Mr. Bageant,
I just finished your essay, and i wanted to say "thanks" and that I respect your insight and skillful articulation of it. Your description of yourself reads like a diary entry I might write in a decade. I'm a fellow southerner, recently graduated from UGA with a master's in nonprofit management, which I hoped to use helping some progressive organization in a green city, but it's slim pickins, and most of the big NGOs are hollow and sold.
My wife and I cried together, drunk as bluesmen, the other night, over feeling like soft, white lumps in a charging gray herd and not knowing what the fuck to do about it. Blow shit up? March in the streets of this besotted college town to a mixture of listless stares, averted faces, or viscious Bush-Cheney farm Teamster taunts? Drink and drug ourselves to blurry stupefaction?
I've got an interview to work at UNC, and the pay is more than double what I've ever made as a waiter or barkeep -- a seductive light in the dark for a married man saddled with debt. We're trying to look at it as a toddler step towards "Old Europe" or New Zealand, but, as you know, it's hard.
I'm boring you, I'm sure. Thanks again for the quality, honest writing, and best to you, your dog, and your wife.
Cheers, y'all,
Brent
Athens, Georgia
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Brent, you are not boring me at all. Letters like yours keep me going.
Joe
