Lydia Polgreen Is the Best

TAKE NOTES Here in Appalachia, they just kill the trans kids. After torturing them. I’ve seen gasoline poured on them. People looked down. At their feet. People walked away. No one would help this screaming, naked kid. I picked up a rug and wrapped him in it and got him…

Tim Barrus: NC and the Pollsters

Take notes. I lie to polls. This is Appalachia. From this perspective, this piece nails North Carolina. The new NC, and the old NC. It’s difficult to get folks around here to slide into politics. It begins with a shrug. Then, we tiptoe around: I thought Trump was gonna… You’all…

Tim Barrus: New York Times

Take notes. I have no faith. Things are worsening fast. I got my kids to another country. I am hopeful we will have a civil war. Repeat: I am hopeful we will have a civil war. The problem is that – allow me to call them the Normals – it…

Why Are You Here

The rains have finally left the Blue Ridge. All summer, I’ve been building a remote (understatement) tree house for the Big Cat Kittens and Mama. They will have to find it on their own. Bakers use those big plastic buckets for their icing bakery products. Then, they throw them out.…

I AM AN ALARMIST

I live in an extremely remote place in Appalachia. We are just now coming to the end of a drought. We don’t need some expert who tells us that it’s getting hotter, Duh. Frankly, I think the experts are wrong about the timetable speed. It’s getting hotter faster. No snow…

TIM BARRUS: THE NEW YORK TIMES

Take notes. Americans will tell you they like diversity. They do not know what diversity even is. It took hundreds of millions of years for trees to invent themselves. During the Carnian Pluvial Event, it rained for two million years. Two million years of rain. We cannot even imagine it.…

There is no Art in Appalachia

There is no art in Appalachia. There is corruption though. Some of these suits are more crooked than a barrel of fishhooks. Unless you view what are, in fact, trinkets, or photographs of water running pastoral streams and dreams through the deep woods. Anyone can do those those things. That…

Republicans Are Scum

Civil. War. Americans love to hide behind the word civil. I live in the deep south. Appalachia. It is not that bad a place to live out a life. But there is this problem with the past. It gives people like me – the disabled – flashpoint moments where we…

Blue Ridge Baby

Blue Ridge Baby a novel by Tim Barrus

Blue Ridge Baby

Blue Ridge Baby, a novel by Tim Barrus

Appalachia Kicks

I live in Appalachia. Supposedly, this, too, is North Carolina. I live here because it’s cheap. Economics is the great leveler. I eat what I can grow. Why is that supposed to be a humiliation. This is the land of No One Makes Much Around Here Anyway. We are not…

Tim Barrus: Clown Car Reboot

I seriously doubt that this one will be published. They’re fishing for a voice. I am not that voice. It’s a voice I know how to play to. I just don’t always use the same exact voice because the rhythms will begin a rendering of monotone because it’s pretending to…

Tim Barrus: The Woods of Cleopatra

On Ponies Whatever nature is in its just causes, the winter will arrive. There is no such thing as an alignment that men do not stand still. Next to looking inward at what is interpreted as tragedy, I do not buy it. The last of the cringe and the plot…

I left him there because we have gone through this fifty times.

How many times can I bail him out of detention before they finally have had their fill of him. Boys like him in Appalachia are a dime a dozen. He needs help. Not prison. Where do you think most rapes of boys happen. It happens in the very institutions we…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

You don’t get to have just one.

Tim Barrus, New York Times

We dance a fancy dance all around the issue of deep poverty. Because deep poverty is doing its bloody dance all around us. These constants – deep poverty, abortion – beg an irony that has babies no one wants. No one supports kids in crisis anymore because there is no…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

People are crazy. Krazy Daisey dazed and confused as shit. I don’t read comments if they apply to me. I go off on people but I am swallowing my autistic Asperger’s Tongue They Might. I send this stuff out and there it goes into the Upper-Middle-Caste of the cast of…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Here, in Appalachia, we’re too uneducated to be joyful. We do not live in America, and we are quite good at ignoring debilitation because it might mean us. We know decrepitude when we see it. It’s ordinary. School is decrepit. Media is creeping decrepitude. Law is decrepit. The coal mines,…

Most People In The Blue Ridge

Most people in the Blue Ridge live like this. I do. Our silence is not Us In Absentia. The dirt bike is in the back yard.

That I Should Love a Particular Star

Is he crazy again. Yeah, this time it was a snake he saw a snake and flipped out. It was, of course, an illusion. There were no snakes, and I am not sure he has ever seen a snake once in his entire life. Maybe Tube. I could swoop him…

DOGWOOD DELL

Tim Barrus, New York Times

I contracted a fatal disease. Dementia sets in. I do get lost, and find it rather interesting as it is usually somewhere I have never been. I have a 16-year-old (going on 27) “helper” who does everything. His spelling is bad but he proofs my stuff which is always a…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

WE ARE THE LIVING DEAD The issue of hunger finally arrived in Appalachia. People cannot feed their children. The suicide rate has exploded as have the covid cases. No one is joyful to come back home. Home is often a trailer in the woods, and no one left for the…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Going Rogue We are the culture of greed, death, indifference, cruelty, mass incarceration, poverty, hunger, suspicion, hate, patriarchal monarchy disguised as democracy, and genocide. Within the context of that evil, bête noire – exactly how is that any different from the cultural nightmare that was ancient Rome’s legacy to the…

Tim Barrus, New York Times

Eating Dog Food and the pandemic are overwhelming realities, here, in Appalachia. I see nothing in the media about how desperate it really is. On my block, people are eating their dogs. Not stuffing. The shame runs deep. Suicide runs deep. Hopelessness runs deep. Failure runs deep. Giving up runs…