For a year, I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. I moved there to be alone. I moved there to recover from a failed engagement. I moved there for the music and the culture and to feel something akin to roots. I moved there for a bit of self-discovery, re-calibration, and a fresh start. I had landed…
Category: Memphis
Final Days: A Few Steps Closer to Home
Songs and smells can sometimes yank you back and sometimes subtly glide and guide you through the thin fog of memory to other places and times… distant shores of past lives. For my father, every time he hears “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan, he mentions Fort Devens and his time in the Army. I suspect…
Housing and Eviction
Yesterday afternoon I made my way down Madison Ave. to head towards the river for a run. A woman sitting on concrete planter asked if I had any cash for some food – I didn’t. She wanted to know where I was from, I told her I live here in Memphis and she said ohh,…
Sh*t
Excrement. That’s what I thought about before I left my apartment and went for a walk this morning. Unless talking about a baby’s first few poops, it’s a topic most of us avoid. That, death, and taxes. There’s an embarrassment about the whole thing. We light matches to make the smell go away. We’re mildly…
Rough Cut
Soooo…. it turns out that maybe I was just hangry when I was feeling like a cranky pants. Actually I just needed to shift gears. Cooking up some dinner and working on the video project were enough to distract me. I put together a rough draft of the video. I’ve about reached the limitations of…
From Behind the Camera
This morning I popped my earbuds in and walked out the door – much like I do every other morning. I took a few steps down the hall and something about the way the song I was listening to started off – the way the notes hit me – combined with the visual of the…
Why I Moved to Memphis
Nearly every summer for the past 16 or 17 years I spent the third Saturday in July at an all-day blues picnic in Morrisville, PA. The picnic is sponsored by The Bucks County Blues Society, which claims to be the oldest, continuously operating blues society in the country. It’s not a terribly old organization –…
Quietly After
It was definitely thunder that I heard…. the sky was clear, but something was brewing. In lots of places around the country, summer brings pop-up thunderstorms. My experience in Memphis is that these things come out of nowhere pretty quickly. I stood on my balcony for a few minutes watching the lightening, and then the…
Protesting in Memphis (Part 2)
Memphis has had a march or protest of some sort every night since May 27. I’ve participated in 5 of the marches. I suspect I’ll attend more – though one of the stated goals was to ensure all 4 officers involved with the killing of George Floyd were arrested/charged, which has happened. There seems to…
Protesting in Memphis (Part 1)
For the past eight nights, residents here in Memphis, TN have taken to the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin as three fellow officers looked on. The protests are part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. For five of those nights, I donned my cloth…
A FEW DAYS IN PICTURES
I haven’t been writing as much. I don’t know how I feel about that or if I can pinpoint why. This morning I went for a walk, and my mind was pretty busy – on a few different things. I tried some walking meditation, but it wasn’t working. And decided to get out of my…
I WASN’T GOING TO WRITE THIS
After a decent day, one in which I felt fairly present, last night was emotionally mixed. I jotted down the note “these were the unbalanced days that made up the year without balance.” Though balance wasn’t really the word I wanted to use, I wanted to get at the notion of feeling joy in experiencing…