Saturday, September 23, 2023

RGN on Location: The Shouldered Calm by al-Falaq

 


The Shouldered Calm

(Lake Wildwood, autumn 2022)

A Calm; clear and soft like baby eyes,

Its face upturned and placidly waiting, as though Mother’s kiss hovers above.

Its face quivers, when the breath of Mother’s cooing babble blows across, eyes trembling with the million rippling lines broken and mended, second by second as the Calm lies wriggling.

Father steps away, his lingering glance cast across from behind curtains of deepening green alive with the droning of his hummed song, thrumming from among the leaves.

Above the calm, Mother glows, Father’s side-wards light sculpting in bas-relief her gentle smile, a million times glimmering in the rippling eyes of the Calm.

The Calm; shouldered about by toy boxes and boughs and ticking trinkets, sliding moment by moment into the encroaching shade, the toys and their imagined lives going about in the time before dreams begin, playing and laughing, upon the drowsy shoulders of the Calm.


About Phil aka alFalaq

al-Falaq is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least!  His collection of poetry and short stories, Threadbare is available on Amazon.
















Thursday, January 20, 2022

RGN at Vendors Across the City: A Pop-Up Vending Event on Pryor Street

Pop-Up Shops and vending have become preeminent events in our modern landscape, as throngs of DIY’ers and fledgling entrepreneurs strive to leverage their unique talents and skills to engage with a public ever more desiring of boutique products and services but also ever more drawn to the convenience of ‘on demand’ delivery and shopping online.  Vending events provide opportunities to set up shop, unburdened by the hefty weight of mutli-year lease agreements, to test out marketing approaches or product response, while also creating a space with a special chic or vibe for folks to hang out for a day and try something new.  On May 15, 2021, DAP Tales and I and fellow GNG member Yvonne Walker took to the streets, Pryor Street in downtown ATL, to be exact, meet the public, met some local vendors and just hang out.


Vendors Across The City is an intermittent pop-up event that takes its moniker from the vendor’s coalition of the same name, a group of merchants and independent business people seeking to take advantage of today’s shifting retail climate.  This time it was in a small street-side lot a mere stone’s throw away from Turner Field parking.  Warm, bright weather, bustling traffic and a constant pedestrian presence:  all the hallmarks of an ideal vending day in the heart of Atlanta. 

 The Georgia Nutts set up shop shoulder-to-shoulder with DAP, her gorgeous smile and a table of Primary Colors and Me books & merch.  

Yvonne tables glittered in the early afternoon sun, showing off the many-hued, polished stones of her Artistic Kitten Collection of handmade jewelry and adornments.  


Just next door to DAP & I, on the other side, was GNG Friend Jenelle Charleswell, whose Nelly Fash Balloon Decor had created an entrance to our vending world, by way of an array of balloons in a rainbow arch.  When not making parties and events come alive with color, Jenelle also is a seamstress, and has sewn by hand a custom costume for our future RGN mascot.  Thanks, Jenelle!

Nelly Flash aka Jenelle Charleswell
Ballon Decor and More
@nellyflash2002

Beats and melodies always set off the vibe right, at any good vending event and the air stayed filled with music as DJ Anthology kept it live, all afternoon.

  Although the space itself was not large, the vendors had come out in full force and there was some of everything you could want to find available:  clothing, Party Decor, a Pop-Up nail salon, mixed drinks in single serving bottles, cigars for the smoke crowd, and of course, food of at least a few different flavors. 









Nails by Nookie aka Jayla Douglas

The Art of Health: JoQuan Charleswell, licensed massage therapist. Your health is your masterpiece: Aromatherapy, Deep Tissue, Medical massage, Myofacial, Reflexology, Sports, Stretching, Swedish Massage, Trigger Point. @artofhealthllc

The Bean had come to hang out with us for the day, and got some curry and rice from Friends For Hire Catering, before joining me on my rounds to meet all our fellow vend-folk. 

I myself waited until I had traversed the full gamut before finally getting my grub on from Mack’s Smokehouse; he had pulled his smoker-on-wheels all the way from Texas.  Props to Big Mack on the ribs!  For dessert, we grabbed a couple of slices of cake from Dee’z Little Cakes.



By the time we packed up and pulled out for the day, we hadn’t done too badly on Primary Colors & Me sales, our bellies were good to go and we’d enjoyed a music filled day of that special vibe that is at the core of the pop-up vending experience.  Welcome to the modern era of commerce, Y’all!





















Sunday, January 16, 2022

RGN visits the Albany Classic Car Show and Arts & Crafts Fair at the Exchange Club Fairgrounds 2021

 


Classic Flare,  Local Wares and that Summer-y, Late Autumn Air

          Anyone who’s been in Albany, Georgia for the Holiday Season knows that, if you’re dreaming of a white Christmas in South Georgia, you’re more than likely to wake up from that dream into a bright day, flush with unabashed sunshine and drawing along under near-eighty degree temperatures.  And if you’re me, you don’t mind.  Me and Hot Days are friends, and although autumn is my favorite time of year, I’m perfectly fine if Summer decides to take its sweet time packing its bags, hanging around nigh unto the winter months, if it pleases, which was exactly what seemed to have happened, in the final months of 2021.  No complaints from me, as it made for a balmy, comfortable Sunday for DAP Tales and I to visit the Classic Car Show and Arts & Crafts Fair, at the Exchange Club Fairgrounds, in Albany.

The fairgrounds, essentially a spacious lot in Southwest Albany with some low-lying buildings, loitered under a broad sky of pale blue and streaked with the wispy clouds of early December.   We found a parking space within the expanse of tawny, season-withered grass, bought our wrist bands from three older fellas in their trademark orange Exchange Club vests in a small, windowed tickets booth and proceeded into the main building, where most of the action was.  

The space was neither large nor small, and was neither crowded nor sparse, but housed a fair array of local vendors, their tents or tables brightly displaying their wares.  Strangely, the very first table seen as we walked through the door into the space, was what looked to be an almost random assortment of rustic farming tools and machine parts, mostly corroded and seemingly unrelated. 


I didn’t see any signs or labels on the bins and no one was there for me to ask what it was.  I chalked it up to being an Albany thing and kept it moving.  Beside the unlabeled agrarian history exhibit was a lovely family positioned at a table labeled as the Simply Beautiful Candle Company, featuring an attractive collection of scented candles and other bath-and-bed sundries.  Their candles are hand-crafted and we bought one scented in my favorite, frankincense & myrrh, because DAP Tales said it smelled like me.  It did.  Also, it smelled lovely later, when lit in our room.


Across from Simply Beautiful was McDonald’s Farm (don’t sing it!), whose eye catching honey colored tent sheltered a table laden with many varieties of their locally farmed pure honey.  Though I do like honey, I’m nothing of a connoisseur; I’ve always thought that the taste of honey is what honey tastes like.  But having a chance to sample pure, unrefined honeys made by bees with access to specific floral sources was truly eye opening.  The flavors were dramatically different, ranging from the sharp and almost pungent, to the robustly sweet, to the mild and mellow.  Thanks, Monte!  It was a pleasure to speak with you and to taste what your bees have been up to.






LeNique's DesignsAlbany GA
Use this discount code at checkout for 20% off your purchase: MAR2021


All the earrings are handmade with polymer clay, making them lightweight and durable.

We meandered at ease, speaking with the vendors.  Most of their offerings are made by hand, with materials from local sources: jewelry, clothing, baked goods and fudge, flags of assembled stained wood.  Photographer Robin Bushnell offers her view, timelessly recorded, of nearby places and the people and things there.  I loved her image of a moored boat, captured awash in that day’s passing evening light. Check out her website to view some of those wonderful pics.


Close to the second door of the building was Martha Jane’s Jams & Jellies, a broad spread with rim-to-rim jars of pretty much every kind of jam or jelly you could be looking to put on some toast or whatever you like to put your jams and jellies on.  Strawberry, blackberry, probably any berry you can pick in Georgia; peach, jalapeno; I think there was a yellow root jelly, even.  I picked up a tasty pepper sauce from her that I put in my greens; it’s nice. 


That was the first half of the floor space.  The second was occupied by ranks of classic cars, their domed cabins and chrome-trimmed grills glittering in the floodlights from overhead.  Chevelle Super Sports and Mustangs sat silently, posed for inspection wearing their red, black, white or silver candy coated paint jobs.  Chrome accents, polished like mirrors, reflected us like a fun house as we walked past.  Spotless interiors boasted curvaceous, stitched leather.  


Right in the center aisle, was a grass-green Mustang fastback, almost exactly like the one my parents had when I was five or six years old, except ours hadn’t been a convertible.  


I think my favorite of the bunch, though, was the Rolls Royce, with its solid vulcanized rubber tires on spoked wheels under sweeping, flanged fenders and its canister headlamps.  It looked like something straight out of The Great Gatsby, and its panache and classiness hadn’t been diminished, not even slightly, by its many decades.  To the back of the exhibit hall, a car-exhibitor, preparing to leave, fired up his 50’s era Chevy convertible and just for a moment, the whole place, from sheet metal wall to sheet metal wall, shook with a thunderous roar and a persistent rumbling, like a great beast rising from a century of slumber.  “Yep, it runs,” a show attendee who had been speaking with the exhibitor beforehand said, grinning, as eager motor-heads ran over to grab a video with their phones or just smile.

Peters Performance, 408 Sands Dr, Albany, GA 31705

The only thing out in the actual fairgrounds we spent time to see was when DAPTales took a moment to sit down with Santa, who was in the place, taking photos.  He seemed jovial, but I wasn’t sure how well Albany’s summery Christmas weather was treating him, in that fluffy red suit.  Well, he can have his North Pole climate; a li’l Yuletide sweat never hurt anybody.


About Phil aka alFalaq


al-Falaq is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least!  His collection of poetry and short stories, Threadbare is available on Amazon.

































































































Monday, January 10, 2022

RGN at American Axes

 


American Axes

No Grudge Required to Bury the Hatchet

          For birthday revelry, what could possibly match up to burying the ole log-splitter a couple of inches into a helpless wooden target, splinters raining like June sleet?  Nothing, that’s what!  

DAP Tales’s birthday sets right in the early weeks of spring, so we needed something suitably spring-ish to do to celebrate.  Anyone who knows DAP, knows she’s a real Viking at heart, so hiring a gondolier for a serenade over a stagnant pond or traipsing through a bloom garden filled with bees isn’t going to, ahem, hack it.  But tossing honed axes like some modern day frontiers-folk?  Perfect!

          American Axes, at 821 Livingston Ct suite G, Marietta, GA, had just what we needed.  Surprisingly located inside a corporate office park, the setting in no way distracted from the excitement of the experience and if it had been raining, all the better!  For a very reasonable fee, we reserved a private room for throwing, though open lanes areas are also available. 

With a private room, it’s only your loved ones and close friends you’ll need to worry about beheading, not random strangers, which is convenient, for the legal minded?  To prevent any accidental dismemberment, though, their trained axe experts will walk you through the safety rules and how-to’s of getting that perfect axe throwing mojo.

   
      We had our COVID-ready room (sanitizer for hands, as well as for the axes and surfaces, placed neatly in the room) for an hour, while the masked but happy gang of us took turns abusing the poor wall of wood, with its painted circles and bulls-eye.  


In any situation like this, obviously some people are gonna have the gift, while some others just don’t; at the end of everything, I finished with a perfect record.  That’s just how it goes.  Never mind that it was a perfect record of not sinking a single axe hit in the target.  Let’s just focus on the “perfect” part.  DAP had her share of hits, though (Viking, like I said) and everyone had fun.

          It is an adult oriented activity (must be older than 12 to throw) but its suitable fun for the whole family.  Those who don’t throw can keep score, like our Beanie did, but we did break the rules one time... eep!


They don’t serve alcohol (for obvious reasons), though it is allowed if you have you own (for obvious reasons), though open drunkenness is not tolerated (for obvious reasons) and no horseplay is allowed (for obvious reasons).  And nothing announces you’re getting ready for fun like signing your name on a waiver. 






Happy Birthday, DAP Tales!  You can check out American Axes online, to see if it’s right for you; I’m just a blogger, so I wooden know.  But hey, you did axe.



al-Falaq is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least!  His collection of poetry and short stories, Threadbare is available on Amazon.