yet day,” Jeremiah 15:9. I couldn’t get that epitaph out of my mind. Nor could I forget the photos a woman showed me on a bluff overlooking the Calhoun Mill damn the evening before. Wearing a two-piece yellow swimsuit laying bare the requisite tattoos she walked over, more than a trace of beer on her breath.

“No More Stories Are Told Today, I’m Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories, The World Is Grey, I’m Tired, Let’s Wash Away.” (the complete title of an album by the Danish band “Mew“)

God knows I love stories. I love stories spoken in song, in film in writing… doesn’t matter. But I worry a lot about whether it’s a dearth of creativity or an abundance of laziness and greed that’s causing the re-re-re-retelling of a lot of familiar stories.

It’s difficult to stop reading when startled by a sentence that goes like this: “It makes no difference that my interrogators are all dead.” I stumbled on that line when reading a recent New Yorker review of Edna O’Brien’s new memoir Country Girl.

Like most folk, I enjoy a good read, but as I grow older I find my patience for long drawn out novels is not what it used to be. I know some people luxuriate in the slow unfolding of plot over many hundreds of pages, the development of character as it plays out over time and space in a good long read, and the final clue that falls into place to eliminate the innocent and point the accusatory finger at the villain in a complicated mystery.

Turpentine camps once were common throughout the Southeastern Coastal Plain landscape. They were industrial communities in some of the nation’s most remote and non-industrial areas: the pine flatwoods stretching from Mississippi to North Carolina. Unlike the company towns in America’s rust belt or the northeast, turpentine camps were temporary settlements defined by debt peonage and populated by African Americans who couldn’t escape the lowest rung of the Southern socioeconomic ladder …

Anything characterized by high energy, originality, humor and intelligence is bound to get my attention. I was at an annual fund-raising party for an alternative art center called Nexus in about 1986. Touring the studios I kept being distracted from the visual art by some very interesting Rock ‘n Roll. I wasn’t the only one. A large segment of the crowd was gathered around the Swimming Pool Qs in the courtyard. Once in their vicinity I was there for as long as they would play.

When I sat in that old church built in the Gothic style surrounded by the music that the organist was playing, I was thankful to be in such a peaceful setting, far away in body and spirit from the violence that holds so many lives hostage in this world of cruelty and tumult.

In a church where people pray for peace, forgiveness and love–all of which seem so lacking in our world–I wonder at times how we manage to reconcile what we wish the world were like and how it actually is. Sitting there in such a calm and safe spot, the lyrics of “Over the Rainbow,” a make-believe place where there are no troubles…