For breakfast this morning I made grits. After I turned the eye off I stirred in shreds of cheddar cheese, threw in a hunk of butter, then let it sit and cohere for a minute. It was the dishwasher that let me have cheese grits. Having a dishwasher is dramatically underrated. People don’t know how averse you get to things like using a cheese grater just to fancy up the grits for breakfast. There are whole sections of the cabinet that I basically avoided before this new house because it was going to be a bear to clean up.
I don’t have a picture of the cheese grits, but they were just bright yellow anyway. They tasted okay (needed a little more salt). Instead, here’s a photo of the prettiest Piggly Wiggly sign I ever saw.
Greensboro, Alabama, with my trusty Polaroid SX-70 (2023), still not sure what’s going on with that little phantom, it’s coming and going, but I don’t mind it.
It was my sister’s birthday this week and on a lark I dialed up a florist in her town and had some flowers sent over. The delivery person called a couple of hours later and said hey, we’re at the house, but there’s a lady here who is checking on things and she says your sister has headed up to see your daddy, and so maybe you want me to deliver them when she gets back? To which I said yes, oh my gosh, you are incredible, and also incredibly thoughtful, and saved the flowers from almost certain extinction, but I was also a little embarrassed because I knew she had left town with her husband and the kids to go see my Pop, but I guess I had forgotten.
Maybe that’s what this phase of life is, trying to send flowers but forgetting no one is home. Maybe trying is still the point of it all.
I don’t have a picture of the flowers, which I suppose are in limbo somewhere in North Mississippi, but here’s a picture of a house I thought was very beautiful. I wish you could see the metal scaffolding in the back over which this huge thing of muscadine vines was draped.
Demopolis, Alabama
I went and saw a new movie at the Capri last night, and in the movie they played some of my favorite songs and several of my favorite artists—the Replacements, X, Bruce Springsteen. But the movie left me feeling vaguely sad and hollow, even though I was sitting in this beautiful theater and hearing these songs blown up to 21st century size, Paul Westerberg yearning through his teeth, How young are you, how old am I, and I can almost see him with his hair falling over his eyes, meet me anywhere or anyplace, if you dare, I will dare. But I think a movie has got to be more than needle drops and the characters walking in slow motion.
I once had some friends get married, and this is maybe a quarter century ago, and I thought “I Will Dare” was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard, well the kind of romance that seemed real, not saccharine, and I walked from my apartment to a copy center and on the way picked flowers and some pretty leaves. I borrowed a Sharpie from the kid running the counter and wrote the lyrics on a piece of paper, and then scattered the flowers all over the glass of a Xerox machine, lay the lyrics behind them, and mashed the lid down. That was my wedding present, a copy center bouquet from the ‘Mats.
I don’t have a picture of that, but I wish I did, I can almost see it in my memory. If I went back in time and saw it on a lightpole in Starkville in 1997, I would take it down, carefully, gently, so as not to rip the paper off the staples. I made some extra copies, and I think I hung them up, but then again, maybe not.
But last weekend in Noxubee County, or maybe that was a couple weekends back, I made sure to try to make a photo of this eagle over the door of the post office in Macon, isn’t that really just something else.
Polaroid 600, because the flash and the angle were just really going to set this fellow off in a great way.
“COUNT THE RINGS AROUND MY EYES” is a rare Friday night edition of GORJUS, being an occasional dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, preserved by instant film. Maybe you can look at it while watching the American version of the Great British Bake-off, which I started last night, and really does keep the charm, although of course the accents aren’t the same.
If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.