If your church upholds (dare I say, worships?) ideologies that support–even promote–violence like that of the January 6, 2020, insurrection and aggressive, cancerous ignorance like the wicked conspiracy theories of QAnon, then your church probably has less to do with Jesus than with this lunacy: “It’s a dangerous time, and this is a place of refuge and retreat if our community needs it,” Moon said in one of his recent sermons, titled “The King’s Report,” which he typically delivers wearing a crown made of bullets and a golden AR-15 displayed before him.
PASTOR HYUNG JIN “SEAN” MOON, HEAD OF THE SANCTUARY CHURCH, IN 2019. (PHOTO: ROBERTO DAZA/VICE NEWS)
About a month has passed since I encountered a black bear on the Loop Trail at Wildacres Retreat in North Carolina. I keep thinking about it. Sometimes my thoughts are about what a cool moment that was, the two of us on the trail, looking at each other for a few moments, then turning in our opposite directions and continuing on our separate paths through life.
This is roughly what my encounter looked like.
But this morning, the bear visitation came with that sort of breathless, What if . . . ? What if this bear, which I took to be a young adult, decided that it didn’t like having me in its woods? What if, instead of turning and ambling off in the opposite direction, it had turned and come toward me?
Not the attitude or direction I would have welcomed.
Even though these and other What Ifs didn’t happen, those thoughts–those imaginings–still take my breath away, just a little bit. I don’t know what I would have–could have–done in response. No stick. No bear spray. No forest-ranger knowledge about what to do. So, I imagine this . . .
A little good ol’ fashioned bear wrestling
. . . until I tamed it — or not. And then I laugh and go on along my path, hoping that somewhere up on the Wildacres mountain the bear is doing the same.
[This is a repost from June 2017. Since then, “Complaints” has become a favorite amongst the creations from these latter days of my songwriting. I had hoped that it would become less relevant. But it hasn’t.]
Sometime back of this, maybe in 2015 or early 2016, I began being unable to talk myself out of being worried about the world that I live in, the world my sons live in, the world my granddaughters live in. Cliché as it is to say, these are troubling times. We somehow learn to live with the worry.
So I began writing some lyrics. I don’t do that well keeping up with the scraps of paper on which my lyrics often begin, so I can’t remember now which set of words came first. But I’m fairly certain that Psalm 46:10 followed quickly on the heels of the song’s first “worried.”
In the summer of 2016, Leesa and I were in the Czech Republic, and we were each assigned–along with the rest of our group–to come up with a piece of scripture that was particularly important to us. Leesa immediately went to the verse in Psalm before we realized that our assignment specified that we select from the New Testament. But during that moment when Psalm 46:10 was her choice, I played her the snippet I had of this song, then untitled.
Since then? Well, a lot has happened to the world since last summer. During the winter, I pulled out the lyric again and began working on it. I also began working on some rather sparse music music that would stay out of the way of the lyric.
So, here’s the lyric:
Complaints
I toss and turn in the dark of night Then I’m up and turning on the light I’m worried – O Lord, I’m worried Why do I hurt and struggle with pain? Why can’t I shake grief out of my brain? Why are this body and this mind so frail?
No answer comes from the thundering whirlwind Or from a burning bush kindled by a lightning strike But from a still, small voice that says to me, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
I fuss and fret about the Great Unknown I spend these dangerous days afraid and alone I’m worried – O Lord, I’m worried Where is the next monster with a gun? Where will I hide? Where will I run? Where will I land if I’m blown to kingdom come?
No answer comes from a thundering whirlwind Or from a burning bush kindled by a lightning strike But from a still, small voice that says to me, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
When sleep doesn’t come easy When the floor creaks in the hall When the kitchen glows in laptop light And the clock ticks on the wall
And when my heart feels heavy When I breathe only in sighs When my dreams wake to suspicions That my truths might just be lies
No answer comes from the thundering whirlwind Or from a burning bush kindled by a lightning strike But from a still, small voice that says to me, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
I made a little video one night when I was home alone. I’m lit by “laptop light” with the lyric onscreen. I never watch Fox News, but because I blame that organization for a lot of the anxiety people feel these days, I decided to have it playing silently in the background. Completely unplanned, Henry Sanchez, the alleged rapist from Rockville High School, appeared on the screen just when I was singing about “the next monster.” My iPhone filmed the whole thing.
Sometime back in the fall of 2021, I think, I applied for a residency at Wildacres Retreat, near Little Switzerland in North Carolina. When the time came for the announcements of who’d been awarded weeklong residencies, I received a very nice rejection email, in which I was asked if I wanted to be place on a waiting list. I replied sure, why not. Within 2-3 days, I received another message offering me three different weeks to choose from, the first and third of which were during my spring and fall semesters. The middle was July 4-10, and I took it.
Leesa packed a wonderful care bundle for me, and I set off on my adventure at around 1:30 or so on Monday the 4th. A couple of hours later, after a stop at the Ingles in Spruce Pine for some additional groceries, including beer, I checked in at Wildacres and was assigned Laurel Cabin.
Laurel Cabin @ Wildacres
Here’s my edited log entry that I wrote on Sunday morning before checkout:
It’s a Sunday morning of soft light and soft rain, the 10th of July, a couple of hours before time to check out and return to the real world—my version of it, at least. this time at Wildacres was my first such residency, and I’m already looking forward to my next, whenever and wherever that might be—hopefully soon, hopefully here. I came here to try to complete the first draft of my second novel, and I did it! During this wonderful week of quiet and solitude, I wrote 15-20K words and came to a satisfying conclusion on my last afternoon here (Saturday the 9th).
In addition to all the writing, I walked as much as I could and napped when I felt like it. I took a couple of midday trips—to Marion on Wednesday (I think) and to Spruce Pine on Saturday. They were good breaks, all of them—the midday trips, the napping, the journeys up the mountain for a bit of suppertime socialization, and the walking.
On my first morning there, Tuesday the 5th, I got up and wrote early (750-ish words) and then took a break for a hike (on the Loop Trail). As I walked along a fairly open area of one trail, I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a black bear come up onto the pathway. It stopped and looked at me. I looked at it. We looked at each other for another moment or two and then I turned to continue on my way, and it turned and went the way I’d come. Later in the week, that scene made it into my draft!
Thanks to Wendy and all—including fellow writer Han—for the gift of this week (July 4-10)!
P.S. The first draft of the novel has working title “Streets of Nashville”
I give the first half of this book 3 stars and the second half 5. I enjoyed the central narrative line of When Ghosts Come Home, but it could have been more effective and more consistently engaging at maybe two-thirds of its current length. The long backstories on Colleen and Jay in the first half of the novel, for example, seem ultimately unjustified, at least at the length they were left; while they were good backstories for the writer to have in his head and his notes, I found them tedious. I kept hoping that their presence in the text would be justified in the second half, but I didn’t feel that they were—again, not at the length they were left.
Another problem—sticking with the first half—is that much of the writing feels like a first draft. It’s a well proofread first draft, for the most part, but one awaiting a revision that never came. I don’t consider the writing poor. Instead, it’s too often weak. Consider the repetitive “had” structure of Chapter 2; often only a “had” or two is necessary to lead the reader into the realm of completed action, with another “had” or two to lead the reader back out into the simple past. Here and elsewhere I felt almost hammered with “had.”
At other points, the imagery is first-drafty and could use sharpening.
“When Winston pulled Marie’s car into the otherwise empty gravel parking lot at the airport, the only thing he found waiting for him was a two-door white Datsun with North Carolina plates”; in the moment as the narrative describes it, the lot has two vehicles–Marie’s car and the Datsun–and “otherwise empty” becomes confusing.
“. . . the sound of his footsteps falling silently on the ground beneath him”; “sound” and “silently” don’t work together, and the fact that his footsteps fall on “the ground beneath him” needn’t be stated.
Enough grousing! In the end, I enjoyed this novel. But enjoyment was longer coming than it might have been. The turning point was Winston’s confrontation with Vicki in Chapter 9. I’d heard Mr. Cash talk about this scene, and I felt its importance just hearing about it. The potential for smalltown racial tension—particularly as this exists in places like eastern North Carolina—comes to life in When Ghosts Come Home. Relationships are vividly portrayed throughout. While the very long delay of investigation into Rodney Bellamy’s murder was a bit frustrating, the ending twist provided a shot of redemption on that score.
WARNING: The following contains some griping and some sweeping generalization, but these do not negate what I perceive to be true.
Back in the first part of May, Leesa and I visited friends in Nashville, which was fun a usual. We ate and drank with them, hung out in new places and old, had a float (me) and massage (Leesa), and attended my Nashville church West End United Methodist. I did some research for my novel-in-progress.
The only blemish on the trip was that our view of the Nashville skyline was here and there embarrassingly stained by billboards announcing the coming of Trump for a rally on May 24. This isn’t surprising for Tennessee, although I hated to see my beloved Nashville tainted by hints of such baseless adoration.
As always, I wondered and wondered and wondered: “What’s the appeal?” While my wondering has led me to all sorts of speculation and generalization, here’s a simple story that I believe suggests something true about the Trump phenomenon and his adoring base.
When I lived in Nashville back in the 1980s, one job I had for some years was as a clerk in Cat’s Records. During one period, I was assigned to the store on Gallatin Road (or maybe Gallatin Ave. or even Main St.) in east Nashville. I remember this high school girl–I’ll call her Tarah Grump–was shopping in the store one day and told me she was going to see Sammy Hagar in concert (during his pre-Van Halen career). Not a favorite of mine, but hey, if she likes him. . . .
A few days later, she was in the store again, and I remembered to ask her how the concert was.
“It was cool,” she told me. “He said ‘fuck’ like every other word.” Then she said again, “It was cool.”
Nothing about Hagar’s songs or his singing or guitar playing. Nothing about his band or the light show. In a word, nothing of substance.
That’s it, I think — the base appeal of Trump. Like a third-rate stand-up comedian, he just riffs on a bunch of mean phrases and bad jokes that have a base, visceral appeal to his adorers and don’t require any thought or . . . let’s just stop with thought, because if that’s absent or unavailable or checked at the door of the rally or speech or even just an image of DT, then the other things I was going to mention are baseless anyway.
WARNINGREMINDER: The previous contains some griping and some sweeping generalization, but these do not negate what I believe to be true.
I’d already written one song for a movie. Somebody in Nashville—Cathi King or Eugene Epperson or Dixie Gamble—had given me the screenplay for Fresh Horses, a Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy vehicle from the late 1980s. I went for the brass ring and wrote a song called “Fresh Horses,” which was probably both an arrogant and a naïve thing to do—to go for the title song on the soundtrack.
I recorded a demo and submitted it to whichever person asked for it, who passed on to some contact they knew who was working on the project.
No response returned from the void. Without deciding the arrogance-or- naïveté question, I chalked it up to experience—Don’t go for the title song!
I liked “Fresh Horses” regardless, so I added it to my band’s set list and moved on.
A year or so later, Dixie, who was serving as my manager at the time, handed me another screenplay and asked me to write a song for it. Next of Kin had the potential to be a box-office powerhouse, featuring Patrick Swayze, Liam Neeson, Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and Ben Stiller, who also happened to be in Fresh Horses.
The Gates Brothers in Next of Kin: Gerald (Paxton), Virgil (Swayze), and Briar (Neeson)
The Next of Kin screenplay told the story of three Gates brothers from eastern Kentucky coal country. In order of age they are Briar (Neeson), Virgil (Swayze), and Gerald (Paxton). Briar owns a coal truck and takes pride in the work he does for this local industry. Virgil has migrated to Chicago, where he has married Jessie (Hunt) and become a cop; his beat is Chicago’s hillbilly slums, where he knows the people and speaks the language. Briar and Virgil struggle in a tug-of-war over the future—and soul—of Gerald, the baby of the family. For his part, Gerald tries to pacify both of his older brothers; he moves to Chicago to work, intending to stay only long enough to save the money to buy his own coal truck. He gets a job delivering pinball machines and other games to restaurants, bars, and arcades. The business is, of course, owned by the mafia, and Gerald’s upstanding morals in defending a job and property he believes to be on the up-and-up soon get him killed.
When Virgil returns Gerald’s body to eastern Kentucky for burial, he and Briar fight about justice for baby brother. Virgil begs his family’s patience with the law and its processes, but Briar wants an immediate hillbilly reckoning. After Virgil returns to pursue his investigation, Briar—driving something like a rusted 1939 Chevrolet Half-Ton—sneaks into the Windy City to begin an investigation on his own terms, in the course of which he, too, dies at the hands of the mob.
Virgil then decides Briar’s path is the way to go. He turns in his badge and summons up from southern Appalachia a group of bird-call-communicating, bow-and-arrow-wielding, school-bus-full-of-snakes-driving mountain men to help. The story’s Armageddon takes place at night in a sprawling Chicago cemetery.
Virgil (Swayze) & Jessie (Hunt)
The screenplay ended without any dialogue I can remember, only the description of a scene. The camera hovers just outside the rear window of a vehicle, with Virgil at the wheel and Jessie in the seat beside him. Ahead, seen through the front windshield, is a straight, two-lane highway, running through flatland. Then the camera begins to rise, and as the vehicle moves ahead, we see that it’s Briar’s old pick-up. And then we see Briar’s coffin in the truck bed and the hazy outline of the Appalachian mountains—“home”—in the blue distance.
Homecoming, I thought.
Sitting at the kitchen table with my Guild six-string acoustic across my lap and a handful of open, droning chords in the key of E (E, A, B, C#m), I began to hum a bit of pentatonic melody. The first verse spilled across the page pretty quickly and easily:
If I die in this place so far from home And I never make my living from my native soil again, Don’t leave me where these strangers will walk across my bones. Take me back and lay me with my next of kin.
I couldn’t help it. While I’d learned my lesson about not giving the film’s title to my song, I couldn’t help but slip this second film’s title into the first verse. It just worked.
But then I began to lose the plot, as far as the screenplay went, and my own circumstances and experiences took over.
I’d been living in Nashville since the early 1980s, almost a decade when the Next of Kin screenplay came my way. Plenty of great friends, small successes, and good times had come my way during those years. I’d developed into what I thought was a good songwriter, and I had a great band that seemed beginning to build a little bit of a following. But running parallel with these were significant disappointments—I don’t want to call them failures, even though they might have been. Among these were two major studio albums that were recorded but never released, and major label interest in the band and me that never quite came to fruition. I turned thirty years old in 1988, a milestone for thinking, for reassessing, and I was considering leaving Nashville and going home. My songs from that time suggest that this was on my mind a lot: “Best I’ve Ever Seen,” “There Was Always a Train,” and “Genesis Road,” to name a few.
Two things happened to decide my fate: first, I read the ending to the Next of Kin screenplay and wrote “Homecoming,” turning my eyes toward home in the mountains of western North Carolina, and second, Leesa came back into my life.
After the first verse of “Homecoming,” quoted above, the rest of the song—chorus, a second verse, a bridge—kept loosely to the spirit of the screenplay but more particularly began to express my own feelings. Maybe that’s why the song made it to the last cut (or so I heard) in the filmmakers’ selection process but ultimately didn’t make it into the film. (Another possibility—contributing at least—is the fact that the film didn’t include the screenplay’s ending, for which I wrote the song. Rather than the beautiful highway scene described above, the film ended with Virgil going back to his police chief’s office, getting badge, and meeting Jessie outside on the sidewalk. As it turned out, the film was never the powerhouse it had potential to be.) I’m okay with the song’s not making the final cut—at least I’m over the disappointment. As with “Fresh Horses,” I’m glad to have written “Homecoming.”
But it’s more than being happy to have written in the case of this one. I’ve often said that—“gun to my head”—I would name “Homecoming” as my favorite among the many songs I’ve written.
If I die in this place so far from home And I never make my living from my native soil again, Don’t leave me where these strangers will walk across my bones. Take me back and lay me with my next of kin.
There were many things my father could not say. He turned the sod and swung the rod and kept his feelings locked inside. When things around the homeplace went from bad to worse to stay, He sat in silence with my brother as I said good-bye.
Homecoming dreams are bittersweet to the taste. Homecoming promises are hope to the displaced. They echo through my soul with the distant music of “Amazing Grace.” Let there be a homecoming some day.
I have learned to breathe beneath this sea of light. I’ve won and lost and paid the cost to find a future for myself. But the ties of blood and earth still bind across the years and the miles, And in my memories the old ways still are dearly held.
Homecoming dreams are bittersweet to the taste. Homecoming promises are hope to the displaced. They echo through my soul with the distant music of “Amazing Grace.” Let there be a homecoming some day.
I’ve been cursed as a deserter and prayed for like a prodigal son. Seems no matter where I’ve turned, my loyalties have fallen under the gun.
Homecoming dreams are bittersweet to the taste. Homecoming promises are hope to the displaced. They echo through my soul with the distant music of “Amazing Grace.” Let there be a homecoming some day. There’ll be a homecoming some day.
Postscript: My songwriting practice tends toward the solitary. Nashville—Music Row—was a place of cowriting, with at least two but often three or four songwriters credited on each tune in the Billboard “Hot Country Songs.” (Even as I write this over thirty years later, this week’s number one country song—“The Kind of Love We Make” by Luke Combs—lists four, maybe even five, songwriters.)
I hope to write a monthly Song Stories post for every third Saturday. If anybody reads this and would like to request that I write about a particular song, please feel free to contact me (michaelamoscody@gmail.com).
I was going to Pal’s near campus a couple of days ago. This Chevy Equinox was in the traffic circle before I was, so I followed it into the line. I had to stare at this confusing array of stickers all the way around the drive-thru until finally the Equinox couple picked up their food and drove off.
My snarky voice wanted to ask if they could tell me why they support Israel. And it wanted to ask why they support an arrogant, ignorant man who doesn’t care anything about–or for–them.
Of course, I had to take a picture before they escaped.
Confusion Reigns: I’m somewhat uncomfortable with Jesus being forced into such close proximity to Trump
Ever take a picture that has strange orbs in it and then have somebody tell you that those orbs are ghosts? I’ve taken some pics and seen orbs, but the pics are almost always night shots and the orbs almost always white (like ghosts in sheets) or maybe with a tinge of green. But if you look at the Equinox picture, taken in broad daylight on a hot day, you’ll see two distinct red orbs–one just above the right taillight and one just left of the left one.
I didn’t notice these orbs until today. As I mused on them, I decided they are the metaphysical signs of two red demons of confusion, one for each of the passengers in the vehicle. The higher one on the right is behind the man, who’s probably taller. The lower one is behind the woman who was driving, and she’s probably lower . . . I mean, shorter.
Demons of Confusion!
(tongue in cheek . . . mostly . . . maybe)
Update: I also saw this one a couple of days later:
Confusion & Contradiction?
This vehicle sports both the “In God We Trust” TN license plate selection and a “LET’S GO BRANDON” (i.e., FUCK JOE BIDEN window decal), apparently without any sense of irony or contradiction.
(This one I’m definitely not tongue-in-cheek about!)
Living the Gimmick by Bobby Mathews is a fun novel, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of pro wrestling. The story moves back and forth between the present-day wrestling world and its history over the past thirty years or so. That expanse of time has witnessed tremendous changes in what pro wrestling is and how it is understood by both participants and spectators, the most momentous changes being, one, the end of the wrestling territories at the hand of a predatory promoter who consolidated all the business nationwide and, two, the public admission that pro wrestling is staged—entertainment, not a true catch-as-catch-can competition.
Focused on engaging protagonist Alex Donovan and his search for who killed his friend Ray “The Wild Child” Wilder, Mathews interweaves the history, business, and backstage/in-ring practices of pro wrestling throughout the narrative. Donovan discovers, in the process, who his friend was—or at least who he became in his later years—and that their friendship of over twenty and more years might not have been exactly what Donovan believed it to be.
Bobby Mathews brings Living the Gimmick to life with his insider knowledge of the world in which his story lives. He treats the off-center world of professional wrestling in the USA and in the South particularly (excepting one striking jaunt to Europe) with fairness. The novel balances, for example, the manufactured nature of the wrestling business with the actual athleticism of the wrestlers. Likewise, women wrestlers live and work in the patriarchal world of pro wrestling, and the novel acknowledges this but gives characters like Kat and Penny more reality than women wrestlers are usually granted in the context of the wrestling entertainment.
Publisher Shotgun Honey is building a strong catalogue of crime-oriented fiction. This is my second (following Chris McGinley’s Coal Black), and I have two more high on my to-be-read list. Living the Gimmick by Bobby Mathews is a nice notch on Shotgun Honey’s title belt.
I was happy to welcome the return of Mick Hardin — at the end of another semester and just in time to help get my summer reading revved up. All kinds of Kentucky birds accompany Hardin as he privately investigates the murders of Shifty Kissick’s boys, Barney and Mason. The oldest brother of the Barney and Mason — Raymond — arrives from California to help Mick. A potential love interest appears, briefly at least, and we witness Mick and Raymond doing their military to abort an apocalypse in a teacup of narcotic and environmental bad behavior.
Again, the Appalachian settings and characters are beautifully rendered, and Mick fits so well within the place and people. Offutt’s Rocksalt, Kentucky, and its environs become as familiar to the reader as they are to Mick. His emotional struggle with finalizing his divorce and his rather bumbling but charming attempts to relate to and support his sister Linda, who is running for reelection as sheriff, also ring true.
All in all, Shifty’s Boys is another satisfying Mick Hardin novel.
