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This is a little bit of an idea I put together for Pieces of the Mirror, my, as yet unfinished, collection of puzzled prose I was writing in the summer of 2008. It somehow did not get posted, or was deleted accidentally. I recently came across it while I was transferring my writing from my computer to my new laptop. I could not find it on my blog, and so decided to post it now.

I often feel the way I did then in these times of trying to write in between work, commutes and other parts of life that need my presence, like I am chugging on my way to the next idea on less than optimum roads through often unfamiliar territory.

Lately my ideas are scattered like small towns in Mississippi of over 50 years ago. Each one connected with some small rural highway running through a landscape of farms and little woodland patches all warm and humid, and my consciousness is like an old pick-up truck backfiring its way in a circuitous route trying in a lazy way to connect them. When my pick-up stops in a sigh of dust and exhaust at some broken down gas station of an idea, my consciousness will get out and converse in slow southern tones casually with the old man who runs the ancient pump that will give my mental vehicle fuel to rumble on down that bumpy mostly paved randomly numbered route to my next idea. I am not in any hurry. Things just are not developing that quickly in my mind that I would need a super highway or a bullet train. Maybe my mental pace will advance into the 21st century soon, but for the time being I’ll be moving on the faint gray lines in between the tiny dots somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico and to the east that big river that flows from out of the great open plains down into the bayou country. Maybe thats where my mind is headed. Maybe next week I will be stranded somewhere in the night, bald tires mired 2 feet in the mud on a back road next to a bayou with not a phone in sight. I just can’t say for sure. Maybe I will drive over the long bridge into the 21st century and take a plane to somewhere I have heard of and my ideas will come tumbling into a melting pot city, converging into epiphanies of light and activity that never sleep. Right now I find myself just outside of Minter City (that name sounds familiar) near the Yazoo River and my gas gauge needle is in the red. I guess I’ll mosey in and see what this place has to offer a mental traveler on a warm Sunday morning sometime in the middle of the previous century, maybe a little prayer and a song and church coffee. Sounds good right about now. I think I will just stick to the river road after that. Maybe I could make Yazoo City by sunset.