.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Hurricane Season 2025

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Back when I was a kid, we all went to the Smith’s house when a hurricane came through South Georgia. It rained hard, the wind blew, but the adults wouldn’t let us look out of the windows at all. The lights flickered and did not go out. It was boring.

A hurricane came through Valdosta Georgia back in 1985 or 86, and because I was renting an apartment I didn’t care. I walked to the store to get some beer and realized drinking while being outside wasn’t a good idea, and for that matter, being outside was a bad idea. It was fun, kinda, to lean into the wind like I could.

I was sent to Mississippi in 2005, on the heels of Katrina, and that was life altering. I got there right after the power came on, and the people who owned motels and hotels reserved some rooms for people doing damage assessments so I never slept on a floor or in my truck. I met people who had lost everything, with no way of finding out if their families had survived, or if everyone else was dead. I went to a place where the smell of death filled the air.

Michael just missed us in 2018, but hammered my sister’s place and hometown of Blakely, Georgia. Then in 2023, Idalia hit and flooded my property, which killed many trees. In an odd way, I think that hurricane helped convince Aqaba that living inside was better than not. But by last year, when Helene hammered us, Aqaba was an inside cat.

Helene was the first, and the last, major hurricane I rode out. I had plans to evacuate, rented rooms, had a place to board the animals, and everything was set. Helene’s predicted track shifted west, I cancelled reservations, then she moved back to the east, hard. It was too late to find a place to run.

The storm passed directly over my house at about one in the morning. For about four hours all I could hear was wind and rain. At one point, it was so dark I started hallucinating colors. The wind rode in through the woods like waves at the beach, getting louder and louder, then receding, with the crack of  murdered trees punctuating the sounds. I lay in bed, fully clothed with my shoes on, waiting for the roof to go, or for a tree to come down on the house.

            At one point I was pretty sure I had made a serious mistake in judgement (I had) and was going to pay for it (I didn’t) but once the wind speed hit one hundred thirty eight there was nothing to do but lie there and wait. T’was a long night.

Right now, Erin is still in the Atlantic, heading north with two other systems cranking up. I enter the teeth of the 2025 Hurricane Season having rode out a high CAT 3 Hurricane. I will not do that again. Ever.

Whatever comes out of the ocean this year, I am running from it.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – A tale of Greg

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Greg and I were friends in high school. Several things about Greg were strange, but after all, he was a drummer in a band. I dated a woman who had known him most of his life, and was good friends with his family, and she thought Greg was a little odd, but so where most of her friends.

I was the best man at his wedding. His new bride was eighteen, he was twenty-four, and they seemed to be a happy couple. Two years later she left him.

Greg started dating a woman older than he was, and she had a twelve year old daughter. They went on vacation and Greg’s beach photos were mostly of the little girl in her swimsuit. I began to feel uneasy about Greg and the girl, but shortly after the beach trip, her mother broke up with him and left.

When I left the Army I moved to Valdosta Georgia and Greg had disappeared. A few years later he called me looking for a character witness in a trial. It seems that a computer virus had infected his computer and downloaded a lot of child porn. I told Greg I was the last person he wanted in that courtroom. If summoned I would have told the truth.

He had called a mutual friend and that friend called me, and we began to compare notes. Greg never had a girlfriend in high school, never dated, and his wife, Kim, looked a lot younger than eighteen. The photos of his girlfriend’s daughter made us stop and wonder. There was only one conclusion to come to about Greg. He was a pedophile. All the clues had always been there, but we, and everyone else, never put them together.

Last I heard, Greg had served five years in a prison in West Virginia on the child porn charge. Where he is now, I have no idea.

Greg and I were good friends. We drank together, we talked a lot about music and life. I was a roadie once for a gig he played at a Country Club where a woman got on stage and stripped. We went to concerts, the beach, and hung out a lot. I wore my dress green uniform at the wedding and somewhere there’s photos of us together. Greg and I were close.

Child Porn is a red line for me with Greg or anyone else. Sexualizing children is abhorrent. I was more than willing to disregard the good times years of friendship in order to preserve my own values. I would do the same with anyone I have ever known.

I will, without hesitation or regret, cut ties with anyone who has anything to do with sexualizing children. There is no acceptable degree.

Take Care,

Mike

friday Firesmith – Eighty Years Later: The Bomb and The Surrender

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Contrary to one of the many myths that surround the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August of 1945, none of the aircrew of either plane committed suicide or became insane after the bombing.

In 1985, a navigator on one of the planes that accompanied the bomber that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki did commit suicide, and was despondent over health issues he had, as well as the bomb.

The dropping of the two bombs might have, or might not have, convinced the Japanese to surrender. The Russian invasion of Manchuria, in fact, was a greater cause for concern to the Japanese than the two atomic bombs. Japanese troops deserted en masse in front of the Soviet Army, which was well trained, well equipped, and had the element of surprise on their side.

Also, in the Battle of Okinawa, which ended in June of 1945, almost 8,000 Japanese troops surrendered. While a small fraction of the up to 100,000 soldiers on the island, many believed the Imperial Japanese Army could see defeat as inevitable.

On August the 6th, a bombing raid destroyed the last functioning oil refinery in Japan, reducing their ability to produce fuels of any kind to zero. They imported 100% of their crude oil, and American submarine actions had reduced imports to 1% of their capacity in 1941.

The Battle of Okinawa, saw the first massive use of kamikazes against the Allied Fleet. The Japanese hoped enough ships would be hit, and sunk, to dissuade an invasion of the Japanese home islands. But the kamikazes, even when they did strike a ship, rarely did enough damage to sink that ship. American naval vessels in particular were heavily armed with antiaircraft batteries. Moreover, American ships were built to take a lot of damage before sinking, and American damage control teams were superb in both putting out fires, and repairing the damage done to their ships. Earlier in the war, the USS Yorktown was thought to be sunk twice by the Japanese before being torpedoed at Midway. The damage control teams on the Yorktown kept that boat afloat after taking damage the Japanese were certain would sink her.

In August of 1945, eighty years ago this month, the Japanese Empire was turning to dust. The Soviets were in China, the Chinese were getting stronger, the Allied Fleet was unstoppable, the American Air raids using incendiaries were killing hundreds of thousands of people, there was no oil, and then atomic bombs were dropped on two cities.

Would the Japanese have surrendered if the A Bombs had not been dropped?

Yes, I think they would have. The idea of letting the United States Marie Corp land in Japan and wreakthe havoc upon the Japanese homeland that they had in some many other places had to give the emperor pause. The Marines and American Army had thousands of veterans while the Japanese had very few.

As the battleship Yamato slipped under the sea in April 1945, the dreams of Japanese Empire went with it. I think the Japanese would have surrendered in August of 1945, simply because anything short of that would have meant the end of their entire culture.

Yes or no? Do you think The Bomb pushed them over the edge or was The Reason?

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – A Study in Common Scents

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Okay, I get it, the gym is a place where the people are, at a minimum, motivated enough to go someplace they can put the effort into being in better shape. It would be nice to attract someone in a gym, and start something wonderful, have kids, and live happily ever afteruntil one of you dies alone, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Also, the gym is a place to get sweaty about staying in shape. If you’re like me, you go in to get a good workout and to do that you have to put some effort into it. If I’m going to get on a treadmill and run, then when I stop, I want to feel it.

I hope, in the end, all of this makes scents to you.

First, let us address those who are using the gym as a brick-and-mortar dating app. Men, there is a very good reason most quality gyms have a section devoted as a “Women Only” area, enclosed, with a locked door, and opaque windows.

You are that reason.

If you’re looking to strike up a conversation with a woman at the gyn, find the woman who is sitting on a piece of equipment, and has been for an hour, listening to music, looking bored and waiting for something to happen.

Women, if you’re going to sit on a piece of equipment, and you have been for an hour, listening to music, looking bored, and waiting for something to happen, do not wear perfume that comes packaged in a pump handled bug sprayer.

Yesterday, I walked by a woman in the gym that had been baptized in something that smelled like patchouli-based plutonium. My eyes literally teared up. Two thingshere, flower child. One, any man who can stand within a couple of feet of you has lost his sense of smell. Two, whatever you’re trying to cover up, if it’s that bad, seek medical help.

Men, if you’re going to go to a gym, stop and have a moment with the idea of showers. Most gyms have them. They have water. They have soap. There is a reason they have showers in gyms.

You are that reason.

There’s a difference between the smell of a human being who has worked out for an hour and dripping with sweat as opposed to the smell of a human being who does not shower on a regular basis.

The difference is the same as that between riding by a farm and enjoying the scent of freshly cut hay, and falling down in the middle of a pig stockyard and having to crawl out.

Women, the same gender who will bathe in perfume, universally will also shower on a regular basis. I’ve never been in the gym I go to and had a woman walk by and nearly gag me because she hasn’t showered since Ford was president. (Yes, there was a President Ford but no one remembers him.) Men are more likely to smell like they just escaped from a prison in that pig stockyard I mentioned earlier.

In closing, you ought to smell like a human being, not a flower.  Also, you ought to smell like a human being who showers more often than a solar eclipse occurs.

Take Care, and Take Showers,

Mike

Friday FireSmith – I saw a Cat

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I know where I was on August the 25th, 2023, because I have a photo. Not of me, not at all, no. I got a partial photo of a cat. Grey, striped, with a white shoulder, it ran away as I drove down the driveway, and for reasons I cannot explain, I snapped a photo.

I called my neighbors and they, too, saw this cat, but it ran away from them. A stray, a feral, it really didn’t matter at all for nothing small and helpless is going to survive out here. Coyotes, bobcats, owls, hawks, venomous snakes, alligators, foxes, and humans with guns who might think a bullet is a mercy for a stray all live here. Starvation, if it lived, parasites, heat, and a host of stinging insects awaited this animal until something killed it.

            There was no way I could take a cat it. Wrex Wyatt had a dislike for small mammals.

Several days later I looked out of the front door window and there was this cat, walking up my mama’s wheelchair ramp as if it meant to simply walk right through the front door. I opened the door and the cat fled. I was too shocked to get a photo, but I did start putting out food, and the food began to disappear.

            I’ve been hungry. Not just simply wanting to eat, but not having food and not knowing where food was going to come from, or when. Whatever else may be true, no animal I can get food to is going to feel that.

            For reasons I won’t not try to explain at the moment, I started calling this cat, “Aqaba.”

Pronounced Ack-a-baa. I would go out on the porch with the bowl of food and sing out, “Aqaba! Aqaba! Kitty, kitty, kitty!” and put the bowl down.

            A week later, I could see him hiding in the woods near the house and when I called he came out, a little bit, and then stopped.

            Eventually, he made his way into the garden to wait. One day I called him and he came running out of the woods and stopped in the garden, and watched me, and crept a little closer.

            And this was as far as Aqaba would get. I talked to him, sang to him, kept food and water out, but there was a line this kitty was not crossing.

            The last week of August I began setting live traps for Aqaba, but he wanted to part of them at all, and refused to go in. On August the 30th, hurricane Adalia slammed into South Georgia, creating more flooded areas and knocking down trees. The power went out. Somewhere in the woods, Aqaba Thomas, the Cat Unexpected, had either lived or died. I set out food for a couple of days and sang for him. The food was untouched. I waited. There was no sign of Aqaba at all.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Gonzo, the God of Thunder!

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The one thing I never got used to in the Army was you could wake up one day and be living in the same room as a complete stranger. Okay, that was also one of the things that were cool, but I got stuck with a cigarette smoker once, and damn.

Some guys from another platoon got stuck with Gonzales. “Gonzo,” was his nickname quickly, and it was hard to pin down at first, I mean, other than his last name, but after a while, we realized Gonzo was doing a good job at hiding a few, uh, quirks.

Okay, here’s an interesting tidbit. The Army had this contest for “Soldier of the Year,” and to get there you had to get Soldier of the Month, Soldier of the Quarter, and Soldier of the Day After a Three Day Weekend and Not Be Hungover. Basically, Soldier Of Meant you wore your dress uniform well and could answer a lot of Army based trivia.

Gonzo missed Soldier of the Year by one slot. He came in second.

Hang onto that one, okay?

Stationed in South Georgia meant guys from other parts of the world, and Gonzo was from Salt Lake City, had never seen a thunderstorm like we have, with thunderbolts and lightning. Gonzo came unglued. Lightning freaked him out. His room dogs told the story of Gonzo yelling at God to stop it, and locking himself in the bathroom while screaming.

Then there was the Sergeant Murrey Incident. Murrey was one of those guys who was not only a lifer, but thought everyone else ought to be, too. You cut him, and Sgt. Murrey bled Olive Drab green. We were out in the field one night, and Murrey got us lost on tank trails, just Murrey and me, and he had no idea what to do next. Finally, I started marking intersections with cans to show him we were going around in circles.

But we got back to the perimeter late. The password had expired and yay! Gonzo was manning the gate. He wouldn’t let us in. Murrey “ordered” Gonzo to let us in. Gonzo refused. Murrey started to step over the Concertina Wire barrier and Gonzo flipped his M-16 around and was about to swing away at Murrey’s head.

With Murrey screaming at Gonzo, and Gonzo screaming back, half the battalion woke up, crawled out of their tents, and eventually, someone came over to me and asked what the problem was, and gave me the password. I yelled the password out to Gonzo and he grabbed the wire and let us in. Murrey wasn’t done. He wanted Gonzo written up. But the rules were rules and Gonzo had followed them. Murrey was scolded and he never got over it.

Gonzo went on to grab second place in Soldier of the Year, and he took a couple of weeks off to spend with his family in Utah. We never saw him again. He stripped down to his underwear in a shopping mall and ran screaming through the place until the cops came, ran him down, tackled him, and arrested him.

I never got used to living with some of the people the Army stuck me with, but I’ve never run out of writing material.

Take Care,

Mike

friday Firesmith – Let sleeping kids lie

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Back in the late 1900s, the house across the street from me sat vacant and unsold for years. It was empty when I arrived, and for a brief couple of months a family moved in and then they were gone. I never met them. Here in South Georgia, you mow once a week if you don’t want the grass to become sentient and hostile. The month of July means the grass grows so fast you can watch it seethe out of the ground. The realtor that was trying to sell the empty house had someone mow the grass once a week, and for reasons I cannot explain, the guy mowed it at ten at night. He had this huge ass mower and mounted a light on the front of it that looked like the rising sun. The next morning, it looked like zombies with blades on their feet had passed through. The mowing was rushed and even using the spotlight from a German Air Raid Defense Unit bolted to the mower, it looked like the guy was half blind, half drunk, or flat didn’t care. The neighbor who lived in the house behind mine wasn’t a big fan of the noise, the light, or the fact shoddy mowing made that house look like crack addicts lived in it. He came over one afternoon and asked me if there was anything legal we could do.Legal? Gosh, legal never really occurred to me, actually. But his wife went to speak to the realty company and told them the kids had to be in bed by nine, and having someone that sounded like a crop duster operating past ten at night was not something she, or anyone else, cared to endure. Two days later, the guy shows up at 10:30, and he leaves the music playing in his truck as he mows. Loud music. A friend of mine worked at a machine shop, and one of their more frequent work requests was shorting signposts manufactured out of steel pipe. They had quite the collection of round pieces of pipe that were two or three inches in diameter and four or five inches long. The next time Monster Mower showed up, at 10:30, my neighbor and I got a six pack and sat on his porch and listened to the sound of metal against metal as the guy hit one after another. Finally, he stopped, got off the mower and rode with the blades off, looking for the offending pieces. He found most of them and threw them into the back of his truck, and mowed on. We walked over and took them out of the back of the truck and tossed them into the back yard. He started hitting them again, hunted them down again, then as he was putting them into the truck, realized what had happened. He looked around and saw two men raising their beers to him. He loaded up and left, for good. The next day one of the local cops arrived to issue us a strongly worded scolding. He came back after hours to drink with us. But at nine o’clock, we called it a night. The kids were getting ready for bed.

Take Care,Mike

Friday Firesmith – 4th of July

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As we celebrate the 4th of July, I consider the origin of the war that brought this nation into being. The “shot heard around the world” was fired on 19 April,1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence.

The British considered the colonies as part of England and subject to rule by King George III, and most colonists did as well. But in two small villages in Massachusetts, Lexington and Concord, locals had begun to build up a supply of rifles and gunpowder. The British heard about this, and decided a show of strength was in order to seize the weapons and put an end to any thoughts of rebellion.

As soon as the British began their advance, five riders were sent out, Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, Israel Bissell, William Dawes, and Sybil Ludington.The countryside was raised against the Redcoats, yet they were not fully aware of what was happening.

Just before dawn on 19 April, 1775, seven hundred British troops arrive at the village of Lexington, and sweep past the local resistance and kill seven or eight men, including the local militia leader. Emboldened by their success, they march on Concord, pass through but then discover close to five hundred “Minute Men” have taken positions all around them.

The Brits retreat, while the Minute Men advance, and the “shot heard around the world” is fired.

From that point, the British are in an orderly retreat in as much as they can be, and the locals are firing from behind trees and from higher ground.  The British suffer horribly on their way back to Boston and the first battle is an American victory.

The idea that a group of ill-trained rebels can take on the best army in the world and beat them should have told the British military something of the nature of warfare against the colonists, but no one thought the war would last very long and there was no doubt the regular British Army would do anything but crush the rebellion.

The war would grind on for eight more years. The British were bled white by the Colonial Army as increasingly, George Washington realized he did not have to win the war, but only not lose it.

In 1781, the British suffered a major defeat at Cowpens, South Carolina, and many on both sides, saw this as the beginning of the end. The French Fleet destroyed the British in September of 1783. British forces trapped by Washington at Yorktown Virginiaand by October of 1783, the British had nothing they could do but surrender.

The Fourth of July, 1776 was not the end of British rule but rather the beginning of the fight against it. Yet during the seven years between those two dates, Americans from thirteen different colonies came together as one to throw off the yoke of the most powerful country on earth.

This brief and very condensed version of events, should in no way diminish the idea that unity of a people, not force of arms, is what made the most difference in a nation who would be free.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Summer of 2025

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It’s with great difficulty I come to terms this summer is less than a week old. My plants

are dying from the heat. That’s the bad news. The good news is the water from the previous two

years is finally drying up. The pond is going with it. That would be the body of water that for the

last twenty-five years has been a body of weeds.

All over America the heat is rising. Roads are buckling under the heat, and Interstates are

closing due. They’ll have to do the repairs at night I imagine. I spent twenty-seven years doing

bridge and highway work, and it’s brutal in this sort of weather to try to work.

In 1997, we hit a spell where it was brutally hot but this was in August. They sent a

nineteen-year-old new hire out to learn a few things from me, and the first thing he learned was

we were not going to sit in the truck. We had shit to do.

This guy had poked fun at me for a while for being “old.”

He bragged he could put up with the heat much longer than I could, and when I got out of

the truck, and took the keys with me, he wasn’t daunted. After about an hour he had drank all the

water he brought with him. He was sweating, but still not giving in. About an hour later, he

wanted to sit in the truck and cool off. I told him he had to do ten pushups for every minute he

spent sitting in the AC. I did fifty. I told him I was going to check on a few things and I would be

back soon. I walked away. He freaked out.

An hour later he was in full panic mode. Three hours in direct sunlight next to an asphalt

operation and he was wilting. He wanted to call someone in the office to come get him but cell

phones hadn’t taken over the world yet. He tried to get the contractor to let him sit in his truck

and no.

Red faced and not sweating anymore, I was getting worried about him. He told me he

quit and wanted me to take him in. I dropped him off at a pay phone and waited until I was sure

someone was on the way. He looked bad.

When I got back the asphalt crew had quit. Not finished for the day, but mutinied. Out of

twelve men, ten of them had gotten into the work van and left. It was three in the afternoon. I

stopped by a bridge project and got into the water with my work clothes on. Spring Creek is cold

and clear and I soaked for a while.

The young man went back to the office and told them I was horrible and had tortured

him. When I got back, clothes already drying, I told them he had quit, and refused to work. They

didn’t so much as slap his wrist. Later, I found out the actual temperature was over 100 degrees

and the heat index over 110.

They don’t make teenagers like they used to. But the heat is getting worse every summer.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – The Destination is not the journey

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We were on the road a little past dawn, headed straight into my past.

I spent the first part of my life in Sowega, and you’d have to be from there to know what it means. Southwest Georgia. So now you’re a native. I also spent a great deal of time working on roads and bridges, so I know places no one else does. Sikes Mill was a quiet place, the Orange Spider Massacre happened there. Wolf Creek was nearby, and I spent a day there once, preparing for an in-house exam.

The turn on County Line Road in Thomas County was where I took to go to a friend’s house, and I’ve never been to Whigham’s main attraction.

I have reached Climax, which is nearby, and sang an Elton John song on Alice Street in Bainbridge.

Heading north from Bainbridge, I saw the house, once a nice house in a nice yard, and now the house is abandoned and the yard a sea of weeds. I met a woman who wanted a ride home so I took her there, we spent some time together, and then none. I remember a lot of weird things in Colquitt, like the man who got a DUI on a riding mower right in front of our paving crew. We had seen him riding past before, and once he turned it over in a ditch so we helped him out. He didn’t spill any of his beer.

A man had a mountain in his yard there, and someone offered to move it and couldn’t.

Steve, a guy I worked with, lost a sheet of paper by the road one day, work related paperwork, and asked me to help him look for it a week later. We went out, stopped, and he walked three feet and found it.

The cypress stump, seven feet across that guarded a well is gone now, the new road ate it.

The guy that lived in a trailer near the road was killed with his brother and three other people in a car wreck in 1980. The trailer is gone now. The hotel I took a woman to in 1982 is still there, and I remember how nervous she was to be in a hotel. She and I were both young, and she had never had sex except in the back of a car or two.

The golf course is a hay field again, and the country club closed, apparently.

New road work done long after I was gone confused the landscape, got rid of a lot of dirt roads, and obliterated landmarks, like the old building where a hamburger place stood. We went there when I was a little kid.

There’s a bypass, and I don’t have to drive through Blakely, where ghosts line up like roadkill on every corner. I don’t have to drive by the house I always thought of as a prison. I don’t have to travel this road but once or twice more in my life, and eventually, I, too, will be forgotten.

Take Care,

Mike