Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I love being in Night Train. This is my second appearance there--and also a roundabout "bug" story. What is it about me, fiction and insects? I think it's how I see bugs as being such an alien, completely different sort of life form from ourselves and I can't help but draw comparisons. See the life we share--our shared creaturehood.

"Roadside Attractions" is sort of a fanciful blast back to some childhood memories for me--in an odd, entirely fictional sort of way. We used to take 17 down to St. Simon's Island where we vacationed at my grandparents home on East Beach. On the way down were various roadside attractions--you could find these all along the way down the coast to Florida. Crazy places with alligators, monkeys and parrots with weird photo opportunities. Most of them were falling into decline by the seventies and the signs advertising them decayed and faded. I think they were where old carnies went to die. We didn't stop . My family also seemed obsessed for much of my childhood with finding the perfect fried seafood platter. There was a place in Midway or Darien, GA we always stopped for lunch on the ride to St. Simons. But we would drive quite out of our way to look for fried seafood.

And then there is this memory I have of my great aunt Emmy-Jo--one of those childhood memories that is like a foggy dream seen from the corner of my eye. You aren't quite sure if it happened or not. But it is of her wearing a living tenebrionid beetle as a brooch. It was decorated with paste jewels--macabre, beautiful and gothic.

So--that's where this story comes from. Mishes of mashes of memories. And look! Here I am at one of those roadside attractions! I'm the Diver of the Day!