Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus Horridus), originally uploaded by Ian Carlsen.

Today was a good day to have my camera on me.

Met up with a three foot long rattlesnake on the forest service road while hiking with dad. Watched it lazily sun itself, flicking it's tongue out and tasting the air for our scent. Got a bunch of photos of it, plus a video of it slinking off the road when it got annoyed by our gawking. Just as it slipped off Dad got a shit-eating grin on his face and slapped it's rattle very lightly. The snake coiled up and then slunk a little further off to wait for us to pass.

So I should clarify the two worlds of Georgia. Maybe it's my upbringing, the fact that I'm from semi-rural Maine, that I'm a liberal hippie tree hugger but the opinion is at least true for me. First there's rural Georgia which is primitive and beautiful and full of hardworking people, animals, scenery, and wonderfully dangerous poisonous things. Strange and new and fascinating though rough and stubborn.

Then there's city and suburb Georgia which is an endless passive-aggressive sprawl filled with the consumer and the consumed. Retail stores have choked out and annihilated local business, developments have stripped the land barren and set up cookie cutter row houses with constantly pulled venetian blinds and no one seems to care. They're caught up in a self-obsessed whirlwind of consumption without thought. Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, stucco, brick and asphalt. They are the reason America continues as it has: a lurching, cancerous, hungry and pestilent nation-state that would suck the world dry to protect it's own image.

Each world has reflections in itself. Some gems exist in the suburbs and some of the rot has crept into the wilderness. The cities exist in these dual worlds constantly and in them there are (as I have seen in the arts communities of Savannah and Atlanta) people like me. Still there is so much culture-noise it's hard to be heard above the din of mass consumerism and so there's no discourse, no dialogue. I am not wise enough to know how to act, how to work as an agent of change. I feel I could try to be a stone in the river, but the river itself would destroy me over time, slowly breaking my back and sapping my strength.

It would take a dam of many stones, perhaps.

But this is metaphor, there needs to be a more serious talk at some point.