How the hell did we end up in this intricate mess?
Is this the fate sealed for us?
Maybe one day, we’ll look back on this time and think,
“Wow, that was some crazy shit.”
If we’re lucky.
And if we’re wise—
We’ll make sure it never happens again.
Too bad we’re so fucking stupid.
I just got off the train and had to piss something awful.
We arrived at the station almost an hour early—which never happens—and the afternoon light was perfect for photography.
I knew a storm was forecast to roll in within an hour, and I wanted to get pics of a church several blocks away, but my window of opportunity was narrowing fast.
I booked it out of the station and started marching down the street to the south side of the business district. I still needed to pee.
As I walked past a nearby park, I thought of a restroom I saw there before. Okay, I thought, I’ll stop by.
I walked up to the restroom, and the door was wide open. Homeboy was standing beside it, leering at me as he gnawed on a straw.
I didn’t make eye contact but observed him in my periphery: Shirtless, pants sagging below his ass cheeks, about nine inches of underwear showing. I understood what was happening.
As I walked into the restroom, I noticed three small urinals on the wall—no dividers.
Downlow central, I thought.
Urinals never had partitions when I was a kid, but over the last few decades they’ve become a ubiquitous fixture of men’s rooms. I attribute that to the shrieking moral panic that Americans keep thrusting upon themselves like kinky masochists.
Overgrown baby men have become terrified of other guys seeing their pee-pees, and women are scared shitless that pedophiles will prey on their crotch droppings, so now we erect little dividers between urinals to protect our precious penises from prying eyes.
Curiously, many of those people didn’t think twice about electing a pedophile and sexual predator for president, but if nothing else, recent events have proven that most Americans are fucking idiots.
Anyone who studies history or has a lick of common sense can tell you that restriction and prohibition never work. Period.
It’s like Whack-a-Mole: tamp something down in one hole, and it pops up in another—harder and faster than ever. That’s the law of balance.
Homophobia has successfully siloed off men so that they never see each other in the flesh, but I’m convinced it’s also made a large chunk of guys abnormally curious about other men’s dicks and bodies, and what they do with them—to the point of obsession.
Men see cocks in porn, of course, but those hairless monstrosities aren’t representative of the average dude, and I would hope most men can understand that intellectually.
There are a lot of stupid bros, though.
The bigger problem is that without actual guys around to be naked and compare dicks with, men have been stripped of an essential rite of passage. We’re primates, after all, wired to learn about ourselves by observing and engaging with others.
As a result, I suspect many men feel inadequate and incomplete on a deep, primal level that’s impossible to articulate. And without a healthy way to address it, of course they get weird as shit.
It doesn’t help when guys’ cunt girlfriends and wives make disparaging comments about their penis size—that’s a frequent-enough complaint online that it seems to be a common tactic women use to emasculate men, which is abhorrent.
A man’s relationship with his penis is solemn and reverent, and for anyone to belittle his manhood is a violation of the sacred.
Because urinal dividers have become so common, online spaces now exist where men post pictures of restrooms with open urinals and share location details so other men can visit them.
That’s how desperate men are to see a real guy’s dick.
Predictably, restrooms that lack urinal dividers have also become prime cruising spots for downlow men.
In the old days, a guy could discreetly check out cocks in any public restroom, and it wasn’t a big deal. Now if you walk into a place with open urinals, it’s guaranteed you’re stumbling into a den of creeps.
I knew that when I stood in front of the center urinal that afternoon. I also wasn’t surprised when homeboy from the entrance quietly walked in and sidled up to my left.
I hadn’t pissed in hours, so I was blasting a load that felt like it was endless.
As I stared at the concrete wall, I watched in the corner of my eye as homeboy unzipped his pants and barely trickled into the adjoining urinal.
Uh huh, I thought. He doesn’t need to pee.
At a certain point, he began staring at my dick. I said nothing.
How do I feel about this? I remember thinking.
The piss kept coming, so what I felt didn’t matter.
It’s not like I can stop mid-stream.
His eyes were still fixed on my dick as he tugged his own like he was shaking the last drops of piss. Then he kept tugging.
Finally, he started rubbing his shaft in deep strokes, turning slightly toward me in case I didn’t know what he wanted.
I didn’t look at his dick, but could tell from the long motions of his hand that it was a lot bigger than my five-incher.
Good for him, I thought.
I considered the situation and realized I didn’t care all that much. I didn’t feel violated or exposed.
God knows I’ve got plenty of dick pics floating around, and I’m sure homeboy’s seen so many cocks that he forgot mine in five minutes. I certainly don’t remember much about the ones I’ve seen.
Most men don’t have the balls to admit it, but all dicks run together after a while—even the big ones. None of them are that unique.
I felt compassion toward the guy, though. He was hard up and hanging out at the park, waiting to get off with someone.
It just wasn’t gonna be me: I wasn’t attracted to him or interested in joining. I also really wanted to photograph that church—architecture has always interested me more than sex.
I quickly zipped up my pants and skipped past the sink. No need to prolong the awkwardness by washing my hands while he stroked.
As I walked toward the door, homeboy stepped in front of me, stopped, and glanced over his shoulder, cruisy style—nothing subtle about that move. I just brushed past him.
It’s a typical Southern city, so I’m sure he found plenty of downlow bros to play with that afternoon. I also got the pics I wanted.
He was a young guy.
Bet you I was twenty years older than him.
We were from different backgrounds, too.
I could tell.
For one thing, he had a mullet—seriously.
Thick Alabama accent.
Smelled of cheap cologne.
I liked him though.
He wore black clothes and carried a black backpack out of habit.
What he kept in there was unclear—I never saw him open it.
He sported black socks and sneakers, too, even when he was wearing shorts.
That was a choice.
I watched him almost daily for over a year.
Never knew his name—doesn’t really matter.
Our paths crossed a few times.
I believe we conversed twice.
He smiled gently and nodded once.
Something about him felt so familiar.
We were of the same tribe—I know it.
I’ve crossed paths with my kin before.
They’re usually quiet, cautious, and reserved—at least at first.
Typically nerdy, mildly handsome, unremarkable to most.
The outer layer doesn’t matter—they inevitably stand out to me.
I always detect in them a silent grace, a sense of honor, and, above all, a desire to serve.
That’s when I know I’ve found another one.
I’m pretty sure he and I had a moment when our eyes locked, knowingly.
His head cocked out of curiosity, almost imperceptibly.
He probably didn’t understand the pattern yet.
He will.
Every time I saw him, I prayed for grace over him.
I didn’t know his mission, but I guarantee he has one.
For years, I wanted to befriend the kin I found.
I gave that up a long time ago.
We’re just so fucking elusive.
Even to each other.
So aloof, independent, and all on solitary assignments.
I’ve come to accept that as the design.
When I discover another one, though, I hold them in my heart.
Even after they leave.
A prayer for them is a prayer for myself.
And of course, he’s gone now.
One day he just disappeared.
May grace accompany us on our separate journeys.
It’ll take years to publish all my pictures from the Deep South and fully exorcise the place from my memory. Damn it, I’ll make it happen, though.
Lately, I’ve been digging deep into the archives, and this is about as deep as it goes: All the photographs on this page were taken in and around Albany, Georgia, between 2005 and 2012.
It’s incredible to think that some of these images are over 20 years old—one was even shot on film and scanned.
My time in Albany wasn’t pleasant, but I learned to make the best of it, and through a lot of solitary wandering, I came to appreciate the area’s unique natural beauty.
Albany sits on a bed of limestone at the head of the Upper Floridan Aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground water systems.
Dougherty County and a portion of neighboring Lee County are notable for their karst topography, characterized by sinkholes of varying shapes and sizes that form when the sandy soil collapses into the cavernous limestone underneath.
Similarly, “blue holes,” like Palmyra Springs in Lee County, form when the ground sinks into the aquifer, bringing its ancient, crystal-clear water to the earth’s surface.
The largest blue hole in the Albany area is Radium Springs, which still flowed year-round when I moved there and was one of the most breathtaking places I’ve ever visited.
Back then, the spring was closed to the public, and you had to crawl through a hole in a chain-link fence to see it, but the trespass was totally worth it.
The color of Radium Springs’ water was indescribable: deep blue and emerald green, dappled with every color of the rainbow when the afternoon sunlight hit it at just the right angle.
For decades, Radium Springs was a popular swimming spot—for Whites anyway—and in the 1920s, a large “casino” was built on its banks, though it never hosted gambling.
The casino was submerged during the 500-year Flood of ’94, and again in a second flood in 1998. There was a lot of local nostalgia for the place, but no one had the money to renovate it, and the State of Georgia ultimately demolished the building in 2003.1
By the time Dougherty County turned the site into a public park, Radium Springs had begun drying up in the summer months, and on my last visit, it was basically a stagnant mudhole covered in algae.
Turns out the aquifer’s supply isn’t limitless, and as the region’s farms keep pumping out water to irrigate crops, the blue holes of Southwest Georgia will likely dry up and fade into memory.
When Radium Springs is active, its water flows into Skywater Creek, which meanders through a grove of giant cypress trees to the nearby Flint River.
The Flint River is unique because it runs through a limestone channel. The water is brown as shit and crawling with reptiles, but when it’s low, you can walk across the rock shelf and find arrowheads and fossils in the holes.
One of my favorite spots to explore in East Albany was a giant bend in the river where the city’s settlers dredged the channel to make it navigable for cotton shipping—it didn’t really work.
I can’t imagine how they did it with 19th-century equipment, but somehow the workers cut the limestone in giant chunks and piled them up on the bank. There are large gaps between the chunks, so you have to leapfrog from one to the next, and God only knows what’s lurking in those cracks.
On one visit, I nearly stepped on a water moccasin that was at least three feet long—better than a gator, anyway.
Another anomaly in East Albany is a swath of fossil sand dunes that were formed during the last Ice Age.
The prevailing theory is that when glaciers in the Appalachian Mountains melted, the water carried large quantities of sand downriver and deposited it around present-day Albany. As the waters subsided, high winds blew the sand into a ridge along the riverbank.2
The sand dunes originally stretched about 30 miles, from Albany south to Baker County. Many of the dunes have been destroyed, and some are covered in trees, so they just look like wooded hills.
The largest extant dunes are located along Sands Drive near the campus of Albany State University. Some of the peaks there are 30 to 40 feet high, although years of encroaching development, sand mining, and heavy four-wheeler activity had largely decimated them by the time I lived there. I’m sure it’s much worse now.
I was always a passing stranger in Southwest Georgia, and the longer I live, the more Albany feels like a weird blip in my memory.
I have no family, friends, or attachments there, and I’m glad it’s far behind me. I guess it has its charms, though.
After his earlier letter extolling Southwest Georgia’s advantages for Northern emigrants, W.H. Parkins (1836-1894), Atlanta’s first architect, wrote the following letter to The Albany News (Albany, Georgia) in May 1879.
In his second letter, Parkins repeated the central argument from his first—it’s no more convincing here.
“Where is the country… that can present a better field for intelligent immigration than this?” Parkins asked rhetorically. Clearly, Atlanta’s masturbatory boosterism had rubbed off on him.
Wallace Putnam Reed (1849-1903) later described Parkins as “a straightforward man,” and you can detect a matter-of-fact sensibility in his words despite the obligatory bullshit. Certainly, Parkins acknowledged the region’s shortcomings, albeit indirectly:
“They may say there is no society, no schools, no markets close at hand.”
That’s still a fairly accurate assessment of Southwest Georgia.
Parkins was neither a great architect nor a good debater, and his rebuttals in this letter were pitifully weak. On the suggestion of Southwest Georgia having “no society,” he retorted:
“I have always found that so far as society was concerned it regulated itself.”
The hell does that even mean?
Parkins made no attempt to defend the area’s substandard educational options, conceding:
“As to schools, there is a deficiency…”
His response to the region’s remoteness was similarly flaccid:
“My own plantation is twelve miles from the nearest Railroad station, still I do not consider that any particular disadvantage.”
Parkins also noted, rather vaguely, that “the New Jersey people are not altogether satisfied with their situation in Georgia.”
That apparently referred to a New Jersey farmer and 16 of his neighbors who bought 5,000 acres in Ware County, Georgia, in early 1879.1 Before moving south, the farmer told a reporter from The Atlanta Constitution:
“…the average opinion throughout New England is that the southern states are about the same as Mexico, in point of morals, society and lawlessness. It is believed that the people are barbarians, and the state of society utterly lawless and desperate.”2
Surely Ware County did nothing to change their opinion—the place is a shithole.
It’s also located in Southeast Georgia, not Southwest Georgia, but the two regions are equally awful: both are unsightly, sweltering cesspools of hatred, oppression, ineptitude, and arrogance.
Can you tell how much I detest South Georgia?
I also question Parkins’ description of “generous hearted… Southern planters,” and his assertion that:
“I have never had any trouble in finding friends any where in the South. It depends upon the man.”
Even today, the people of Southwest Georgia are deeply suspicious of outsiders, if not outright hostile.
Ironically, the region’s largest city, Albany, was largely shaped by three Northerners:
Of course, the rules are different when money is involved: if a rich Yankee arrives in Bumfuck, the locals roll out the red carpet and crowd around with their hands out.
But for a middling Atlanta architect like Parkins? Somehow, I doubt Southwest Georgia received him so graciously.
Credit him for optimism, though. In touting the region’s potential greatness, Parkins proclaimed:
“It will be, in my estimation, a great boom to this country, when men will awake from their lethargy and drowsiness, and see the drawbacks that attend them face to face, and then go to work to avert it.”
Spoken like a man who had yet to be worn down by the place.
Advantages—Advice From A Northern Settler To His Northern Friends.
Editors Albany News: In my letter to the Southern Enterprise (which you were kind enough to copy) I was anxious that the facts which Gen. Sherman said in regard to North Georgia might be extended, and that Southwest Georgia should reap her share of the benefits, for, in my opinion, she is justly entitled to honorable mention at least, and if the people who live on the fat of the land, on level rich lands, don’t speak out in her behalf Gen. Sherman’s red hills and deep gullies of North Georgia and Tennessee will soon be peopled with such an industrious class of farmers and mechanics that it will cause us to look with envy upon them, hence the necessity of blowing your horn, and blow it loud.
A few days ago I was traveling through the upper portion of Calhoun county, and I have no doubt Baker, Lee, Dougherty and others are in the same category, and as I saw the many hundreds of acres—yes, thousands, I fancied what a country this would be if those broad acres and 3,000 acre plantations were divided up into 200 acre farms and people with those intelligent, industrious, hard working farmers of the North, what a picture it would present. Where is the country (I was about to say on the globe) that can present a better field for intelligent immigration than this? What is there that cannot be raised, and where else the country that can grow something every month in the year? Now, I do not desire that any of my northern friends should be mislead [sic] as to the character of the soil, climate, people, or anything else, for what I say here I can prove, so far as the capacity of the soil is concerned. Can anything more be wanted or desired than to say that we can raise anything that grows out of the soil. Is it not better to live in a country where it is not nine months winter and three months late fall?
You may travel the world over and you cannot find a more generous hearted people than these Southern planters. They may say there is no society, no schools, no markets close at hand. So far as the first is concerned, that depends upon where one locates, and whether they come singly or by ten, twenty or fifty families. I have always found that so far as society was concerned it regulated itself. I have never had any trouble in finding friends any where in the South. It depends upon the man. As to schools, there is a deficiency, but the State is gradually working to the front in that respect; her State superintendent is indefatigable and is working hard to establish good free schools wherever there is a demand. As to the markets, they are in some respects, far away from some portions of the county. My own plantation is twelve miles from the nearest Railroad station, still I do not consider that any particular disadvantage. It must be borne in mind that people make the markets, settle up this country, and it will not be long before Railroads and produce buyers will be at your gates.
I notice an article in the Philadelphia Times where it says the New Jersey people are not altogether satisfied with their situation in Georgia. I do not know which particular portion of the State they allude to, but of one thing I am satisfied, that Northern people coming South cannot run things as they would North; their ideas and principles in agriculture and manufactures are good, most excellent, but they must adopt those ideas and principles to the situation when coming South. The climate is different, the people are different, things have to be managed differently to attain the same end; labor is not so well skilled, which I find is one of the great drawbacks.
But I am digressing. I am firm in the conviction that if Northern farmers will come here in Southwest Georgia, and come to stay, that after five years, eight out of ten will not go back North, and if the other two go back they will return in less than twelve months. I have known hundreds of Northern men to come South and stay, and I can count on my fingers all that ever returned, I mean on my acquaintance. It will be, in my estimation, a great boom to this country, when men will awake from their lethargy and drowsiness, and see the drawbacks that attend them face to face, and then go to work to avert it. Many farmers cannot get out of the old rut, and seek to run their farms and labor as they did during slavery; this cannot be done successfully. Labor has got to be treated differently and should be made interesting, which can be done in many ways.
I am confident that if the people of Southwest Georgia will divide up some of their large waste places, and, if necessary, give away every alternate farm of 100 acres, that the time is not far distant when they would be taken up and would enhance the value of their remaining acres double the cost. I know of a tract of land in one of the Northern States that was sold this way and the owner made an independent fortune. Those to whom the land was given got a clear title after five years, provided he put certain improvements on the land that was required of him in the start.
If these waste lands were in proper cultivation, and cotton be made a surplus crop, and some improved stock were introduced, it is my impression that the time is not far distant when Southwest Georgia would take a leap ahead, and lead the van so far as good lands, good society and good crops is concerned, and if my northern friends want to get into a country that has the easiest farming in the world let them come down here and be convinced.
W.H. PARKINS.
Morgan, Calhoun county, Ga.4
