"honey, white folks come in through the back!"
the old lady welcomed me in to her home
They were talking the three old ladies the ninety year old, about
how she wished she could learn computers
everybody should know computers, she said, that and Spanish
because so many people speak Spanish here these days, mmmhmmm, and she
doesn't blame them, everyone is so poor in their country, if you want to see poverty
go down there... she was eating in a restaurant in Juarez
and the children would come up and watch you, and they tell you not to feed them, but
no I couldn't eat dinner with hungry children, no, me neither
and they are the most hardworking people you'll ever meet, mmmhmmm, and we have
such lazy people here, I don't know
why everybody is complaining about them all the time, we ought to be
lucky to have them

Coffee:Half an hour away, in Lake City, there's a coffee shop and used bookstore, right near the angel shop (313 N Marion). The people who own the place are darling; I hope it is still open.
Food:There's some grocery stores in Lake City... and if you like BBQ, some authentic-looking BBQ joints in Jasper. Also in Lake City: Domo Japanese resaurant, I-75 and Hwy. 90.
Nature:A few state parks are around, like this one-- the Stephen Foster state park-- way down upon the Suwannee River, and all that jazz. The water is bright brown because of the tannin...
Other Things to Do:Tromp around in the swamps, pray, swat mosquitoes, drive to the ocean.
Nearby:Tallahassee, 1.5 hours west; Jacksonville, 2 hrs. east.

field notes: jasper, florida / 25 april 2005

"Without a vision, the people perish" -- Proverbs 29:18

It was me, the elderly lady, an old blind man named Sonny, and another old woman in purple that looked like a grouchy Hobbit. We pulled up to the Assembly of God church and parked on the trimmed green grass; the church was white, the sky was blue, all postcard-perfect.

I noticed I was probably the only one in the room under 60. I was introduced to Charlie, the pastor, wearing blue denim overalls. They all welcomed me as a child of God and then started to pray. Shit. They were freestyling and they were loud. I could tell this was the kind of thing where you were supposed to pray very loud so that the people on the pews around you could tell how good of a prayer you were. My mind was blank. Some writer I am. "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, le-olam, amen," I ventured, "bless my family and the trees and the birds and the sky, may we all live in grace, for-ever and ever," et cetera, all this commotion of prayer and all around me Praise Jesus My Jesus I Love You, just waves of it...

.... then it was time for the Lesson. It was called Power of a New Consecration and I thought it was quite good. There was this whole thing about a guy who killed 1000 people with a jawbone of an ass, because God was with him. They were talking about spiritual warfare and spiritual blindness and how to regain your spiritual sight... about how the mind is the battleground of the devil, and about fasting, and about how churches today are just empty entertainment like television. Eerily, I agreed with a lot of their complaints, since I do see a kind of spiritual malaise and blindness. Only I call this capitalism, not the devil. I see the mind being taken over by thoughts too, but I call this the ego. And I agreed that "this world" is full of temptation and trash, but that's what I call "consumer society," rather than the whole World...

and that was when I decided to give my life to Jesus Christ, my lord and Savior.

just kidding.

BUT, I thought, there's got to be some way to harness this power, the power of all these disaffected people feeling the ills of society and wanting to do good... and here they are talking about fasting, when they're completely obese, and spiritual blindness, but voting for George Bush--
how do I explain? There's got to be some way to tap into this. Any radical cannot afford to ignore the Christian population in this country. We've got to make use of this & speak their language somehow, since we're fighting against a lot of the same things, only they get tricked into thinking that conservativism will fix these ills, when really it creates it. As Cornel West points out in his book Democracy Matters, the Christians aren't making the correlation between the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus and the American Empire today.

well. i made it through the Lesson and then I found out that it had been just Sunday School-- the real Service was yet to come. This was an Assembly of God Church and they called each other Brother and Sister and got really riled up, Praise God, Hallelujah punctuating each phrase. Then there was a baptism. Charley and a woman stood in this tub of water, must have been 3 foot deep, with all their clothes on, and he dipped her in the water, and that was it. Rebirth, new life... within the walls of a windowless building, decorated with fake flowers.

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