The Smoke Eater for Aug. 14, 2025.
The Rules of the Road, and an Appetizer from the Heart of Fat City
This The Smoke Eater for August 14, 2025 and we are going to eat you.
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2025, August 5.
White knuckled on Alabama's I-59 in the dead of night. I’m juking left and right in tandem with the semi-truck just ahead at 70 mph. He is my Sheppard in this concrete valley of darkness.
We've been together for several hours coming out of Knoxville. I’d found myself leading an impromptu caravan of semis down I-75. He’d broken away from the pack and shot forward at 80 mph as we rounded a bend in the Tennessee River bend just outside of Chattanooga. And he was right on my ass coming into Georgia.
He wanted me to go faster, but I wouldn't. I saw the Georgia State Trooper before he did, and then he backed off. Besides, we were hitting the first single-lane construction zone.
Fucking Georgia. Their state troopers love speed traps. It’s not uncommon to catch a glimpse of a deputy lurking on an I-95 overpass clocking speeders so another deputy hiding along the on-ramp can shoot out like bat out of Hell.
As we cruised out of the construction towards Alabama in the fading dusk, he took advantage of the extra lane to lunge past, the last bit of orange and purple sunlight disappearing beyond Appalachia. Nothing left to slow him down.
But this is the deep south. Federal infrastructure money has a tendency to disappear here. State officials might not call them them, "socialist handouts,” just that The Good 'ol Boys in charge know what's best for their people. Just like their papys, grandpapys and great-grandpapys did when they ran things.
The semi suddenly taps his breaks, tail lights flash then jump and dive before my truck dips and shakes. Then his lights zip hard and fast to the left, then back to the right. The black crater almost swallows my front end and now we’re both swerving around this dark and treacherous road.
The semi is dodging right. Then back. Now to the left. He starts throwing turn signals to give me the heads-up as I mirror his every move. If he speeds up, I speed up. If he’s riding the white lines, so am I.
He is my guide, and I shall blindly follow.
As I slowed to take my exit around Attalla, he overtook the truck in front - the first soul we’d seen for over an hour. I wanted to tap my horn or flash my lights, to say thanks, but I didn’t have the chance.
This was my exit, stage right.
2025, August 8th
2200, Slidell, LA.
Driving through Mississippi is strange. Having lived here for the better part of a year while working in corporate media, I learned never to speed near towns. There’s usually a cop waiting to make some desperately needed money after state legislators abolished income taxes. There aren’t many social services, and the roads are terrible.
Sometimes, they’ll just kill you.
When I lived there, locals in Alabama and Mississippi would share a joke at the other’s expense. It usually surfaced when comparing standards of living, or after some poor bastard won a Darwin Award.
In Mississippi, they'll say, "Thank God for Alabama."
In Alabama, they'll say, "Thank God for Mississippi."
Neither has much to brag about. Both state’s are regularly make top ten lists for highest poverty rates in the U.S. Both have incarceration rates that are some of the highest in the U.S. - Alabama is the highest in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world incarcerates more of its own population, per capita, except El Salvador - home of CECOT.
Meanwhile, their state collegiate sports programs rival NFL franchises. In Alabama, home of the Crimson Tide (“roll Tide,” alumni say), the sports program pulled in more than $214 billion in 2022. Missippi’s two biggest schools, Mississippi State and "Ole Miss” took in a combined $244 billion (and almost $273 billion if you include Southern Miss in Hattiesburg) in 2022. And State and Ole Miss are two of the 10 largest employers in the Mississippi.
My interactions with the state police in Mississippi are relegated to the sidelines of college football games. They mostly just stand there scowling at everything in pristine blue uniforms with high-gloss patent leather shoes. Someone once told me they were there for security, but I have my doubts.
I always showed up in dirty jeans and a faded black T-shirt, with scuffed combat boots and an arsenal of camera equipment. Nobody ever responded to my obnoxious small talk except the coach at Southern Miss. He was cordial enough, but I got the distinct impression that someone somewhere had instructed many that I was to be humored publicly and mocked privately. People in town treated him like a god.
The team always took the field in a crowd of smoke, and game after game I missed that heroic shot of players emerging through the smoke like a horde of barbarians storming a squad of Legionaries.
I was almost trampled and killed when I tripped over my own two feet while running backwards and shooting.
”You get your shot,” he asked later with a laugh.
By the end of the game, that photo was the lead on my live gallery.
Once I made the mistake of lighting a cigarette on the sidelines during a particularly dull game. My reprimand was so swift and stern that I was confident someone knock me unconcious on my way to the parking lot later, and crucify me on a goal post.
Unfortunately, I can’t post any photos from my time in Mississippi because an editor claimed the company owned every single photo I took while I was employed with them. Even photos of my cat that were shot on my personal phone. It’s one of the reasons I quit and moved a few days later.
Netroots isn’t really something journalists travel for these days.
The "big lefty conference," as I told the uninformed, was in New Orleans this year. It was the 20th anniversary, and once upon a time it was host to some of the largest players in Democratic and progressive politics. Now, it's not the kind of thing most journalists cover.
The only mainstream journalist I saw this year was Dave Weigel. His write-up in Semafor is tragic, but fair. He’s been to almost all of them.
Some of the speakers can be rather ignorant and insufferable, but the same could be said about most political conferences. Especially those that last three days. And my job isn’t to listen, analyze and/or regurgitate.
They were sharing the massive New Orleans Earnest N. Morial Convention Center with the USA Gymnastics trials, as well as a Pickle Ball Festival that featured Andre Agassi, the once great tennis champion.
Aggasi plays pickle ball now. Times are tough. Everyone needs a gig.
Typically, an outlet or agency will cover the cost of travel and lodging, and a modest per diem budget for food. None of my colleagues wanted to cover Netroots, and at least one of the editors who responded to my pitch told me they really didn’t care. So I shot it on my own.
In industry lingo, that means I’m shooting “stock on spec for the wire.” This means that nobody is paying me a “day rate,” and everything I shoot is likely to end up in a stock image library, like Getty Images. I’ll be lucky to make money off a single photo, so I shoot photos of every panelist in the hope that, sooner or later, that obscure person on the fringes of mainstream politics does or says something that warrants the attention of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, or some other outlet who almost never hire a photographers - but will happily pay the premium for an image.
And because stock imaging is becoming monopolized, images could sell for a few cents to over a hundred dollars a use. The photo might never sell.
Speaking in general terms, this is a really fucking stupid way to run a business.
I was on the escalator when of the featured speakers, Vince Warren, noted that he'd seen me running around and said there was no way he could keep track of all the names and faces.
I pulled the reporter’s pad from my back pocket and showed him my laundry list of names, and how I'd structured everything by the room number. Then I passed him one of my stickers that read, "Low Tech, Low Class," and another that says, "This Machine Exposes Fascists."
Warren grinned.
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