Good Times, Bad Times
Why the blues won't get us down.
Photograph by Johnathon Kelso, www.johnathonkelso.com.
If magazine editors contribute in some way to the dissemination of art, it's not only in their decisions about which writing to publish, but in the routes they open up for writing. I hope we are creating a little route in this issue with the debut of a department titled "Writers on Dating."
We came by the idea easy. After all, whose dating advice should we crave more than a writer's?
You didn't laugh, but that was a joke. It's a joke because most writers are inept at dating. They are too self-aware and doubtful. They are insufficiently suave.
When it comes to males, the most popular daters tend to be monosyllabic, self-loving, overconfident boobs-or rock & roll mumblers who practice Jimmy Dean brooding in the mirror.
The same qualities that'd make you a hunky dater wouldn't impress readers for long, and that's why the two professions (good writer + popular dater) don't often conjoin.
When it comes to girls who date, I have no idea how they do what they do or why. Perhaps our new department will reveal some of their secrets. Certainly, I expect a magazine department to explore its subject. Writers of the world, I await your enlightenment.
Even though I don't date anymore, girls continue to baffle me. Well, I "fake date." That's the term I invented for the occasions when my intelligent, beautiful, and very patient girlfriend allows me to hang out with other chicks. On a recent fake date, a writer/photographer I'll call Billie Jo did something that utterly baffled me. She kissed her dog on the lips. Right in front of me. Naturally, I objected.
"Of course I kiss my dog on the lips," Billie Jo replied, and did it again. "But I've only French-kissed her one time and it was an accident."
When I texted my patient girlfriend about Billie Jo's kissing of her pet, she wrote back: "Duh."
Next, my seatmate on an airplane, a Southern fashionista, heard the story. She said, "Kissing a dog on the lips is a natural act-I don't see why you are so upset. And I also Frenched my dog one time, but it was on purpose."
Typical female ganging-up.
But girls shouldn't anthropomorphize their pets, right? That's basic.
Billie Jo didn't back down and said women who don't have children simply and naturally coddle their pets and I needed to get over it.
Her directness made me recall my recent friendship with a cat. I'm speaking of Maizy Blue of Conway, Arkansas, a stray who adopted us in the Year of Our Lord 2010. I'm going to fess up. That cat was so doggone cute that there were moments when I could not resist smooching her little, black, perfect head. (To which she responded with a dainty lick to my nose.) So it hit me. If I can treat a pet as a papa would his baby, then girls can kiss dogs on the mouth.
I hate being wrong. But I like to imagine that I can own up to being outsmarted by a Southern female-or a stray cat.
All over the South, wind and water of extreme ferocity have caused historic destruction and much pain. Many of us lucky enough not to be direct targets know that it is just mere chance that we weren't. (In our part of Arkansas, the nearby town of Vilonia was pulverized by a tornado.)
When it comes to raw survival, the arts do not top our list of priorities. But I'm grateful that people in this country believe there are benefits to building communities that encourage creativity, if only in nooks and crannies. Some of us even think the American fixation on culture helps distinguish us from narrower, less empathetic-and less interesting-societies.
But, yes, there are violent or shocking moments when culture does not seem relevant (unless it has contributed to whatever inner strength you possess and need to rely on). That said, during some hard times in the South's past, art could seem like the only place where some people got to express themselves with truthfulness or go beyond thoughts of mere survival. What else is the story of the blues or jazz? Maybe that's why there are many blues songs that reference the Mississippi Flood of 1927-art as balm to reality.
As we go to press in May, we cannot even say that the season's destruction of the South is fully past. Our prayers and wishes go out to our Southern brothers and sisters who are experiencing the worst of it.
