Tag Archives: Memory

2026, Day Book, essay, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, the no-scape

Does Anyone Remember the Creepy Lawn Jockey from Season 2 of the X Files?

I go back and watch shows with an obsession. I don’t know why. Lately I’ve been going back and watching Mulder and Scully. Sometimes I miss the skepticism and paranoia of my childhood. An odd turn of nostalgia at that, being a child raised in a world in which the infrastructure was crumbling and being repaired with Hubba Bubba and Brillo Cream caked prayers.

But you miss little things the first time through, watching for the plot. Like Lawn jockeys; just an odd transition shot that had nothing to do with the plot. The lawn jockey was about establishing tone, true; the Caucasian face paint was starting to chip off and was meant to make us think about zombies. But you could argue that it was almost a non-essential shot. A little extra little taste from the director. A little wink and a nod, darkly funny. Lawn jockeys could make any trailer a royal compound, right? Like adding Greek columns to an old row house and turning it into a bed and breakfast.

It reminds me of the first time I drove back by the house I grew up in and saw that the new owner buried wagon wheels at the end of the driveway/ Like they rolled up from after some long journey, wrapped in gingham and a dream, and dug the foundation themselves, when all they did was buy a 40 year old ranch style house and paint over all the memories in western kitsch. The unknowns and barely knowns have been painted over with a new, thick paint of certainty. The color is a colorless gray, and reflects nothing.

Underneath, all the old memories rest on the drywall and frame, preserved like fossils against elements and the passage of time.

[Day book 2026 / Spring 3.21.26

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Mick Parsons
Mick Parsons
@rivercitymick

Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.

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2026, Day Book, poetry, prose

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.19.26 [Martin Luther King, Jr. Day]

“The Dancing Martyrs,” doodle by Mick Parsons.

I had this book when I was a kid. It was one of those children’s books, the kind that sometimes pass for actual history because it washes over the blood and broken bone of human history. It was a book about Gandhi and Martin Luther King,Jr. I want to say it was about John F. Kennedy, too, but that might be a different book. The book talked about how these men wanted better for their fellow men, wanted freedom and self-determination. It was one of those books that ignored Jim Crow and only referred to the British Colonial power as having eventually turned cruel, not that it was cruel from the beginning. It was one of those books that referred to the death of martyrs in passive voice; not that someone murdered them,but for their good works they were killed, worded in a way to rob it of violence, because there was some notion floating around that still is floating around that it doesn’t matter what words you use as long as you “get the point across.” Facts without teeth. Erase the colonialism. Erase the racism. At the end of the book there was a drawing in black and white of King and Gandhi holding hands with Caucasian Jesus, standing atop a hill with a rainbow overhand. They were holding hands and singing

“Free at Last, Free at Last.”

I thought of this book the first time I watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

from The Seventh Seal, Dir. by Igmar Bergman (1957)
the
tooth
less
af
fair
his
story
with
out
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bl
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d: wh
ite
noi
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2024, essay

Things That Remain in Spite of Us

Dynamic Earth – Ocean Currents by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Recent flooding brings to mind the 1997 flood… the first one I really remember. There have been others since. There will be more. That year, the Ohio River flooded. The town of Falmouth, Kentucky, was washed away: entire buildings moved off their foundations. The river was 52 feet above flood stage in Cincinnati. It reached 15.76 feet above flood stage in Louisville.

There was a year, I don’t remember which, that Triplett Creek flooded and the southwest end of town flooded. That same year, a drought caused a fire in the mountains above Morehead, Kentucky and they burned for what seemed like the entire summer. The mountains bore the scar for years.

I still dream of these things. It was a pivotal time for me. As I get older, I find myself more interesting in Things That Remain in Spite of Us: the mountains, the river. They bear the mark of our presence; but they remain. What gets washed away will be rebuilt… it won’t be the same, because it will carry the mark of the flood in spite of any attempt to erase it.

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