Wewa

Halfway into Tyndall Air Force Base on Highway 98,
I had to turn around and go back where I came from.
I took 386 to Overstreet, 71 to Wewa, and 22 on in to Springfield.
This year Wewahitchka held its annual Tupelo Honey Festival
and this year's crop of honey wasn't ready. But who minds a 50-mile
detour if you get to go by Dead Lakes Speedway. Fastest dirt track
in the South. Pit area pass $5 extra.

I remember Owen and Balder
providing the music at the Gulf CI
Christmas party at the Wewahitchka
Community Center. Correctional officers
and their wives (or husbands) dancing with each other.
Next to honey and stock car racing, the prison is a major employer.
Open bar. Exit smokers. Pigs-in-a-blanket for hors d'oeuvres.
Chicken wings in Louisiana hot sauce. One K-9 officer cut his hair
with dog-clippers. Between the guards and the inmates, it's houseflies
on both sides of a screen. What you lookin' at? Who dat say who dat?
I cut you bad. It's honest work. No worse than the corporate cubicle
dot-com culture mini-Eichmann's of capitalism. When I saw Ulee's Gold,
in Atlanta, that scene at Rich's IGA, the teenagers in the 4 x 4, Friday Night
in America, I hollered, "Go, gators." The Wewa High School football mascot.
Nobody got it. You could put that on my tombstone. "Nobody got it."