Late last Wednesday Lexie and Crystal and I decided to go to Adolf's Bar. Adolf's is the middle of the road for bars here - it's less redneck than about 50% of the establishments in town, but probably more country than the other half. It is a small place. It's located in an aluminum building like most of the other structures in town. Strictly speaking, it's not even in town, it's on hwy 61 heading north, across from the massive glowing power plant that cows graze in front of. The plan was for us to play pool and numb ourselves via their cheapest alcohol. It took us a while to work up the guts to tell the boys inhabiting the pool corner that we'd like them to give up a table...specifically it took us two cans of the Beast. Meanwhile, we got to listen to the same 3 girls and 4 boys do kareoke repeatedly to both TLC and Charlie Daniels Band. We have that great cross pollination of cultures here, where the trashiest of us listen to only the combination of the most popular "southern" country hits, and the spillover of black culture via Gangster Rap and Sex R&B. Basically, whatever they can get ready to screw to.

Working the door was Randy McGill, whom Lexie and I graduated with. Randy holds the distinction of being the only person I ever slow danced with at a school function. I've only ever been to one - a dance commemorating the sucessful end to our 6th grade year. And true enough, I danced with Randy there, with his sweaty hands and already developing musculature. Once we got in high school he was already lifting weights and playing football, although he was very quiet. We've always had a understanding. We didn't run in the same circles anymore but we nodded to each other like those who used to be friends. So now he worked as a bouncer at this bar, after apparently having a failed attempt at moving to Starkville. It's very hard for us Delta Children to get out of here. Our blood poisens us once we leave, I mean it. I have plenty of examples from my graduating class, from the class before me or after me. All the people that I know who have left town sucessfully and without regret are children of college professors, those who had logically chosen the best place to teach and raise their children, and then taught their children to choose a life based on logic too. Logic does not tell you to say in cleveland, so they have no problem immigrating to beautiful and cultural colorado or north carolina. Those people never let this place get inside of them in the first place.

So Randy, Crystal, Lexie, and I are playing game after game of pool, and Lexie and I's skill is starting to wane as the alcohol sets in deeper. Another girl we graduated with comes up to me to tell me how shocked she is to see that I'm drinking. I tell her she doesn't know very much about my life. She's lost a lot of weight since high school. She asks me about a mutual friend we had, and I explain that I'm bad at keeping in touch with people, especially when their lives get weird or complicated and I don't know what to say to them anymore. I can't stop thinking about how much weight she's lost. Some people have changed in the years since we've graduated. Some have made better of themselves, and though I can list all the places I've been through and the weird activities I've been a part of, I can't say I'm one of those changed people. My life seems to run in the same circle, I don't gain or lose weight, I don't find new loves or abandon old ones, I don't get married or find a career.

Sometimes when I'm talking to people from around here -the towns like Merigold and smaller- my accent slides up suddenly, so thick that it sounds fake...but it's not. I feel like I'm fighting these two sides to myself here. One is the part of me that goes on tour, that part of me you meet on the road and say "Their accents are not so thick for being from Mississippi." The other part of me stays here always. That part of me wants to move into the smallest town I can find, buy pictures of the river, eat crawdads on Sundays, elect the same mayor for 30 years, talk to the people I knew in high school - that my parents knew in high school, uphold my grandfather's name in the community, and hope that things never change. This is the part of me that is slow and unmoving like one of these muddy rivers. The other part of me tries to contest all of this and read these anarchist books that I truely do believe in. I'd like to think there is room for both parts to win, but in reality I'll probably either end up in Portland doing rooftop agriculture and protesting the WTO, or I'll stay here and let things settle me into these same slow moving currents. At least I've got company.