what's the blues when you've got the greys

Some observations on the week with medium gratuitous attention paid to picture examples as necessary:

Here's some of the little beach shack. Behind it, a small retaining pond that allegedly contained alligators. (I saw none.) It was a cute little shack: very 50s, no A/C or wifi, but tough and friendly. I really liked it in the mornings when the sun was so bright in the kitchen and I got coffee and sat on the back steps.

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I think I need to lighten the fuck up. I know my last post before I left was super grim, and I was sort of in a weird mood a lot of this week/weekend. It's easy to say that, like, "just stop being so sad and stupid!" but I get so preoccupied sometimes. The littlest things make such a difference to me. I should really work on making myself a more productive person and less of a fuckup who worries about stuff constantly. I wish I were a squire a la The Hedge Knight and then I could just like buff out armor and brush the horses and pull trout of little creeks.

(I read GRRM's Princess and the Queen on the ride up, so I'm about all extra Song of Ice and Fire stuff.)

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There was a lot of night swimming. I kept thinking, like, isn't this how jaws starts.

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One stupid good run and I feel starving and tight and hot as hell.

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I love live oaks. I took a million pictures of them, but it was pouring intermittently, so only a few turned out as not just a vague tree-shaped smear of fog on my camera lens. They were so encompassing, so vast and bendy. This was at Fort Fisher, a Confederate fort that mostly got blown up where a lot of blockade runners tried and failed to keep the Southern port of Wilmington open by pirating the scatter of islands we were staying on. I'm sure some of the oaks were original--it's hard to tell scale here, but most were thicker than me, some several me's.

One of the coolest live oak encampments I ran (literally) into was what I assumed to be a hill. I noticed a strange little passage on the side of it--much like a foxhole in a thicket--and decided to check it out. It turned out that the whole "hill" was actually a thatch of tangled up shorter live oak tree branches that ended in a strange cavernous room made of tree limbs. It was super cool, and a little spooky to be in there alone with all the blown-up Confederate ghosts.

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A weird thing: (featured in this, a vaguely unflattering selfie I took for my little brother as an entry in the years-long ongoing saga of "selfies I take for my little brother in front of unusual species of trees as a form of sibling one-upmanship") is that I got a ton of sun. The flash bleaches me out some here, but you can see the odd effect it has on my eyes...like... they're all green and weird! I guess the grey-blue seems more greenish or hazel with the flush of color/dark hair roots near them. Could almost believe I was sired by a true Black Irish* despite the more Nordic leanings I get from my mother.

Also, I realize now bright pink lipstick might not be the thing.

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Down in Caroline,

Way down in Georgia, on the Tennessee line.

We fought for the rebels, and Robert E. Lee,

Now we want to go home to Virginia

Say we want to go home to Virginia

Won't you carry me back?

Won't you carry me back?

Carry me back to Virginia.

Won't you carry me back?

I wanna be buried in Virginia

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In the ocean, I was terribly stung.

But not in the cool aquarium!

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I went with these folk.

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The Fat Pelican was a good place. Every now and then I would creep down during the day to check internet things, and we went out a couple times at night. I wish I had taken more pictures of the space itself: it was amazing and tacky and horrible. One of the things about it was that they encouraged you to write on the walls. The one I liked the best was by the ladies room, and read, "Gil you need to stop controlling Holly."

Most of the regulars were about twice my age. I walked up to the bar one afternoon to settle up, and asked "May I cash out, please?" and the old lady behind the counter mimicked my voice in an awful mocking accent back at me "MAYICASHOUT?"

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*For the first time in a lifetime of hearing it said about my father and especially my great grandfather, I finally googled "Black Irish." Odd phenotype in the Irish people, and my Quinlan side is all like that: dark-haired, very tan, dark eyes. Anyway: one (not very good theory) is that they are descendants of Iberians or the "Atlanean" Irish via some ancient sea trading route. Yeah! That sounds good.