It takes 12,000 miles of travel to appreciate where you started.

I hated the south till I left the south. I treked my way to LA, then NY, then back to LA, then came back home, back to the south, back to Atlanta.

Somehow being in my liberal utopia made me long for the backwards south where everything was a little off-kilter but also a little slower, a little more chaotic, and dysfunctional, it made for good comedy in comparison to all the LA professionals I was used to dealing with out West. After six years of being away, After being gone for six years, I think I had begun to miss the chaos, my city, Atlanta, always had to offer. Like how at the local Walmart, you could just tell the overnight forklift driver, just didn't give a fuck. He'd drop pallets of cereal in the middle of the dog food isle, as if to say "Fuck you Walmart, pay me my goddamn benefits!" I'd find myself climbing on pallets of cereal to get to the dog food, laughing to myself, and thinking FILA and how did the elderly get their dog food? But I had to get that special blend of kibbles. Only the best kibbles for my K-9.

It should be no shock there was a rogue overnight forklift driver, but I found it funny no one was correcting him. Wasn't there one Walmart employee who saw this and said..."um what?" Or "stop" or...something. Like a shift leader or a manager...or a general manager? Corporate? Someone? Anyone? When I first moved back to Atlanta, and patronized the Walmart weekly for groceries for my broke ass, I thought about it often, but I quickly came to grips with the fact that no one, on any rung of the East Point Walmart employee tree, gave a fuck. These people were under-payed, and were going to do little more for the company then punch the clock. This lack of interest in any form of professionalism, or even pretending to have a form of professionalism quelled my anxiety that I wasn't good enough to "make it" in my writing career. This lack of professionalism permeated the metro-Atlanta area. I had been moonlighting as a stagehand for several local production companies and I was making headway fast. In this city, just showing up and not wondering off to get high or eat snacks in the corner was a worthy work quality. In comparison to the productions I worked for in New York and LA, the pace and work ethic of ATLiens was a complete joke, and I'm all for it. It 'A' made me look better and 'B' was a more enjoyable work experience.

I remember when I went on a work trip to Tampa for a big boxing match, which I will not name here. I somehow got stuck in the straight-laced van, so no such ecstasy occurred in my vehicle, but when we arrived in Tampa I found out the other van and its driver had "hot-boxed" the van for all seven hours of the 456-mile voyage. The same van, got in a car accident the following day. The day after that, assault was threatened between one of the passengers, and that vans driver. And yet, no one got fired, no one held a grudge, and every day after, the van and its inhabitants would show up to work, listening to music with red eyes covered by sunglasses, and smiles adorned across their faces. It was like anxiety didn't fit into their lives. And for an anxious nobody, who dreamt desperately of being a somebody in the film world, who dreamt of a life writing on an old typewriter in a dusty motel in a third-world country, creating the backbone of several blockbuster films, and a couple art-house cult classics, and who was drastically underperforming in every aspect of this goal, this was overwhelmingly refreshing.