Eric Wagoner

A view of the northern night sky through an ivy covered tree in north Georgia. A solar event is making the horizon glow purple.

This might be the most striking nighttime photo I’ve ever taken, thanks to the technology on this phone, an ivy covered tree, and solar storms making the sky light up way down here in Georgia.

Lee Harvey Oswald singing while Jack Ruby plays guitar and the state trooper plays keyboards.

I’ll reply instead.

A bumper sticker with Gordon Lightfoot’s face, a picture of a freighter, and the words “STOP HONKING! I'M CRYING TO THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD BY GORDON LIGHTFOOT”

Fifty years ago today the gales of November came early. I put a mournful sticker on my car to commemorate the occasion.

That’s twice this week Kaycee’s name came up, in different contexts. How odd!

Anyway, off to eat my afternoon bowl of bran.

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loading the dishwasher in a way that infuriates others is the most human these things have ever behaved

But Tchaikovsky has earned my trust, so I kept going. And by the end of the first chapter, the police have been called. So I guess it’s not that, and we’re off and running.

Just started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model. The first chapter reads like a retelling of “There Will Come Soft Rains” and I mean, look, if it were Joe Random author I think I would have bailed halfway through because that short story is perfect the way it is. I don’t need it to be a novel.

The original Far Side Cow Tools Cartoon by Gary Larson. A cow stands on its hind legs behind a table, staring blankly at the viewer from behind its heavy brow ridge. On the table are four crudely made tools: a lump, a lump with an offset crooked handle, a long stick with hooked prongs at the end, and a crude handsaw with irregular teeth. In the background a barn sits on a hill. Caption reads, "Cow tools."

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.

David is a world treasure. Bob doubly so.

I love Athens and will celebrate who we are and protect us as best I can. It’s just so hard sometimes to stay focused on everything I love.

Tonight helped. The Wild Rumpus is the embodiment of everything wonderful about Athens.

Athens is a tiny bubble and getting smaller every day. Just last night a grown ass man walked around in a fully tailored SS uniform. He got thrown out all the places and eventually bashed a girl in the face with a beer stein and went to jail. So they’re not welcome, but they think they can try now.

Tonight I went alone and in a terrible mental state. My brain chemistry is nearly as bad as my eyesight, and tonight it was really really bad. But I went and one of the first bands playing in the street was Mexicano ska, and after an hour of skanking with my big cardboard monster mask on I was good.

Me in front of a Mexicano ska band playing in the streets of downtown Athens Ga at the Wild Rumpus.

The Wild Rumpus Spectacle and Parade is one of my favorite events of the year. I’ve been in all 17, going back to the first one where the organizer put out a call for folks in costume to walk the downtown sidewalks with him and so many people showed up he got ticketed for holding an illegal parade.

This is so delightful!

Wallflower, by RJ McKendree 11 track album

The LP was, as I said, created entirely out of my head, by a fictional songwriter called RJ McKendree. But I knew exactly what it sounded like. When the book was done, I asked @dimorphodons.bsky.social "Do you fancy having a go at making it exist?" So he did: rjmckendree.bandcamp.com/album/wallfl...

In chapter one of my novel Villager, I described a fictional painting, painted 60+ years ago by a forgotten painter: a psychedelic swirl of moorland landscape, which later became the cover of a fictional psych-folk LP.

"Do you fancy having a go at painting this?" I asked my mum.

So she did...

Amazing.

Neeps, tatties, and a can of haggis

We can’t make it to the Scottish festival today, so the Scottish festival had to come to us.

"New Far Side comics" was definitely not on my bingo card for this week. They're not bad!

www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

Recorded footage today for my YouTube cooking show, for the first time in months. It felt really good.

I don’t know about nature healing any, but I am, just a little.

In my darker dreams, when mass violence erupts, this street is the first to get shot up.

I hate that this even enters my thoughts.

I’ve dreamed about it many times though. This neighborhood is the first minority neighborhood just inside the Athens county line, the border between this liberal island and extremely red counties with significant openly racist populations.

I’ve lived in this house, in an a neighborhood populated almost entirely by people of color, for nearly ten years.

Just now at 1am on a Wednesday night a car drove down the road with someone hanging out the passenger window yelling the n-word over and over.

It’s the 1st time I’ve seen that here.

I love Asheville so much. It’s two and a half hours away. It it were closer I’d be there all the time.

I had no idea how entwined he was with Athens until after I moved here. This place makes magic.

In memoriam...

From Survival to Sustainability: The Next 20 Years for LocallyGrown.net Six weeks after the rebuild, the crisis is over. Here’s the focused roadmap—EBT access, delivery tools, and quiet reliability—for community-run, multi-grower markets.

Six weeks after relaunch, the LocallyGrown.net crisis is behind me. What was once one hardware failure from extinction now has a future—and a roadmap for the next 20 years.

Final post in the series: From Survival to Sustainability
blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/locall...

It was good to see you!