Margaret Renkl is the best writer in America. She nails the South to the wall. I had sworn off the New York Times. Enough. Enough. Enough. I have never read a newspaper where book critics stalk you. Personally. If this book critic guy keeps it up, he’s going to regret it. It is totally outrageous. I have a laundry list. They won’t publish anyone with AIDS who has anything to say at the New York Times. I see really rotten things to turn my toes. Upward. Toward Denmark. The New York Times is irresponsible. Period. I want them out of my life. I do not want my work in their digital archives. I loathe them. I want the reviews of my books to be deleted. I want the work I published there to be deleted.

I wish the publication could be deleted but no. Even the raves. Delete, delete, delete. A rave review is meaningless to me. Anything with my name on it has to go.

I am only snake eggs to you. Book reviews are like rabbit tobacco. The chew ain’t worth the spit. Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha. All I have is Dirt Bike Town. But you could drop Joe Chrismas straight into my book and dance about it. I know Joe Christmas. Joe Christmas was my friend. And you, Mister Book Review, are no Joe Christmas. Once a writer, always lipstick on a pig. 

The coal trains of gravitas that still reach horizon to horizon, if you live next to the tracks, you get used to it. What no one can get used to is a book critic. It’s raining bullfrogs. I am dying. I know that. I will never get used to it. Death just comes. It is ephemeral, we will all be born again up in some shit hole in heaven. Glory be to god. Most book critics write in the language of revenge. I saw what I saw. West Virginia sucks Appalachia into its gut. And then it shits it out. Kentucky sucks Appalachia into a Baptist version of Lift Me Up.

Kentucky is bleak and hateful, too. I drove up to some fast food place, and every single male in that place came out and created a crowd around my dirt bike. “But where’s the gas tank, Sir.”

“Don’t call me Sir. Call me Romeo. It’s electric. You just plug it in. Like sex.” Here’s the great thing about dirt bikes. The are not loud. You can even sneak up on the KKK midnight bonfire get-togethr in the KKK woods where the KKK is pleased as a basketful of possum heads. I would never do such a thing. It would entail risk. The good thing about dying is that risk doesn’t carry water. 

Another strange thing is that the sheet disguises camouflage scratch. Almost nothing. Even I can recognize voices. I know who you are. I know who is stalking me, too. I am here to tell you I fervently hope it’s not the KKK. And you thought this shit ended in that last unpleasantness, the War Between the States. What are you, five. Get a clue. It’s all still there, and if you think these people do not want another Civil War, I am here to tell you they do.

Why. Because no one respects them. I do not respect them. I pity them. I know hollers with folks who have never been more than ten miles from where they were born.

“Tim, we’re gonna hunt you down and hang you.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah”

“You will never know what hit you, boy.”

If I had a quarter.

I do believe with every cell of this wretched body, I will be murdered. You will find my body sold down the river. The blood really does flow like a river through my dreams. You don’t believe this but I do. I have seen my death in dreams many times. North Carolina Crackers know that dreams explain the future. The KKK will  kill me. If they get the chance, they will. I will need a different motel every night. I went through this in Manhattan years ago. Ever hear of a veloceraptor by the name of Roy Cohn. About as useless as tits on a boar hog. I will make reservations in different places on the same night all over North America. The Kantankerous Motel Chain. Red bugs and chiggers. The same dog bit me. These groups move around like Copperheads. I would say dickhead but I am not allowed to say dickhead. Dickhead, dickhead, dickhead. The New York Times can eat my ass. Today, I am outside of Paintsville, Kentucky. South of Paintsville, there’s a road sign that says: “Congested Area.” An empty road. My friend lives in a trailer which is fine. But it comes with a caveat. Levisa Fork Flooded.

The trailer took a trip. Appalachia river flooding is awesome. Cars. Homes. Buildings. Trailers. Dead pets. Dead Poets. Dead chickens from the poorhouse. All racing away. I came here because my friend is in the KKK.

I want pictures for my new photo book. The struggle is to not do poverty porn. They’re still living in that trailer. Smells. In essence, they’re off the grid, any grid. Way back in the piney woods. They are afraid of Protective Services. Some white bitch with a clipboard. The children playing with a gun. They crawl through a window to get in. It’s been a while since Noah saw his trailer become an ark. We had a fist fight last night. We are no longer friends. Jack Daniels came and left. I won. I broke his nose. There will be and there is – blood. Who’s the President. Abraham Lincoln. Is it really that bad. It’s worse. The KKK finally came between us. I did get my photographs of the family in their sheets. The word family rolls around in my mouth like cheap gin. You can wear your sheet with flip flops.

You won’t be able to see it, but I see it every day. The book critic who hates me so much has unleashed his students from NYU to track me down and harass me and my family. I am not going to write his name because I am hoping and hoping and hoping in vain he will go – AWAY. There are lines in the sand here. All of them have been crossed. This guy is pathetically harmless. But his students are not. They are anything but harmless.

Like this place. There is a silence in the rain that I listen to intently. I am always trying to listen for footsteps. I have my own gun. This has been going on for (count them) twenty years. My own students who were 18 are now almost forty. Book critics cannot let it go. They cannot do it. He’s done his damage. By unleashing his students. Who are obviously not a savvy as he is slick something considerable. I will admit it. I am afraid. The rearview mirror of child care.

I am sitting on a refrigerator that is on the ground tipped over. It is filled with mud. Pecking away on my phone. The South shall live again. Writers always go for the low hanging cherries. The use of the term – War Zone – until it has no meaning whatsoever. The South cannot rise again. It is an illusion these people tell themselves. Floods make the KKK look like just another flood. They were picking up bodies from the flood for a while. The flood I barely missed. My flood was a tsunami of New York hatred.

People will ask you where are you from. If you have any notion of living a hundred years, forget it. If you say New York City, I would run. How fast can you dodge bullets. 

The story of my friend is infused within the same kind of hatred that goes from town to trown, picking up converts. Now, it’s a hatred of Appalachia. They are from this place, and they loved it. The land no longer speaks to them. It almost killed them, and they simply do not have a pot to piss in. Men folk with that far away stare. The snake handler’s Oh Let’s Thank God and Jesus for the snakes. I swear to Truman Capote’s soul that the snake I saw this morning in those hills was a Copperhead snake the size of Monroe Alabama. I want to shoot it. But they eat rats. Snakes and rats. The South is poisonous. It will bide its time. But it didn’t go anywhere. It did not pick up its hoop skirts and fly away like Wendy. 

I wanted to spray paint those sheets with the term. FUCKING VICTIM. Why victim. They’ve lost everything. No one wants to know them. They have no money, and if they did, it would be under the mattress. There is no mattress. And the KKK did not take a very long walk to nowhere. 

Sheets is the wrong word. Kid with pointy hat. No fucking shoes. The Grand Dragon Haha. No HBO. It’s raining. The rain will stop you in your tracks. Look up. Drink deeply. I am not a writer. I am a photographer. I do not understand that because as a writer, I am a piece of shit. Always have been. Who is in no way as profound as any of the photographs so hard-hitting as the black and whites by Baldwin Lee. I did Carl Sandburg for Flaunt. This looks like TriX. It can get very dark in the hollers. I wanted those sheets.

I burned them.