Drive.

If you cruise long enough, ignoring the newer interstates in favor of highways that branch off into dirt roads, you'll eventually find Como, MS. Trees, houses, dirt, fields and kudzu. Kudzu that'll swallow trees hundreds of years old, and make what I used to think were leafy tree monsters (I read about Ents one too many times as a kid). Closer to the interstate among properties dotted with hydrangeas and majestic old trees with tire swings hanging from them are huge southern houses and shiny SUVs, at least two per house. Kids play in the yards.....all white.

Drive further down the road. To Main street. Most of the buildings closed and run down, with paint chipping off brick. City Hall, the police station, and the volunteer fire department sit on one side of the road. The buildings are small, maybe two offices inside each building. On the other side of the road, the only building that has any life coming from it at all is the barbershop. Doors swung wide open, fans going full blast. You can hear the laughter clear across the street.

Take a left on Church St. and you start to see the other residential part of Como. Kids on bikes. Houses of a more normal size. Ms. B's Cafe, closed either permanently or after the lunch crowd, run out of buildings and bits pieced together and fading. These neighborhoods are a mass of twisting roads that eventually dead end into a school with one rusty basketball hoop in the middle of an overgrown field. In almost every yard, entire families sit on plastic lawn chairs underneath small trees and talk.

Como has a population around 1,600, with an average income less than half that of the national average, and appears to be completely segregated along economic and racial lines.

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On another note.....I'm ready to go back to FPU. It's one of those moments where you're tired and frustrated, and all you really want is decent cell phone/wifi reception, the ability to stay somewhere that has those things past 10pm, a decent reasonably priced cup of coffee, a hunk of tofu, and friends you can play tunes with.

Peace, Love, and Tunes,

Mac.