#fredneck

the angles between roads don’t quite add up at Kenmore and Hanover and though I’ve lived here most of my life I continually get mixed up in the immediate vicinity, staring directly at Google Maps

graveyards are everywhere. many people I know don’t breathe when they’re passing one; many people I know have stories, or stories told on their behalf, about things done in graveyards. I walk through one on my way home and I steer well clear of the stones. wouldn’t do to get a reputation

there is something you find in the basement of a church and something you find in its sanctuary. they are complementary but distinct.

haha, weird, the way this stream winds through Pratt Park as the banks rise kinda makes it look like the water’s running uphill, which of course it is not, water doesn’t run uphill

America buries its genocides and they rise again as ghosts, cursed to haunt their own historical markers. the blood in the canal has given rise to algal bloom. kudzu devours the trees like an untold confession and look, all I’m saying is that white people who take souvenir photos with their kids on the auction block are inviting trouble

I remember the blue dog. I remember spanky’s. remember when corky’s was good? I remember cards and cones. I remember going to FAA shows there. I remember when it was the Unitarian church. remember when First Night was magic?

you can tell a lot about us from how we gossip about the Rappahannock. river’s high since the rain. river’s low today- you could probably walk across without getting your feet wet. we've heard the racist jokes about the Latino families at Old Mill Park that some of us have the decency and sense not to repeat. we cluck our tongues over each year’s drownings. we watch the depth lines on the docks. we know why it’s Sunken Road... don’t you?

how many times has the belltower on campus tolled since noon? you lost count at twenty and it’s been so many more than that. you hear the reenactment in the distance, firing cannons non-stop. this can’t be happening, you tell yourself, but nevertheless...

the turnover in the administration is three years. students are usually out by five but often in as few as three. in a matter of years no-one on campus will remember that the freshman have not always been inducted into the Shadow Court on Ball Circle on orientation

sophomore or junior year of high school we had a new principal who called the entire school into the auditorium, grade by grade, to tell us that school spirit was now mandatory. I reported the event verbatim in my comic in the school paper. I won an award for journalism and an enemy for life