A rare Lady Slipper orchid [Cypripedium reginae], just coming into bloom in April, 2020 on Lookout Mountain: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, Ala. – It’s a tough business always being brutally honest.

But somebody has to do it, right?

Sorry in advance. There’s no funny little ditty to sing you this morning. This is just not funny anymore.

As I sit here isolated and alone on the mountain in the quiet woods, watching the world go by on the web, I can’t help but think we’re nearing the end.

Maybe it’s just me, because I feel old and fed up. I’m sick and tired of dealing with crazy, ignorant, arrogant, selfish human beings, when all I have ever tried to do was help people understand what’s really going on in the world.

My entire life’s work has been devoted to altruism. Forty years of journalism.

“How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man,” Bob Dylan sang.

If altruism is too big a word for some of my dumbass friends in Alabama, well look it up. If you are reading this you have the Google search engine right there in front of you. Do I have to explain everything in Facebook comments to people one-on-one every damn time?

Forget all the pretenses that drive our society, culture, government and media system. If you don’t know what the word pretense means, by all means look it up.

Maybe it’s the stress from being so isolated due to the novel coronavirus, but I do not think I’m alone. My good friend Tony Parker, the pollster in Birmingham, had had enough yesterday when he posted this on Facebook.

“Who has bail money? I am maintaining my social distance but, a dumb ass without provocation said ‘god bless Trump’ while I was doing pick up at the Fish Market in Birmingham. I asked him if he was ‘fucking kidding’ and was he ‘that stupid’?”

“His only come back was – ‘I bet you voted for George McGovern too.’ I said, ‘bet your ass I did and the country would be a better place if he had won and, oh by the way, you are a Fox (News) brainwashed dumb ass, uneducated, half wit’.”

“The lady taking our order said hey I’m just trying to take everybody’s order.”

“Damn, the world we live in. Lol. I can’t believe how many dumb asses that are walking among us. Oh, if you really don’t like my posts please Unfriend me. I’m old and tired of this bs.”

I’m with you, Tony. I don’t have much money, but I’ll send you five bucks if you get arrested for punching a Trump supporter and somebody puts up a GoFundMe for you. Nobody will do a GoFundMe for me, because you have Rachel Maddow and cable TeeVee.

John Prine

The other day I was reading stories about the death of John Prine from this horrible virus gripping the land, listening to John Prine records (or at least his songs on my computer) and I wrote a song. I can’t post the lyrics yet, because I sent it to another song writer in Nashville and they may be working on it and producing it now.

Then on Sunday, while I was laying down on the bunk bed upstairs in this Snuffy Smith log cabin tracking the tornadoes and thunderstorms on my iPhone, I couldn’t help but start thinking of my own mortality. In this I know I’m not alone.

What if a strong wind were to blow down one or more of these 150-foot tall pine trees around here and squash me like a bug?

Or what if one of Trump’s so-called Christian redneck supporters somehow finds out I’m here and decides to take his angst out on me?

Maybe I’m being a little paranoid, but who wouldn’t be in these crazy times? You’ve seen what Trump says about the press on TeeVee. You know how crazy these people are. You’ve seen the stories about all the ammo running out at the Walmart.

I guess I was concerned enough on Monday to call a friend of mine in Tuscaloosa who sometimes helps maintain the New American Journal web interface, to make sure this archive will remain up long after I’m gone. He’s also my legacy contact on Facebook. Maybe one of these days a historian will come along, if we survive this virus, and find this 15-year body of work and maybe consider it worth mentioning in a book. I mean something similar happened to Henry David Thoreau.

If not it won’t matter to me anyway. I’ll be dead and gone and many of you will be too.

We were joking around a little bit about this, and my friend had an interesting thought when I said maybe he could find someone to write my obituary after I’m gone. It’s not like I haven’t thought about doing this before.

In journalism school, one of the exercises we used to teach was to have students write their own obits. News organizations often write the obits of famous people long before they die to have them ready just in case. We call this a “canned obit.” Off the top of my head I can’t remember why we call it that. I’m sure you can Google that too.

This practice has two teaching functions. One, you learn how to write a feature obit. Two, you have to stop and think what you want your life to look like down the road. What do you want to accomplish in life? It’s a good thing to think about for a young journalism student. I’m a little worried about this Generation C, the kids coming along now not being able to attend their own classes or graduations because of the coronavirus and social distancing.

I told my friend I might get around to writing my own obituary and saving it as a draft he can publish upon my death. But I’m not quite ready to do that yet. Besides, I said, it’s all in the book anyway.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

For the record I was pioneering web publishing in the first decade of the Internet Age, when we published The Southerner magazine in Tennessee.

I taught journalism for a little while, then went back to work for newspapers for a time, before turning back to the web full time when I moved back from Washington, D.C. in 2005 to take care of my elderly mother in Birmingham. I was keeping up with the news at first with an old html news links page, then in the second decade of the Internet Age, I added a blog interface to the back end of it and called it The Locust Fork News-Journal. Some of my Facebook friends may remember from the email listserv days.

In 2014, I finally got my mom into a retirement community and moved back to Washington in a camper van and got a fresh start under a new name, a New American Journal, for new media, national in focus, not a blog but a news journal, in the third decade of the Internet Age.

Back to the present tense, as I was still contemplating my own mortality, as I’m sure many of you have also done of late, I wrote another song. This one I will share with you, since it updates my final wishes from something I wrote a long time ago about wanting my ashes scattered along the water’s edge by the Gulf of Mexico in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Since I don’t much care for beaches anymore, and have come to prefer mountains — maybe because of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels, sea level rise and all that — I have a new final wish. I also sent this one to Nashville, but have not heard back on it yet, maybe because I’m not television famous.

Bury Me On Lookout Mountain

I’ve told the truth my whole life
Even when a white lie might have done just fine
It’s in my DNA somehow,
Traveling with me in this ride called life.

I told the truth in the newspaper
I told the truth on TV
I tried on the radio but it didn’t quite work out
So it was all online from there for me.

I love telling stories
Especially with the freedom of the web
You can take them or leave them
It don’t matter much to me…

Just do me one favor
When I depart this world somehow
Please bury me on Lookout Mountain

Please bury me on Lookout Mountain
Deep in the pines by a babbling brook,
Do it somewhere they can’t find me
To take the last piece of my hide

I’m tired of running from peak to peak
But I’ll keep doing it for you
As long as they let me
And you keep reading…

I’ve kicked their asses
And I’ve been scarred
But when the man gets too big
You can bury me on Lookout Mountain

Please bury me on Lookout Mountain
Deep in the pines by a babbling brook,
Do it somewhere they can’t find me
To take the last piece of my hide

Do it somewhere they can’t find me
Deep in the pines by a babbling brook.