So this morning we were in town, searching for internet options. We decided to hit the drive-thru at Arby’s and ask them, my logic being that some Arby’s restaurants do have Wi-Fi. “What’s tha-a-a-t?” exclaimed the girl on the drive-thru headset. She actually thought we were trying to redeem a coupon.

There’s alot going on out here and alot of nothing all at the same time. I won second place at the Tenn-Tucky karaoke contest last week despite the fact that I haven’t had much of a voice since arriving here due to going out every night and yelling and screaming and smoking. This is tobacco country. Everybody smokes. It’s just what you do here. But Baby Got Back won me second place and $50 bucks.

We hang out alot at the local cafe where coffee is only a quarter. A quarter! Then there’s always burger night at the Truck Stop. Don’t let the name fool you, like it did me. This ‘Truck Stop’ is a tiny little restaurant with one gas pump that just happens to also offer diesel and a roof over the pumps that’s tall enough to accomodate a semi. But I’ve never seen a trucker there.

I’m finally beginning to get into a rhythm. I’ve kind of been a beer-guzzling sloth lately and catching up on sleep the past couple of weeks. But within the past few days, I’ve found out who is in charge of the barn art I’ve been seeing in Adairville and I’ve actually been commisioned to do a piece, which I’m very excited about.

It’s about the beginning of harvest time. They’re starting to cut the tobacco and hang it in the ‘baccer barns. After it hangs for a couple of days (?), then they smoke it. I’ve seen several smoking barns within the last few days. The smell of the tobacco wafts across the fields and is the herald of autumn. I’ve driven around with the hope of getting pictures, but people here are very guarded. I don’t blame them. It’s difficult to just rock up and start snapping pix.

The fresh food we’ve been getting is divine! Our neighbor Joe gives us a bag of tomatoes just about every day. Some one down at Tenn-Tucky gave us two boxes of fresh corn. Cantaloupes and peaches are in season right now . . . as well as zucchini and cucumbers.

Word about everything gets out quick around here.

Somebody said the quilt-pattern art on the barn at the Tenn-Tucky Tavern was a swastika. Within days the owner of the place heard that word in the hills was that she was running a Neo-Nazi biker bar, so the art, even though it was just a quilt pattern and not a swastika, had to come down. Tenn-Tucky is a real community resource for us. One of the bartenders made a crock pot full of gumbo for us. The Kentucky side is dry and we’re in the middle of nowhere, so everybody comes by to nab $4.95 6-packs of Busch to go. We’ve met half the town with the hours we’ve logged in there.

I’ve met some interesting characters. I had to tell the girl at the coffee shop the other day, bless her heart, that her continuing references to church were making me uncomfortable. A mexican farm hand tried to openly buy me by asking and offering money to my boyfriend. There’s the self proclaimed heavy metal guitar player from hell who quickly added in that he believes in god. And I can’t wait to try the “Okra Man’s” pickled okra.

I’ve been noticing nature, too. Finding snake skins, spying deer in the front yard and noticing that when the lightning is crackling before a storm that the lightning bugs flicker at twice their normal speed. We were flying down a back country road the other day and I almost ran over about 20 wild turkeys. That was cool. I’m trying to get tours of local dairy and tobacco farms with some of the farmers I’ve met at Tenn-Tucky and planning on reporting fully.

I drove 20 hours straight from ABQ to the farm in Kentucky to live with my new boyfriend Matt and his friend Hardy. I don’t think that driving 20 hours straight was the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I wanted the experience. Plus I was paranoid that someone would see all the boxes in my car and try to rob me. And the bulk of what I had with me was every shred of writing I’ve ever done in my whole entire life, so it was more important to me than anything and I didn’t want to chance losing any of it.

While on the road, I encountered two dudes who were robbed at gunpoint and their truck had two bullet holes in the driver’s door. They got held up in Oklahoma City. It made me feel like my choice to drive all night long was a correct one. Arkansas smells. Stinks like a combination of manure, moth balls and skunks. My arrival in Nashville greeted me with rain and crazy fast drivers during morning rush hour. Perfect and typical Nashville greeting. I got to the farm just when the rain started to fall really hard on the tin roof of the farmhouse. Perfect.

I don’t have internet on the farm, but plan on trying to update this blog at least twice a week. So stay tuned!

I’ve been absent from the blog world for the past week because I’ve been living on the farm and there’s no internet up there. I can’t even begin to list all the insanity that’s gone down this past week - but here’s a quick sampling . . .

We went to a show, met up randomly with a couple of people from Memphis and ended up giving a ride back to one of them after her sketchy roommate ditched her in Nashville. From there, things just got stranger . . . we ended up staying in Memphis for two days. Note: Protection in Memphis seems to come in the form of an aluminum baseball bat behind the door and a pit bull named Money.

We saw some good shows, went to a pirate bar, became lifetime members of Graceland Too in Mississippi (which is so strange and surreal that I will have to blog about it separately), ate some damn good BBQ, stumbled literally into a cool-ass hostel for one night and met some very interesting characters.

Other than that, I’ve been living it up on the farm. I like it there. Taking walks, finding 4′ long snake skins, hanging laundry on the clothesline, drinking real milk from the next farm over, making tobacco stick bonfires, dancing til all hours of the morning to old records, tractor drinking . . . Life is good.

I left East Nashville on Monday and headed up to visit my friends Matt and Hardy at Hardy’s farm, which sits right on the Tennessee-Kentucky state line. I stayed only two delightful days, but packed alot of good times inside of 48 hours.

I had a bit of trouble finding the place and cell signals don’t work so well up there, so I stopped in for a respite at the Tenn-Tucky Tavern, located on the state line between Tennessee and Kentucky. I knew they’d wonder where I was and eventually find me, so I wasn’t too worried.

“Do ya’ll serve food here?” I asked the bartender, who just shook her head and laughed. “All right then, I guess I’ll just be having a PBR tallboy and a pack of smokes.” Turns out that bartender was one of my customers when I used to be a traveling sex toy saleslady in those parts. Such a small world.

After Matt and Hardy collected me from the Tavern, we went to the farm and visited two completely different ends of the culinary spectrum. First we cracked open a wheel of brie and a nice bottle of red wine and then followed that up with lots of PBR and some boy-scout style open pit cooking using nothing but hot coals and shovel.

We waited til dark, grabbed some tobacco sticks to use as hiking poles and then tromped through the woods, exploring a long abandoned one-room schoolhouse and a pre Civil War graveyard. We ran through fields of mist. We hung out for a bit on the state-line road. I stretched out with my head on the Tennessee pavement as my legs dangled into Kentucky’s border. Why that was so much fun is beyond me, but it was.

We stayed up all night long listening to music. I played some air banjo. We danced our asses off to old records - my favorite in particular was The Crazy Water Barn Dance. When the sun rose, casting a golden sheen on the cut wheat fields, I finally went to bed.

I love unemployment.

Ok, so here I am this morning. Drinking black coffee. Headphones in. It must be working, because no one is fucking with me and I’m powering through work. I have not been motivated for a few weeks. Because every single day, it’s like, “Oh shit, what kind of BS will go down today?” The waiting game is over. We’re all going home. This nightmare has ended. The ennui has lifted because the uncertainty has dried up.

And even though all the crew has descended upon our office and are frantically wrapping out all their gear and paperwork, NO ONE has bothered me. And that’s good. I’m all jumpy and jittery. And cranking it out.

It occurred to me this morning that one must know what one wants in order to make what they want to happen actually come about. And what I want is to wrap this thing up and move on. Head ‘em up, move ‘em out.

I’m kicking around the idea of futzing around my family farm for the summer. Anybody wanna help me build a structure there . . . ? As in a permanent structure? There’s nothing there but cricks and trees and rabbits and hawks and deer and snakes and a well and maybe a usable foundation for a house. And potential. And plenty of room . . .