Preface to The Biloxi Blues
After Black Lives Matter and the fascist Antifascists burned down my neighborhood in 2020, I left Columbus looking to travel for a year before moving back to Virginia Beach, so I traveled the country and went back to Virginia Beach. Unfortunately, moving back to Virginia Beach did not go as planned. Nothing bad happened. Nothing good happened either, but I just looked at my aging condo and realized it was too big for just me, and I didn’t feel like paying for repairs.
When I bought my Virginia Beach condo, I had never lived on my own outside of military baracks and college dorms, so I thought I would use a guest bedroom, guest bathroom, loft, and walk-in attic, but I didn’t. I didn’t use half the house, and when I was a Marine, I had a sailor roommate, but I just wasn’t feeling the condo anymore. When I lived in The Atlas Building, I got down to living in less than four hundred square feet, so my thirteen hundred square foot condo was enormous. I wasn’t attached to my condo, because I hadn’t lived there in eight years, and I only lived in my condo for three and a half years, so I decided it was time to sell.
I act like I had a choice in the matter, but I was having trouble finding a job after the Uber rates plummeted, and I needed to quit drinking, so I needed the money, so I could focus on quitting drinking full-time. The decision to sell my condo would have been more difficult if my property value didn’t skyrocket between 2020 and 2022. I would have been a fool not to sell, so I sold my Virginia Beach condo and traveled the country again for the spring and early summer of 2022.
I headed up the Appalachian Trail from Central Virginia starting just north of Shenandoah National Park to parts of Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, which I know like my own backyard, because my brother Nicholas could see the trail from his kitchen window. I hiked and camped with my dog Reese and listened to the Alcoholic Anonymous book and attended two to three online meetings everyday when I had internet. Yes, I worked the 12 Steps of AA hiking thousand of steps in the mountains.
I bypassed parts of the Appalachian Trail during my thru-hike, because I road walked pretty much all of Massachusetts and half of Vermont, because the bugs were driving me cray and giving me pink eye, so I went back to hike some segments on the trail. Part of the Vermont section I road walked right past AA’s founder Bill W’s family home, so I went back to hike the section with my dog, but I checked out Bill W’s home on my way back from Planned Fitness. I didn’t go during a meeting, but it was cool to check out nevertheless.
Memorial Day and the entire week afterwards I spent at an awesome roadside motel with my dog Reese. It was a lot more enjoyable than thru-hiking, because I worked out at Planet Fitness, hiked three to six miles of the AT with Reese, and then I had a clean hotel room for seventy-five dollars that was walking and running distance from downtown. I try not to camp with Reese during the summer, because of the bugs and heart, so that little motel has perfect with three hundred and sixty-five degree views of the Appalachian Mountains.
I’m not really going to get into too much detail about my time in New York City and Albany, New York, but being in Philadelphia for the Fourth of July was petty awesome, and then I headed to Chicago for a family reunion with the Maryville kids. I met up with my brother John, his wife, and kids, while staying with my aunt on the Southside of Chicago. Well, she lives in the suburbs but not too far from our family’s old stomping grounds. Then I road tripped back to Mississippi from Chicago with my brother, his wife, and children. They didn’t live in Biloxi, but I thought Biloxi gave me the best shot at employment and wanted to be close the Gulf Coast Veterans Administration, so this is where Matthew Brdecka’s The Biloxi Blues picked up where Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues dropped off Matthew Broderick with Epstein jokes.
Pick up your copy of The Biloxi Blues from the Woody series today:
Originally published by The Biloxi Blues:
