Paths of Freeze

Upon our second awakening this morning, the sun showed the crushed glass rug of frost all over everything, and my bones felt as if someone had injected crushed glass into the joints.

Second awakening? Oh, yes. Our first awakening of the day was at about, ohhhhhh, 0230, when the dogs began snorting around outside our bedroom and demanding some attention. We got up to let ’em out and and see what might be yanking their emotional chains. They ran straight to the maple tree in the back yard and started leaping up on it like trained coon dogs. I shined the flashlight up into the bare branches and expected to see a possum. Nosiree, Bob. ‘Twas indeed a coon, and a fine, fat fellow he was. Almost as big as Bluebelle. He was about 15 feet up and turned his eyes into the beam of the flashlight, then began a leisurely climb even higher into the branches. I got the dogs to come on back in, deciding that the ringtailed tooter needed some personal space for reflection and a chance to escape into the woods. We went back to sleep, finally, but there is a cost involved with these late night adventures.

Mrs. Orr in particular is not feeling great. Not just from the lack of sleep, but she continues to battle this bad dose of chest congestion, with frequent bouts of coughing and sneezing, her head alternately stuffed up and running wild. If you’re inclined to pray for her recovery, I’d be indebted. Mine don’t seem to be working too well these days.

***

Sometimes the world has a lovely harmony to it. Those plastic bags grocery stores provide in which to place your fruits and vegetables in the produce section are notoriously difficult to open. I used to lick my fingers to give me some purchase, but nowadays with all the cold and flu crap floating around, this is not an option. So how delightful it is to be standing there, holding an inoperable bag, and the little produce mister thing goes off right next to me, watering the carrots and brussel sprouts and peppers. Sorted! Just reach over and catch a bit of the mist on the fingertips, and the bag can be opened. Easy peasey, Japanesey. If the guy who patented the produce mister has any business sense, he’ll put up a post on the company website and claim that he deliberately designed the thing with the expectation of the latent finger-to-bag effect. I know I would.

***

A close friend and I have been talking about how alone we feel in the world today. Alone in terms of our worldview, our beliefs, our take on the current situation as we watch the American Empire die and crumble. He and I are united in our aghast perception that so many people can be so thoroughly and intentionally stupid about so many right-before-your-eyes things. Time was, a man could encounter another man who introduced himself as a conservative, or a Christian, or what have you, and you’d have a pretty good fix on who and what he was. This is no longer true. I would probably be described by someone who doesn’t know me well as a “conservative,” simply because of a number of doctrines that I oppose. But this would be wrong, wrong, wrongety wrong. Just because I oppose men in dresses being able to use the same public restroom as my granddaughters does not place me in the camp of anyone who considers himself “conservative.” Those same people are A-OK with sending a gorillion dollars to Israel and the Ukraine while their grandmothers languish in nursing homes and hostile strangers flood across the southern border and the Social Security they paid into for their entire working lives drains down like sand in an hourglass to give these strangers toys and futures. They attend churches that were obediently closed at the directives of the Covid clowns but still consider themselves bastions of truth, strength, and virtue. They vote straight Republican. Hell, they vote, which to me is a failed litmus test for how serious and cold-eyed realistic a man is —as I’ve said so many times, “They stole the last election. They did it right in front of you. They laughed in your face while they did it. They suffered no consequences for it. And your answer to our problems is to Vote Harder?” Knee-grow, please.

I’ve walked away from every institution I was once numbered among, because they are, without exception, nothing but whores and grifters and liars. Without exception. They use their flocks, their members, their supporters. They lie to them, manipulate them, and cast them away when they are no longer useful. Like the sign held by the man in the park, prove me wrong.

And this extends to the bloodlines and culture of those I used to consider my people. “My people.” It sounds almost quaint now. What does this phrase mean anymore? If a black man, or a Chinese man, or a Jew, or a Mexican, speaks of “my people,” his listeners will smile and nod with approval; they know exactly what he means. But if a man who looks like me refers to “my people,” those same people look puzzled, uncomfortable, worried, often hostile. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it, much less examine themselves as to why this might be.

I was inculcated by my family with a hot pride in being a Southerner, and I carried this pride with me all through my life until these latter years. But though I was born in Dixieland, and yes, it was early on one frosty morn, I no longer think of myself as a Southerner except as a reluctant geographical afterthought. To which batch of Southerners do I belong? The ones who pay dues to the NRA (see the above remark about whores, grifters, and liars) and boast about how the only way they’ll give up their guns is when the gubmint pries them from their cold, dead fangers? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure these are the same porky fellows who used to play dress-up in Confederate costumes and talk about honor and Marse Robert and Stonewall and “The South Will Rise Again” while listening to Charlie Daniels and Lynyrd Skynyrd ….and yet none of them lifted one damn finger when the BLM vermin were defacing and toppling and melting down the statues of the men they claimed were their spiritual forefathers. They’re the same ones who read their Scofield bibles to tatters and tithe to their churches led by girlboys who are scared to death of the woman in their pews, the ones who send money to Jews for Jesus and any oily group who claims to tout “Judeo-Christian Values,” whatever the hell those might be. When I think of Southern males now, I think Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Miss Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell. I think of the countless guys from SC and VA and AR and FL and GA and TX and AL and NC and MS who obediently rolled up their sleeves and submitted to a medical experiment. I think of the backward baseball cap-wearing assholes who let their kids run around dirty and foulmouthed and malnourished/misnourished, preyed upon by the local diversity scum so the daddies can drive a jacked up truck and drink beer and live in an apartment complex. The clowns who grin and duck their heads when they refer to their wives or their girlfriends as “my boss.” The ones who will pay $400 for a tattoo but can’t pay the insurance this month. Or the ones who will pick a fistfight if you tell them the NFL and NASCAR are full of  rich, untalented people who hold them and their families in contempt, but who will meekly grin and turn red in the face and remain mute when some 300-pound convenience store clerk named LaQuandra snaps, “Come on up to the counter, white boy, I ain’t gots all day.” And then there are the stalwarts who yammer about secession and about the magic dirt of the South, ignoring the fact that the only distinct culture(s) once extant in the South centered around all of the things that they themselves have willingly, gleefully abandoned. They’re ashamed of who they are, how they look, how they talk, where they come from, and their own parents and grandparents. But bah gawd, th’ South’s gonna rise agin’. The coarse term cuckservatives is never more appropriate than when discussing today’s Southern men.

Like my friend, I feel absolutely no kinship to 99.9% of these males. You cannot argue with them. You cannot convince them, even when you put engraved, videotaped, verified evidence in front of them. “You don’t vote? Hell, that’s unAmerican! If you don’t vote, you got no right to complain!” they chant, like obedient little Betas out of Brave New World. So vote harder, Billy Bob. Vote harder and name your boy Jayden or Bladen or Carter or Atticus or Levi, and let him wear expensive sportsball jerseys bearing the names of spoiled criminals who wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire. Vote harder and teach your daughter that it’s okay to marry any creature she drags home, as long as he identifies as a good Christian boy. Vote harder and waste your time watching the slick talking heads on Fox News while they make up “facts” out of whole cloth and give you good reason to take those antihypertensive medications to which your doctor helpfully introduced you. The same one who gave you the “vaccine.”

I’m  not like Hale’s “man without a country.” I feel that I’m a man without a people, and to paraphrase a common statement, I did not leave my people; my people left me.  Almost all of them would read the words I’ve written here and see hatred in them, not love, just as they see spanking a child as hatred, not love.  I no longer fit into the group into which I was born. I cannot fit into the groups I’ve made overtures to joining (and I’m looking into your vile, dead eyes, Jorge Bergoglio). I long ago deplored and denounced the US Marine Corps, which is now a woke, approval-craving collection of tattooed pansies, “led” by grasping, craven monotone-speaking careerists who are every bit the backstabbing bitches attending any junior high today. And I’ve already made my case that Southern white men are deluded, weak, fear-soaked and watchful, slurping on their mess of pottage and washing it down with Mountain Dew.

It’s a chilling thing, a killing frost of the soul to think on these things. But I am still the product of my bloodline, and I am destined to think on them until I no longer think about anything at all.

~ S.K. Orr