Category Archives: Personal

Behavior, Opinion, Personal, Psychology, Social Rules

Thoughts From A Madman

07/19/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

Thoughts From A Madman

If you read all this expecting a nice bowtie conclusion, you’re in the wrong place. I also wouldn’t fault you if you read it and think I’m under the influence.

On average, if you’re sky diving, it takes about twelve seconds to reach 120 mph. Those twelve seconds are a piano riff of experience, one so fast that you only hear one thunderous notes as your fingers slide down the keys. Try to explain the indescribable sensation to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The same logic applies when you try to explain addiction, abuse, or a hundred other things to someone who has not personally experienced it.

Someone smart said that it’s the definition of a minute: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.” If asked to describe both experiences, words come quickly to recount the hot stove, whereas the pretty girl scenario provokes a desire to be poetic.

Consider our biological imperative to procreate. In terms of evolution, it is our primary objective. It pervades us as individuals, and touches all aspects of society. Attractiveness is marketing. Most people are not aware of how much time and energy gets directed toward looking better. We clutch our pearls when people seem to be interested in sex, as if it’s not the elephant in the room. We’ve categorized it as one of the most important things in life, yet the one thing that we can’t talk openly about. This post will get fewer of views because I used the word ‘sex.’ Which is strange, because about 70% of the men who are on this app will pretend that the algorithm doesn’t feed them suggested content on the fringes of it, if not a spiral of partially clad women. The algorithm knows us even when we don’t acknowledge it.

Another friend posted about the ridiculousness of telemarketers. If everyone collectively refuses to participate, it goes away. And that’s true for everything. War? Prostitution? Banjo music? They exist because there’s a market.

Friday worship eats our modern life. Futurizing, anticipating, pocketing away the intervening moments just to be able to slide into perceived comfort that allegedly waits for us at the end of most of our workweeks. But Monday sits and waits for us. Take a vacation. You’ll think about it for weeks in advance. The blur of the glorious vacation flies past, leaving us to greet our mundane life when we return. Kodak moments give way to relentlessly washing dishes, paying bills, and surviving an endless series of orchestrated drama that most of us experience at work.

If you can’t embrace the “chop wood, carry water” part of life, the odds of you being happy fall like a vase placed on a table near a cat.

Did you know that the fastest camera in the world can take 156.3 trillion pictures per second? Despite its speed, it is still slower than reality. We look at clocks to see what time it is, as if it means anythimg other than it is our mechanical executioner, demarcating another flash of time that we didn’t dive into.

Think of the famous painting of the Mona Lisa. Millions of people have seen it. Yet few notice that the painting hasn’t had eyebrows in centuries. We focus on the enigmatic smile, yet rarely notice the glaring absence of eyebrows. We do the same for people. Everyone has something noteworthy, yet we constantly filter and categorize people in order to makes sense of the world. But it’s our world, one limited to us. It boggles the mind that we are entirely different people depending on who is interacting with us. Each of them has their own idea of who we are. Even though we claim to be driven by logic, all of us know the agony of realizing that we can never change someone’s first impression, much less having become a totally different person.

People feel lonely despite most of us having complex communication devices that can connect us to almost every person in the world, every idea once expressed, all at once. We hold these devices up in an attempt to capture a moment, even though there isn’t really such a thing as a singular moment. It doesn’t stop us from having thousands of pictures on our phone. Like bibliophiles with a thousand books they never removed from the shelf.

Scientists now know that time seems to fly as we age because we have fewer new experiences, less revelry in different food, and less inclination to switch the radio to another music station. We attempt to become stagnant, limiting ourselves to the comfort of what we know. “New music sucks,” some say. Some new music sucks – just like some of the music that grooved valleys into our emotional memories sucked. “People are all the same,” is another refrain. “I’ve seen it all. Why travel? Everything is the same no matter where you go.” No, it’s not. You’re the same wherever you go. Finding new things becomes too much trouble.

The reason I love stories of people who break things is that whether they are pushed into or choose it, they realize that the long list of things that supposedly define us are all easily discarded if circumstances demand it.

If you don’t think we complicate thingss, think of the Hawaiin language. It has only thirteen letters, yet can voice all the ideas and content that our more complicated language does.

PS The picture is of College Avenue. When I’m out walking in the dead of the night, I love to walk down the middle of the main roads and see how long I can walk without a vehicle passing through to interfere. I’m sorry Chad, that you’re on your way home at 2:00 a.m. after drinking nine craft beers and a cucumber-infused tequila.

Fayetteville, Lemon Moment, Personal, Work

If

07/18/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

A huge bolt of lightning shook the neighborhood shortly before 1:30 a.m. Even though it’s rare for me, I had miraculously fallen back to sleep after waking up around midnight. I was dreaming so intensely that the lightning strike seemed to have followed me out of the dream. I’m certain that one part of the dream resulted from a conversation I had yesterday when I explained that I track how many days old I am.

It’s rare for me to remember my dreams vividly. Since my sleep pattern switched a few years ago, my brain retreats to a dead place that is more akin to hibernation than sleep.

Today is my first day off work all year. It didn’t occur to me that this was the case until late last week. I decided I would make the final decision as to whether I would work when I woke up this morning. And that if I didn’t go in, I would take a ridiculously long walk. I had to wait for the storm front the mostly move away. For those of you who weren’t up at 1:30, the lightning show was amazing.

I work with several hard workers who don’t get to enjoy the incredible benefit of paid time off. Some of them are losing almost a couple of hundred dollars per pay period because we lose the hours once we are capped out at the maximum. All of us appreciate that we work for an employer with good benefits. But all of us feel the cringe of being put in a situation where we can’t enjoy it because of understaffing. Whether I should say that or not is another issue. But everyone knows that burnout is unsafe for us as individuals and as workers.

Perhaps they grind of work is training for the upcoming economic mess. There is no doubt it is coming and its tendrils will affect all but a few of us. I can picture my grandma saying, “there ain’t no belt tightening when someone has taken your belt.”

My long walk was beautiful. The strange misty glow of the early morning-late night after rain lights. The smell from the rain and the clingng heat. The empty roads that I walked down the middle of. A family of raccoons that complained as I unknowingly walked by. An unseen young woman on one of the balconies of the beautiful modern apartments flanking Gregg, as she beautifully and melodically sang a song I wasn’t familiar with, and a song probably unwelcome to the ears of the other residents. (But for me, as an accidental audience, it was perfect.) The long stretches of both hill and road. The night time summer sky billowing with retreating white clouds. The occasional person on a scooter; some of them involuntarily participating in the morning.

I hated giving up ownership of the streets. Leaving the unobserved and frozen in time houses with all the residents tucked away inside.

It’s hard to explain how rounding a corner and seeing strange orange glow of a section of road brings on the same feelings that “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” or “Stranger Things ” It’s just a stretch of road illuminated by optical illusions. But you weren’t there when I looked to my left and saw a ground light being temporarily blocked by a cat who was creeping along the edge of the driveway. It was accidental synchronicity and caused the hair on my arms to stand. I stopped to take a picture of the light. But that’s all it is. People sound a little off when they try to express how such little moments are entirely different when they are experienced.

The same is true for most of us when we listen to someone describe their dream. The narrative loses the immersive magic that held the storyteller captive while they were experiencing it.

(I added the word death to the mailbox as a joke…)

…

The dream:

Instead of a tombstone, the grave was marked by a tall crystal spire. Somehow, I knew that it wasn’t an actual grave and that inside whatever what was in the ground was nothing more than a DNA sample.

The sun peeking through the trees was orange red and seemed off in a way I couldn’t precisely explain.

Even the air felt thin and reprocessed.

The dash of the dates didn’t initially make sense: “1967-23,666.” Then I realized whoever designed it knew about my penchant to calculate my age based on the number of days instead of years.

Turning my head, I saw that four people stood behind me. Each of them carried a vial of colored sand. The sand shown brilliantly, like ground diamonds.

They didn’t speak English but I understood them.

“Does anyone have anything they would like to say?” I couldn’t see who voiced the words.

“No. I think he said it all before he left.”

As I turned my head again, the four people moved closer. I didn’t step away. They passed through me as they approached the spire. I felt like I had become mist.

Each of them opened their tiny vials and poured the contents into a almost invisible seam about halfway up the spiral. Flashes of almost every color began washing over the grass around them.

They disappeared as the sky became dark, like a sped up movie traversing time. As I watched the sun slide down the sky, my field of vision collapsed into a single dot of rainbow colored light and then disappeared.

…

Biographical, Family, Lemon Moment, Music, Nostalgia, Personal

Nostalgia

07/15/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

I love when forgotten memories get unlocked by music. Monday afternoon I was scrolling and Sammy Arriaga’s version of Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” came on.

I remembered a specific summer afternoon over the years. But for some reason, this time an enormous amount of details came back. It felt like a door had been unlocked and let me remember things that were locked away. It was July of 1990, back when I was as naive about so many things and an expert at things most people didn’t experience.

I hadn’t thought about that summer afternoon in years. Even though it was my first year at Cargill, I was trying to do something for Uncle Buck who had helped me yet again. Many people don’t know that it was because of him that I was able to do things that I otherwise might not have. Several times in junior high, he stepped in and helped me when my parents drank all their money away. I have to include Aunt Ardith in my thanks.

I mowed Uncle Buck’s yard for him. Because Aunt Ardith went to play bingo, Uncle Buck invited me to join him as he poured himself a “snortee.” Jimmy would have been at his job at Mary Maestri’s, working in the separate building on the large property at the corner of what is now highway 112 and 412. Like almost everything else, it’s an entirely different world out there now.

For once, I accepted a small glass of whiskey with two cubes of ice. Uncle Buck laughed like he did, pointing out that people who preferred to drink their whiskey straight were either sophisticated or about to start a fight.

When I was younger, Uncle Buck tried to encourage me to learn to play bass guitar. He liked to tease me about being in band and choosing the French horn. But he was glad that I was into music. Once I graduated, I turned down both a music scholarship and an offer to be in the United States Army Orchestra. Uncle Buck wasn’t someone who repeated himself often, but there were a few times he told me to find a way to get back into music.

Uncle Buck got out one of his records. He chose Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls.” He showed me the album cover and laughed at Fender’s enormous head of hair. By that age, I had already adopted my short haircut.

Probably because no one else was at the house, Uncle Buck told me to listen to the song with fresh ears. He said that it was one of the best examples of a perfect country song. Just a stripped down love song that wasn’t cluttered by technique.

I don’t know what Uncle Buck was thinking about when the song played the first time. It’s strange to me to think that he was around 57 years old that afternoon, just a little younger than I am now. Whatever look he had on his face, it was 100% nostalgic.

When he played it the second time, he explained it to me as a musician. While I don’t remember specifically everything he said, he told me that it was the perfect tempo to sing or dance to. That it was standard time, mostly major chords, and that it was the perfect example of a verse-chorus song. Uncle Buck was impressed with the fact that Freddy Fender made a hit out of it both in country and pop. Uncle Buck was also impressed that the song included a steel guitar and an accordion.

As the song played a second time, I almost fell out of my chair when Uncle Buck softly followed the lyrics as Freddy Fender switched to Spanish. Uncle Buck loved teasing me about speaking Spanish, but this time, after the song ended, I asked him about it. He told me that because he learned all music by ear, it was just a question of repetition.

We listened to a couple of other songs before Uncle Buck put on Charlie Pride’s “Kiss An Angel Good Morning ”

I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but he pointed out that it was almost perfect too, because it was the type of song bad singers could do reasonably well.

I wish I could remember what song he played next. That part is lost to me. He got up to pour himself another drink. He stood in front of his well-equipped stereo system, thinking. As an electronics tech for Montgomery Ward, he had nice stereo equipment. Whatever song it was, by the time it ended, he had downed his drink.

If I had it to do all over again, I would find ways to sit with Uncle Buck and have him talk about music. When he was younger, he had the chance to play with some amazing musicians in Memphis. Even though he played in a couple of bands that did well, he chose a good job with benefits over the musician lifestyle when he moved to Springdale. Because I’m older now and can relate to the fact that he was about the age I am now, I understand the nostalgia he probably felt that afternoon.

Music, Personal, Relationships

Monday Has It’s Tuesday

07/08/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

Monday Has Its Tuesday

(A man dressed in a black suit stands with his back turned toward the empty auditorium. As he turns to hold the stand mic with his right hand, a soft spotlight highlights his chin, tilted to the ground, obscured by his hat.

As the band hidden offstage begins to play, the man removes his hat and holds it over his heart.

He takes a deep breath as his voice reverberates throughout the auditorium. It’s obvious that his voice is powerful. For this song, however, he holds back, as if alllowing his voice to be free will bring him to his knees.

As he sings, he looks at the stage floor.)

Monday has its Tuesday

The night has the sun

Standing here alone

Feeling undone

Presence is a choice

Time is short for all

I’m losing myself

and becoming small

You shine your light to others

Without a second thought

When I’m here waiting

Slowly losing the plot

(Chorus)

I need your energy

both laughter and desire

smile when you see me

always wanting to know more

I’m losing myself

I feel like a chore

Monday has its Tuesday

The night has the sun

Standing here alone

Feeling undone

(As he sings the last two lines, he raises his head to finish)

I guess I’ll wait

Even though I’m gone

(He bends to place his hat on the floor, flooded by the spotlight. He sighs and shrugs, exiting stage left.)

Brinkley, Lemon Moment, Monroe County, Nostalgia, Personal

Nostalgic Dream

06/28/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

Robert looked at William in consternation.

“The house you paid for and waited for is gone. You had it for a day. Why are you smiling?”

William laughed and looked at Robert.

“Are you kidding? I spent a day on the porch and went to sleep in a room exactly like the one I slept in when my Grandpa was alive.”

“You’re strange, ” Robert said. “But I understand.”

William flipped the retrieved nail in his fingers.

They stood in the carbon and ashes of what was the front porch. Even the creosote soaked railroad ties that served as steps were reduced to ashes. Behind them long strips of galvanized steel lay twisted and burned on the ground. Concrete pylons poked out from the burned remnants.

Both of them looked out across the cotton field and watched the dragonflies against the sunset.

“Sometimes a day is a lifetime,” William whispered into the baked air of the Delta.

Fayetteville, Lemon Moment, Personal

Mimosa Morning

06/28/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

Because of the unique view my apartment grants me, I’ve noticed there are certain moments before sunrise when there are fleeting moments of beauty. This mimosa stands guard across the street, adjacent to the railroad tracks. Because of the beautiful trail enhancements and the modern lighting that adorns it, there are a handful of minutes when the mimosa seems to be backlit. The brooding clouds seen to enhance it. I took this picture twenty-two minutes before sunrise.

Some people dislike silk trees because of the perceived mess and the gnarled roots that provide unexpected trips. But if you are a fan of hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees, these are among the best places to stand and watch when the sun is attempting to toast your head.

If I could pick a time of day to render as static and unchanged, it might be the time shortly before sunrise. When the subdued colors are HDR and the world waits to be awakened. If you stand still, each minute changes both in hue and feel.

The second picture is looking down Leverett where it reaches its end against the agri park. To the left is Narnia, fourteen acres of dense, wild growth that holds thousands of birds and small animals. Even though it’s difficult to see, at the bottom of the first towering electrical pole is a public notice that this property will soon be erased to become a dense housing complex. Everything about this little private area will change forever when that happens.

X
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Behavior, Opinion, Personal, Photography, Politics, Religion, Social Media, Social Rules

Social Media Isn’t The Problem

06/27/2025 X Teri 1 Comment

On a recent friend’s post, people seemed to agree with “Social media destroys friendships.”

Do you mean to say, much like telephones did when they were introduced? Or computers?

Blaming technology is a vacuous accusation.

Social media is problematic because people do not use it in the same way that they hold conversations in their living rooms.

Much for the same reason, when people enter vehicles, it adds a layer of impersonal anonymity. That’s why people do and say things that they most likely wouldn’t do in person. It leads to road rage. Cursing. Aggressive behavior.

Social media gives people the power to reveal themselves. It does not create problems out of thin air. It strips back the ignorance we have about the things the people we know believe. It reveals resentment and anger hidden below the surface. It gives access to rudeness and poorly planned responses. That behavior is the responsibility of each person who engages in it. It does not fall on the outlet of expression we use as social media.

Social media is a virtual living room and the modern town square. Personally, I treat mine like my living room. If you go to my pages, you don’t see hostility. That’s because I don’t typically engage in it, and it’s not welcome in my virtual space.

If, however, I visit a page or website that’s not mine, I expect it to look and sound exactly like our society. If you are expecting kumbaya in content outside of your control, you should probably take a dosage of reality pills. People in groups are crass and argumentative. Logic is not the presiding factor. But people are also creative, compassionate, and informative. If you judge one portion of social media without consideration for the other, you’re missing the point.

If you gather a group of people, you’re going to hear a huge variety of opinions, interests, and hobbies. You’ll see people whispering to each other if they’re having conversations about other people. Uncle Larry is going to say something racist. Someone will likely show up drinking – and you know darn well they aren’t going to behave. Others will attempt to hog the conversation or say outrageous things for the reasons that people say and do those things. Social media works the same way.

Social media did not become massively popular by accident. It is the result of our individual choice and vote to use our precious time and energy engaging with it.

Social media does not destroy friendships. People do. One crass comment at a time.

People who focus exclusively on the negative aspects of social media ignore the power and beauty of collective expression. It’s easy to dial in to cynicism and hate. These aspects of social media are exactly what people exploit when they have agendas.

Each of us has tools to limit our exposure to things we don’t want to see. It works exactly like a TV guide. We can ignore platforms, programs, and the stations we choose. I don’t get angry because MTV has cooking shows. I scroll past it. I roll my eyes at what some people say, just as I expect them to roll their eyes or get pissy when they see mine.

If you’re looking at content from your friends, family, and acquaintances that makes you angry, it might be better to take a second look at who they are, how they behave, and what they believe. Act accordingly. They are revealing themselves. And while it might frustrate you, you at least have a means to see what occupies their thoughts and time.

Social media is what you make it. You can’t control collective communication. But you can control your exposure and how you choose to use it.

Social media per se is not the problem. It is us. All the defects and things about it that you do not enjoy are a reflection of our society.

Social media is exactly like alcoholism. Alcoholics falsely like to claim that their behavior is the result of drinking. It’s not. Alcohol removes their inhibitions and their control regarding what’s already in their heads. It is not a creator. It is a revelator.

X
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Fayetteville, Lemon Moment, Personal

Alien Artefact

06/26/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

It doesn’t resemble much seen up close. But under the darker sombrous canopy of trees above the creek, shimmering with sunlight shadows, it looked alien and transplanted. I wish I had brought my markers and chalk to further adorn it and give it a bit of life through color.

Traversing the creek, the water granted me a sudden reminder that light refraction hides unexpected depths and drop offs. More so in clear water. I did not bite my tongue as I stepped a foot deeper than I anticipated.

From there I found a delightful sand and sediment bar. Once stepped on, I sank a foot and a half. I’m glad it ended there because getting out of those things is more of a goal than a certainty.

X
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Ancestry, Biographical, Brinkley, DNA, Family, Monroe County, Opinion, Personal

Revelations of Dad

06/24/2025 X Teri Leave a comment

This is personal. I’m not overthinking these words. I just want to get them out.

I’ve written about some of this before. My dad was in prison in Indiana. I heard so many different stories when I was younger. The Terry family was cemented into compulsory silence about this and many other things. (Such as the fact that I had another sister until a few years ago.) To find any truthful reference to ‘why’ my Dad was in prison, I had to do it the hard way: I searched THOUSANDS of pages of newspapers across Indiana. I’ll never forget that feeling of finding specific information. I had a cousin who probably knew most of it correctly. But she opted to adhere to the family code of silence. That’s why I had to do it the hard way. When she didn’t provide the information, I told her that I was patient and that I would find it.

I don’t disclose these things to shame members of my family. Apart from the fact that you can’t shame someone who is no longer alive, facts don’t bring shame. They bring revelation. I’ve proven time and time again that anyone who stays at it will uncover most truths. That’s how I used DNA and a decade to find my sister. It’s also how I kept at it to substantiate the details of some of my dad’s life.

I received the Indiana Reformatory index card out of the blue today. The prison stopped maintaining most old mugshots. But in those few lines of information, there are massive implications.

I was born in March 1967. My dad was imprisoned on February 1st, 1967. He was in prison for two years, ten months, and six days. That’s a lot longer than anyone ever mentioned to me when I pressed them for information. Dad was living in Indiana before his arrest, which is the first documented proof that my parents were not living together. Dad joked that he had been in Alaska. He didn’t make the joke often because being in prison wasn’t something he talked about unless he was drunkenly telling people.

Less than four months after being released from the Indiana prison, my dad was involved in the death of a maternal cousin during a DWI incident. My Dad didn’t suffer any charges for this. Regardless of how people feel about me saying so, connections kept him out of trouble. Monroe County, Arkansas, was a different place then. The Terry family didn’t hesitate to use those connections to quash any concerns. Had my Dad been held accountable, it might have caused him to return to an Indiana prison. His parole wasn’t discharged until almost eight months after the DWI death.

When I’m thinking about my life or talking about it, I mention that I lived with my maternal grandparents while Dad was in prison. I wonder what life might have been like had he not returned. Whether his presence would have been substituted for another man of similar temperament. It’s all speculation. I wouldn’t have my other sister had Dad not returned, or if he had been put back into the system.

After the DWI death of my maternal cousin, Dad jumped into a highly questionable affair. It took me years to piece together that one of my earliest memories of standing up in the back seat was one in which I accompanied my Dad to Clarendon beach with his affair partner. Mom said that I couldn’t possibly remember it. Normally, I’d agree. Growing up that way tends to erase a lot of memory. But that memory stuck with me.

After that affair debacle, Dad engaged in another affair, one that led to the birth of my sister. I didn’t realize until I met her that her birth explained my family’s sudden departure from Dad’s beloved Monroe County to Northwest Arkansas. Away from my grandparents and some of my maternal family, who would have altered the trajectory that Dad’s behavior brought upon us.

I’m sharing this because I feel vindicated for finding more pieces as time passes. I’m not revealing anything that should not have been disclosed to all of us. The foolishness and false family honor of those who demanded secrecy still bother me. Then again, I’ve come to learn that this tendency governed their lives. Several of them were completely different people than their demeanor indicated.

Love, X