Category Archives: essay

2025, America, essay, no scape, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, Working Class Literature

The Surveillance Age Comes Knocking

The knock on the screen door was so light Gypsi, our 12-year-old blue heeler that barks at leaves blowing down the sidewalk across the street and was lying on the mat in front of the door, didn’t react. I might not have even heard it, except I was looking for my coffee cup or something. We have three dogs, all of whom react to noises with varying degrees. Nala, the 8-year-old FOMO husky mix, pretty much barks whenever Gypsi barks, except for when she spies one of the neighborhood cats when she’s outside. She mostly stairs out the window the way I remember my grandma watching soap operas in the afternoon on television. Barley, the 12-year-old aussie shepherd mix, only barks at Something. He’s always had the knack of knowing when something ought to be barked at, though I’ve noticed him slipping a bit in the last year. He’s a good old son, though, and I give him the grace earned by a working dog in semi-retirement. 

But when Barley didn’t bark, I took notice. 

Our doorbell doesn’t work and as far as Amanda knows, has never worked. I’ve thought off and on about fixing it… or at least seeing if it’s the button or some wiring issue I don’t feel like digging out. But we have the dogs. And doorbells are generally more intrusive than they are useful. 

Amanda was sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door open, talking to me about something. I think I was about to ask her if she remembered where I set my coffee cup or whatever it was I was looking for. The knock at the door was so light she didn’t hear it, either. 

“There was a knock at the door,” I said, looking through the peephole. A standard issue dude bro, dressed in white down to his air-cushioned kicks with the prerequisite baseball cap turned backward, was standing on my porch. He was intentionally standing within view of the eyehole. A salesman, I thought. I briefly debated ignoring him. I couldn’t be sure he didn’t register my voice through the door or take note of my shadow through the spy lens. These new generation dude bros… what my 5-year-old granddaughter calls brahs might have heightened senses, especially the salesman models. 

“What?” 

“There was a knock on the door,” I repeated. I moved to open the door. In our small house, the bathroom is in eyeline of the front door. I ask my wife if she could please close the bathroom door so I could open the front door, and she obliges. I opened the door to find a blond, chisel-chinned dude brah standing there with a tablet. I almost miss when they carried clipboards, I thought. A soundworm of Ronald Reagan on The Tonight Show echoed in my ear. They show up carrying a clipboard and say ‘Hi I’m with the government and I’m here to help.’ Thundering laughter and applause at the joke we were all supposed to get. The name of a home security company was emblazoned on the dude brah’s fitted polo. There was an accompanying company ID hanging from a careless lanyard around his neck. I opened, stepped through, closed the front door behind me and opened the screen door.

His approach was flawless and his dedication to the script was admirable. He reached out his hand, which I didn’t take, and told me his name, which I don’t remember.  “I’m just out here upgrading our customers out here,” he said, nodding to the street, “and I thought I’d stop by and see if you were interested in protecting your home.” 

Not bad. I wondered if he practiced. He asked me my name, and I didn’t tell him. He went on to tell me that he was offering to set me up with a camera doorbell… “That’s why I PUNKED you,” he added, “because I noticed your doorbell didn’t work.” Genius. I wondered if he registered my eyeroll. He went on to try and sell me a free month of service, during which his company would be watching 24 hours a day. 

“Now I know,” he tried to hide a slight lip twitch, the kind people make when they step near fresh dog shit, “I know this is a safe neighborhood. In fact, your friends and neighbors tell me the biggest issue here is porch poachers.”

 Friends and neighbors, I thought. Does he mean the guy next door who lives with his parents and sells drugs or the meth heads a few houses down that burn plastic in the giant firepit out back?

I tell him I’m not interested and move to go back inside. He says he understands, then asks me my name again. Again, I don’t tell him. Undeterred, he points to the tablet, explaining that because his company will be watching 24 hours a day, if some dreaded porch poacher tries to take an Amazon package off my porch that the I-spy-little eye doorbell camera will say “Hey,” which naturally, will scare off any potential poachers. 

Porch Poachers. Sure, we’ve had some packages taken. Is it inconvenient to reorder? Mildly. It doesn’t happen that often and we don’t order any high ticket items like that. Does it piss me off when it happens? Yes. I thought about telling the dude brah about taking all the smart lights and speakers out of our house. The Faceless Woman, as Amanda took to calling it, would listen at odd times and was starting not to listen at all when it was supposed to. The smart device experiment had been my idea. It was also my idea to rip it all out. I didn’t say that to the dude brah. I also didn’t tell him what I thought of the new police program to use residential cameras for random surveillance. 

Again, with a little more edge in my voice, I tell the dude brah that I’m not interested. Then he smiles — bleach white teeth that have never met a cup of coffee or a cigarette, with vaguely sharp incisors — and asks, trying to hide that slight lip curl, am I really not interested in protecting my home. 

“I have three dogs and a shotgun,” I said, being sure to look him straight in his dead eyes like he’s a paper target. 

“Hell yeah!” he proclaimed.

I nod. “I don’t have problems like that.” 

I must have stumbled on the correct turn of phrase or tone that turned the if/then command in the dude brah’s brainbox. He stuck a hand out again and asked me my name. This time I shook it, still looking him dead in the eyes. 

“Ozymandias,” I told him. He repeated it, curiously and without comment, then walked away.

[cross posted at: https://open.substack.com/pub/eymick/p/the-surveillance-age-comes-knocking?r=fciwk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true]

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2025, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

Wednesday is a Floating Day

This means that the rest of the time, we’re passing one another in our home on different schedules, grabbing for whatever time we can get. (from ” The Faded Sepia of River Mud“)

On these days I feel like I’m operating in a different time zone.

No matter how much I try to let myself sleep in or try and make myself stay awake when I come in from standing 2nd shift watch, I wake up around 10 AM. Today is Flip Day in my schedule… I’m on night watch, midnight to 0800 tomorrow. I try and get a few things done around the house, write, drink tea instead of coffee. I know Earl Grey has caffeine in it, but there’s a little less caffeine in tea than in coffee and I find it easier to lay down and relax after tea. These days are me, the dogs, and an ungrateful, sweater humping cat. I’ve been watching this Netflix show, The Diplomat. Other than fish bowl murder mysteries, classic British sit coms, and oddly unending loops of The Mentalist, I like well written political intrigue.

What can I say? Television fiction is the only place I can find palatable politics at this point in the timeline.

It’s raining and snowing today. I’m putting off what is probably a novella knocking around in my head. I’m not often plagued by longer fiction nagging me to write it, but this one’s been going on for months, since taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus to South Point. I’ve been writing that story in fits and snatches between rounds and reading Driftwood: A Biography of Harlan Hubbard. I want to get some sleep, but I also don’t like to waste one of my two full days off in the week.

I’d like to say I’m being amazingly domestic while Amanda is out doing the Good Work of the World. But I’m slouching in my very tired wing back chair, feet up on a foot stool, Chromebook perched on my right leg, writing. Season 2 of The Diplomat is on the television. This set up is sort of ideal for most of the writing I do; floating in the middle of things.

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2025, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

The Gator Horse and Gothic Landscapes: an Ohio River Valley Aesthetic [Part 3: Telos as Cultural Current]

Mick Parsons. Ohio River just south of Cincinnati. Taken October 2024

“The thing that makes literature from the Ohio River Valley distinct from Midwestern literature – and indeed makes it geographically distinct from the Midwest – our telos is the ebb and tide of commerce and things that move. That the river is always in flux is what gives the Ohio River Valley it’s unique and complex history, culture, and art. At it’s core, there’s a stubbornness, a caution when it comes to change; but there’s also an inherent ability to embrace what the river brings. It’s as natural as the ebb and flow of the river. The South, the Midwest, and even Appalachia — culturally, they are built on a resistance to change, that can border on a dangerous nostalgia. The Ohio River Valley, with our deep-rooted tradition kept in the stories like those of Mike Fink and the Gator Horse Keel Boat Captains, takes whatever comes, keeps what is useful, and lets the river carry the rest away.” – from Part 2

It’s taken me a while to suss this out. The idea’s been rolling around in my head for a few years now; it would crop up from time to time, annoy me with my inability to find the proper words. It’s been the catfish that wouldn’t be caught; it climbs up out of the mud, nibbles on my line, then disappears into the channel.

Where I’ve been stuck is in this concept of telos (from the Greek: goal or purpose), which Meghan O’Gieblyn uses in her book Interior States: Essays (2018) to build a definition of Midwestern culture. For O’Gieblyn, the Midwest is defined by the LOSS of telos, which I interpret as a loss of status dating back to Carl Van Doren’s “The Revolt from the Village” published in The Nation in 1921. This loss, which lends to the Midwest being thought of as “pass through” or “fly over” states, makes sense to me as a defining characteristic — for the Midwest. But the Ohio River Valley, which connects parts of five states, which has been both the main artery of commerce and the mythic wild west long before Billy the Kid and the western cowboys, doesn’t fit into the paradigm. Yes, we’ve experienced economic devastations, battles, sickness. Losses of core industries, especially inland ship building dating back to WWII, shifts in shipping building and a general divesting in the river fronts by communities that owe their very existence to the river have all contributed to a what could be described as a loss of purpose or status.

The difference is, though, that while no one was looking, life on the river carried on. Tugs still push barges up and down the river; better environmental laws and communities beginning to take a renewed interest in their river fronts as areas of economic development have led to a resurgence of life. Rivers ebb and rivers flow and so does life along them. Literature from the Ohio River Valley does not linger in the past, but it does connect to it, like tributaries to the main artery. We know where we’ve come from but we know we we’re heading somewhere else. It’s a literature of permanent transition. From the trappers, traders, and slavers, to the mythic keelboat captains like Mike Fink, Gator Horse writers are tied together not by genre, or even a common approach to language. But like the people who passed through on the Ohio River on keelboats, on expeditions, and (in some places) on foot they are tied together by the river itself. The river has defined the life along its natural boundaries and later, its artificially created boundaries, for as long as there have been people and the river. Like any avenue of mass immigration and commerce, people bring their own relationships with language and forge their own relationship with the geography.

Part 4: Laying out the Cartography

When I first started this project, I thought I could just focus on literature; but I’m not one who thinks one should separate the art from the time it was created. So instead I’m going to try and tie a lot of threads together into what I hope will be a much stronger line, connecting writing, music, and painting to the cultural, historical, socioeconomic, and anthropological aspects of the Ohio River Valley. And because I want to start with literature, I’m going to hold off and that and begin with what will end up being an extremely brief version of the river’s socioeconomic story. From there, I’ll be sharing stories from the region’s historical and cultural heritage, including some not-very-pleasant facts that continue to haunt us; and then I’ll end with art, music, and literature, without which we would have no understanding of the Ohio River Valley at all.

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