When I took a week-long car trip through the south over the July Fourth weekend, rather than be around town to listen to an old, foolish, loudmouthed crackpot on the National Mall, surrounded by "his" tanks, rant on about the Revolutionary War troops "taking over airports". During my trip I stopped in to stay for a night as a guest of my BFF during my last year at SIA before I went off to boarding school for four years. He lives alone in an old port city in South Carolina and I was glad to catch up with him after several years of not seeing him. He has had occurrences in his life as a parent that are eerily similar to mine. We went out on the town that night and the next morning I got up before dawn and ran 2 miles in the stifling summertime heat of a seaboard southern city before I left after sunup to further pursue my trip.
In January I took a car trip to stop in overnight to see my cousin and her husband in Hampton, Virginia. I hadn't seen them since shortly before the last presidential election where, during a restaurant dinner with her extended family present, it became abundantly clear that politically I was supporting a clear upcoming winner (the qualified former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton) and victimhood resentment was obviously abounding on the part of her larger family when I was asked why all democrats maintained that all Trump supporters were uneducated (stupid, I guess), because didn't I know that many Trumpites had P'Hd's? I felt a little ambushed as I allowed as to how undoubtedly there were many Trump supporters who had received an education somewhere and let it go at that because Clinton was so overwhelmingly predicted to win handily. After Trump won, we didn't speak much for a couple of years. When I visited this year, I walked on the beach with my cousin and her dog early the next morning and we had a short, hesitant political discussion about the "deep state" and the "criminal presidency" and I guess that's a start because we both listened respectfully to each other. It did seem like two ships passing in the night on divergent courses though, with me knowing that my assertions were based on actual facts and believing that her assertions about the "dirty dems" must be based on what she perceived to be as facts.
During that trip I stopped in to see my college roommate on the Inner Banks of North Carolina who I visit occasionally. He lives alone in a house on stilts in hurricane country on the bank of the New Bern River and I enjoy visiting him because we sometimes sit around on his screened-in porch watching the river flow, eating fish and sipping beer. One of the last times I visited him I canvassed locally with him for a few days in 2016, monitoring early-voting at the courthouse for the Democratic party where, I'll never forget, a big ole caricature of a Southern elderly male voter took me aside and whispered in my ear, "You all are on the wrong side, boy." I laughed him off to myself because it was so obvious to me at the time that America was on an upward orb to ever more greatness. Little did I know the dark underside of Amerika being hidden inside the fetid belly of the outdated, republic-killing electoral college. My friend this year was looking to move out of his tiny coastal village, where life was awful slow, and move into a bigger seaport town so we toured the towns of Oriental and Southport, looking at their downtowns and nearby residential neighborhoods and looking at residences for sale. It was an interesting trip wherein I saw a person I thought I once knew well but never really did in the least.
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