Today I brought the unwanted leftovers from that jackpot Craigslist vinyl purchase to a semi-corporate record store in Memphis called Spin Street. The cashier up front directed me to the “Socially Hazardous” section in the back of the store. There, I met Paul—the store’s “vinyl guy” who didn’t hesitate to start judging me. A sign above his hermit price tagging station reads “Prepare to be offended.”

Paul looks about 50, has Ozzy Osbourne’s hair cut short, and likes saying phrases like “Zippidee doo dah” and “Sim sim sala bim.” He’s a classic disgruntled employee, fraught with agony amidst his 18-year-old coworkers and seemingly brain-dead usual customers.

After assuming 22 is an OK age to look down upon, Paul went through the 30 or so records I brought in (Billy Joel, Emmylou Harris, Phoebe Snow, Janis Ian, etc.) He was on the defense, expecting I was there to clean out his cash drawer with some junk albums. Telling him about my real collection wasn’t enough to win his approval. I thought this guy was going to keep up his toolish charade until the guy behind me approached the counter.

I’d say after living in Savannah for four years, my southern dialect deciphering abilities are in top form. This kid just wasn’t speaking English. After he mumbled something about the Stax museum and “laying down tracks,” Paul and I determined he was trying to sell his rap cuts to the store itself, but he hadn’t yet recorded, produced or pressed those tracks.

It was only after Paul dismissed the guy that I could speak to him in an unchallenged manner. Now, instead of brushing me off because I wasn’t a 50-something, burnout record store clerk too, Paul let me know how much it meant to him that guys like me are still around, “a big part of the counter-culture movement” or something. He even rounded my $9 trade-in cash up to $10!

He then told me that he can’t help but be a racist. I could tell already, the way he dealt with the rap game’s next mogul moments earlier. He apologized for having an attitude originally, and blamed it on the police investigating a meth lab in the apartment above his late last night—the apartment of a black couple. He told me that his impression of black people is tainted, and that he can’t separate his gripes with today’s culture from his gripes with the young black people he encounters every day.

As most who are reading this will know, I can’t be any less racist than I am. I try my hardest not to even think in a generalizing manner, especially when it comes to skin color. The way Paul confessed his unintentional racism didn’t disgust me, but it came close.

After leaving Spin Street, I hit up the Taco Bell next door for a chalupa. I was the only person in line. No one would take my order. I couldn’t help but notice the worker ratio of seven black men and women to one white man. After almost 10 minutes of waiting, $5 bill in hand, asking each employee that walked by if they’d take my order and receiving no response, that one white man, Todd, came to help me.

“I ain’t supposed to be takin’ orders, I’m cookin’ today—but what do you want, man. I’ll go make it for you.”

He brought my food back up to me before anyone else in the tiny kitchen could notice. It took another few minutes for the girl behind the counter to take my money as I waved it almost unreasonably close to her face.

Paul’s words still fresh in my mind, I walked out verging on making a judgment I’d usually berate others for considering. But a man outside stopped me—an old homeless black man.

“This here’s the worst damn Taco Bell I ever been at! I seen how they treat you—shit was pitiful! Don’t let their crap get you down, man. Don’t let that ruin your day.”

The Jacob Lawrence collection is incredible, almost to the point of overwhelming.

For those unaware, Lawrence was a Harlem-based painter reminiscent of Romare Bearden. His work has been commended in many ways, like the U.S. National Medal of the Arts. His bold, almost cubist style is vivid and blatant. Many of his pieces are based on history and legends, forming sequential bodies of work.

What I found most interesting about this collection of at least 50 Lawrence pieces was its apparent popularity among children—a binder filled with paper intended for Brooks visitors’ thoughts was swarming with first-grade handwriting: “These are really cool!” “Thank you Jacob!” “Your work insprires me alot.” Some kids left drawings of simple figures along with, or entirely in place of, their interpretations. This commentary helps prove simple imagery and depiction of certain events and ideas is just as strong in art as people love to believe burying a piece’s meaning under a complex layer of media and concept.

Joyce Kozloff’s “Joyce Kozloff’s Boys’ Art” sat under a glass case only showing one page of its probable total beauty. This book hit me with as much nostalgia as possible—loads of intricate, tiny red-pen figures grimacing and firing beams from their clenched fists, and poor renditions of popular drawn characters scribbled all over a textbook style map of Germany. This piece will no doubt influence my drawings, sending me back to age 10 for weeks, if not forever. (Sadly, online images of Kozloff’s work doesn’t do my impression justice.)

Evan Lindquist’s late-’70s engraving, “Thought,” speaks for itself conceptually. Although, I’m not sure my tangents are always so tangle-free.

One of Nam June Paik’s TV towers stands in the central lobby—nothing short of fascinating in person, as expected.

Not many other people were at the Brooks today. However, one man, while spouting his opinions on the film “Metropolis” to his friend, managed to touch a few 18th and 19th-century oil paintings with his bare hands. Uh.

Some notes:

The most exciting part of the Florida panhandle was knowing I was 60 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

Dothan, AL is the “building mural city” of the U.S. This is the one I saw. This is the one I wish I saw.

A small town along US-231 between Ozark and Birmingham, AL is home to at least 20 bingo halls, two of which have large, inflatable, angry-looking gorillas standing on the roof. Other notable sights in that town: a gas station, trees, Po’ Boys Guns & Ammo.

A woman who looks about 90 years old is working in a McDonald’s just outside Birmingham on I-65. She showed me where the ketchup was.

The men’s room in the Chevron near Jasper, AL doesn’t have enough space to sit without your knees pressed up against the wall opposite the toilet.

Looking back, I should have detoured to Natural Bridge, AL. My assumptions of the town were correct.

US-78 turns beautiful once over the Mississippi border. The highway cuts between some of the rolling green hills, leaving high, brown rock walls on either side of the road. Water the land soaked up from the day’s showers leaked down the rocks.

A semi was broken down on the side of US-78 in the Holly Springs National Forest. Its cargo: a highway-style Taco Bell sign bigger than my first two apartments. I almost slammed the brakes going 85 for a picture.

Posts from Tennessee to follow. Stay tuned.

Spent the rest of the day looking at sneakers but not buying any.

The natural world is crawling with allegories.

Two days on a sailboat proved both liberating and incarcerating.

My body still feels like it’s floating up and down waves miles offshore.

Floating in the small pool at the marina at dusk piqued my interest in dendrology, as I watched a tall, tan tree with wide branches and bright green leaves form a flat canopy in the wind flowing off the ocean.

It leaned over the pool, over the group of drunk fishermen and their wives listening to the Eagles and talking about who’s fucked their daughters. Its leaves shivered in the breeze but never fell down to me.

I still don’t know its name.

I’ve been living off craigslist revenue for weeks now. Approx. one month until the temporary move to Memphis. Anyone in Graceland need some freelance?