What Next

Since June 21, this update has been sitting in my drafts.

No content, just a title: What Next.

What next, indeed.

I stopped blogging a little over halfway through my trip, from a head-clouding mix of confusion, stubbornness, and shame (plus a few exciting life changes, for good measure).

See, I had a vision, once. A tidy little project, and a tidy little plan. A planned exploration leading to a planned revelation. And when that tidiness got… messy… well, I kinda imploded.

But I never gave up. I’ve been slowly crawling my way back up, and shifting the mess back into new, tidy piles, and I’m here to pick up where I left off. I have 42 pages of transcriptions – and five of the meatiest interviews still left to be transcribed – as well as a rough outline for my book now. I feel like I wrestled with the devil, and I won.

SPEAKING OF.

One of my Kickstarter perks was a bit open-ended; you could send me anywhere, to do anything. (Within reason. Luckily, none of y’all took full advantage of that.) The amazing R.L. Merrill, a San Francisco author, sent me to the crossroads to sing a blues song.

I started thinking about this in the Northeast, deciding what song to pick. I started keeping an eye out for crossroads as I drove south through the Carolinas, and even stopped at the crossroads where US61 meets US49, the very spot in Clarksdale Mississippi where Robert Johnson once sold his soul.

HB4116

But it was rainy, and cold, and crowded, and commercial, and there was a strip mall taking up most of the real estate. I drove on. I didn’t find the right time and mood until I popped back up out of Florida, on a sultry Georgia summer evening, smoke thick in the air.

I’ll let the video speak to what happened next.