Culture Diving

 

St Augustine to Gainesville is a deep dive.

Miles of scrub country. A lightly whispered spoil of rotting cabbage still lingers in the humid thick of an unforgiving sweat box afternoon.

Air conditioners sputter and spit under the broken arms of Venetian blinds, hanging out of windows, gasping for air, their bodies long pockmarked with rust stalactites that drool down onto rotting decks made with wood that had once been something else, now patched with ancient roofing tin and staged with moldy couches.

Leprous mobile homes slowly die of consumption. Roofs tarped; sides stained by the desperate clutches of the mud below.

Out there, surrounded by quick cut Pine forests and fields that have leeched Montsanto cancers into the aquifer for 70 years, I love the false feeling of enhanced freedom. Living an under-the-radar lifestyle combined with that spit-in-your-eye, fuck-you spirit.

I admire that rigidity of conviction, regardless of how misguided, that blindly follows the call for a gallows to be built.

Metaphorical nooses hang at the ready, a gauntlet on the road along the way, waving ominously to challenge the demons they see on all sides, oblivious to the fact that the noose builders themselves always seem to be the first in line for their use.