Brenda worked at the new prison in Wewa, maintaining the computers and installing and maintaining the telephone switchboard and telephones. It was hard, physical work, and she ran all day long.

She car-pooled with a man she called her second husband. He was retired Air Force and taught her how to deal with the DOC bureaucracy. He was an electronics technician, or electrician, and they sometimes worked on the same things.

With no outstanding debts and a low monthly rent (I put new floors in and we got the first six months rent free), low utilities (phone and electricity: we were on Granny Brown's water and sewer and bootlegged Wayne's cable TV), we could live on what Brenda made with me home cooking the meals and writing.

I drove around the Gulf Coast writing books like GULF COAST BLUES and publishing pamphlets making fun of the Division of Cultural Affairs and the Bay Arts Alliance.

Brenda didn't mind me doing that, but she wanted a place of our own, a little further from Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne, and to buy a house we'd have to have some money saved up, and to save up some money I would have to have a job, so I was looking for a job.

Until I found one I liked the trailer just fine.

I rode my bike to the post office and the library.

Owen came home for Christmas, and Balder graduated from boot camp just before Christmas and came home on leave.

We went to see him graduate and drove him home.

Owen was playing at Jekyll Island, with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, and we stopped by there on the way home, to hear them play.

Brenda took a picture of me and the boys.

I saw hot young trumpet sensation Roy Hargrove interviewed on A&E, and he described jazz as "America's classical music."

He implied that it was black music, that only black people could play it, or appreciate it, and white people could go suck eggs.

Maybe he was insecure, or arrogant. He was certainly talented.

But to me he just played a lot of notes real fast. There was no substance to them. He didn't build his solos, the way a master did, and he didn't play chorus after chorus for hours, like some rare souls did.

Anyhow, in writing about it I said that classical contrasted with folk, and jazz was a folk tradition, not a classical tradition.

It's true blacks were better at it than most white people, but jazz was world music, and many white people, and foreigners, could play it, just as well as a black person could.

Also, white people could appreciate jazz. Indeed, if jazz depended on American black listeners to keep it alive, it would be dead. White listeners kept it alive.

Also, bluegrass was just as original an American art form as jazz, just as difficult to play, just as much a world music. The only blacks I could think of playing bluegrass were Rootin' and Tootin' Wooten with Bela Fleck.

Classical musicians are trained in a conservatory, there is a language to talk about it in, there is a body of criticism about it.

Folk musicians are self-taught, or taught by other street musicians, there is no body of criticism, or critical vocabulary.

Bluegrass was a folk tradition, like jazz.

I called myself a white racist, to distinguish between me and black racists, as if there were such a thing as black racism.

Spike Lee says a victim of discrimination cannot be a racist. There are no black racists.

That's bullshit.

Blacks aren't just racists toward white people. They're racists towards other blacks.

I'm a racist towards a redneck, a cracker, or a peckerwood, just as I am towards black people.

But just as a black person can call another black person nigger, and a white person can't, so do I feel free to call myself a redneck, a cracker, or a peckerwood, but I don't like a black person calling me one.

Rather, they can call me anything they please. But I claim the same right.

I lived in a trailer, and we were poor, but I wasn't poor white trash.

Or, I can call myself poor white trash, but you can't. Nigger.