Summertime Blues
Every year when the temperature breaks into the 90’s, Alan Jackson resumes rotation in my daily listening. It’s not intentional. It’s like on the first blisteringly hot day, I turn on my car and Summertime Blues is playing on the radio or shows up in a random commercial. It’s fate.
Alan Jackson is from Newnan, Georgia which is a little bit aways from where I grew up. I feel like every Southern family has several unsubstantiated claims of connection to fame and/or fortune. It's a different kind of brag, though. It’s not “I am validated as a person because I met a celebrity” it’s “I met them and they weren’t full of themselves. Isn’t this celebrity lucky that they can fit in and get along with people like me?”
Supposedly my aunt used to babysit Alan Jackson’s kids. These claims are unsubstatiated and currently under review. But from what I heard he wasn’t full of himself or nothing and if he wouldn’ta said his name you wouldn’ta even known it was him at all!
As a hoochie with a coochie living way down yonder on the Chattahoochee, I gotta say his description of a Georgia summer is spot on.
Atlanta summers are chaotic. On one hand, we live in a modern, city. A lot of people work in an office and need to dress professionally. You spend every day trying to act like a well-mannered, civilized person. But the fact of the matter is that it’s 100 degrees outside with enough humidity to soak your undershirt right through.
And from May to September, though I might appear to be a professional, well-mannered, civilized person I am wearing a costume. Because the “real me” during a Southern summer is a barefoot, redneck child with a perpetual, unavoidable sunburn that drinks from the hose with a red popsicle-stained mouth. I do not drink from the hose anymore. I wear ample sunscreen every day. I don shoes when I leave the house (and only when I leave the house.) But I always have popsicles in the freezer.
And I will always love Alan Jackson.
Excerpt from my July newsletter. Read the full version here and read past newsletters here.
Hi! I’m Anna Carter, a GFE escort in Manhattan, NYC. I’m originally from Atlanta, GA.