Notes from Beyond the Planet of the Apps 2028:
End of My Journal Days and Early Outland Christmases

Journal Page

If readers have been able to follow in some recognizable chronological order my essays based on my long ago journals, God bless ’em, since I have been long dead and unavailable to assist them putting them in order.

I lived in Georgia’s Coastal Empire less than a mile south of the Savannah River for five years before leaving it and the rising world of apps and robots behind. Since then I tried to keep much more than just a journal with accounts of activities and occasionally smart-assed opinions about our country’s “disorderly houses.”

Before coming to that swampy coastal land, W and I lived on a tropical island where for the greater part those who called themselves locals were more than occasionally drunk, vagabond or wannabe sailors on liberty and who had bought, built or rented themselves small places in the lower Florida Keys, and whose visiting tourists were usually drunk from the time of their arrival in the islands until their departure, or all their money was gone. It was a merry, untidy and increasing expensive place to live, while aging and becoming more infirm of body, soul and mind as the merriment increased but our ability to tolerate it lessened.

After almost twenty years, we left and headed 666 miles north in order to live in the south, nearer to family and medical experts and away from hurricanes. We found ourselves living in a 136 year old house in the midst of one of America’s greatest hard liquor drinking towns. It was an old money place whose genteel lifestyle was becoming more like our old island locale. We also got run over by three hurricanes in our first 13 months, while most importantly shielding escaping island friends from the depredations of Hurricane Irma which wiped out thousands of homes in the lower Keys in September 2017.

It was that island chain’s altering event that started me shifting my focus away from daily journaling of the facts of our existence to the wispy signs that underlie this Apps-land series. My previous essays and journals went something like this:

“Monday, February 28. Rose at daybreak, after coffee went up to store to pick up paint for the house porch floor. Once done, the house will look great. Next will be the the patching and painting of the peeling portions of the garden side of the house which look rather rough. About 2 PM two men stopped by looking for menial labor work. Had none to offer. Took a late side trip to the fish house. Bought some good looking extra large Georgia shrimp for dinner – grilled kabobs for dinner. Toured the garden. Found the squirrels busy burying and and unburying last falls nut harvest. Nice sunset with wind blowing fresh from northeast.”

While before Irma getting to know the distant relatives of the folks who founded the colony of Georgia on the banks of the Savannah River more than 280 years ago would have captured all of my interest and energy, the rise of the apps made that quite impossible.

I had kept the diary in part to preserve some of details of life I found in these towns’ unrecognized intersections and edges. Secret medicinal hemp-growing enterprises, the illicit babe and he-she trade, the daily misdemeanor court felons, down-and-outers, and assorted crazies whose exploits always got to me. I finally saw that my dailies were wholly focused on the recent past — a reality that was fast disappearing. The apps and bots made me finally see that I needed to think about the future and that, if somebody 150 years from now read what I was writing, they might care more about how they got there rather than what I had for dinner.

Nighttime view of the end of a Key West
street near Mallory Square in May 2017

My last fully canonical journal entry was on Christmas 2017. Later on after we fled, our early post merger Christmases in the outlands were celebrated in natural and simpler fashions. Given how sparsely populated the outlands were with us analogue rebels, there are likely few recollections of those early traditions. These celebrations were not so much religious or raucous but spiritual and thankful.

Initially those who were within 15 or so miles (approximately one day’s journey of mountain hiking) of each other would gather at a central but private place away from the celebrants’ dwelling places and sat in a circle sharing what they brought to the meal. It was often the first and last time we would see many of the new outlanders.

We old timers would never tell the newcomers of the likelihood of seeing each other at the following celebration. It eased our sense of loss when they didn’t show the following year, while increasing our own chances of surviving another year.

There was no getting a little merry, since no alcohol was available in sizable quantities — it was reserved for medicinal or pain relief purposes after an injury. There were no persons in costumes parading the glens or late hour firing of guns (bullets were too precious for self preservation for such foolishness), nor was there whooping and hollering in honor of the day. Just quiet companionship and thanks for another year passed and hope for a another to come.

After local game had mostly played out and efforts at animal husbandry were still fledgling, Christmas dinners consisted of fruits, vegetables, tubers, nuts, rough breads and such. Salt preserved fish from the annual runs were the delight to all of us.

I cannot forget our joy of our first, beautiful little gathering of 12 hardy souls. Stories of past happy times were swapped like we were attending prize winning movies at a foreign film festival.

Meals were always at midday to give attendees enough time to hike there, eat, share and then return home the following day before sunset and the drone bots night time patrols.

If the weather cooperated by providing us enough noise cover, group carol singing and individual Christmas tale recitations were done. Sometimes the more inventive of the attendees would regale us with a “Christmas Time in the Outlands” in which they displayed much talent and eagerness in interpreting the parts of old English and American Christmas stories in our new surroundings.

Every year one or more would bring a small recreation of a Christmas tree decorated with colorful dried preserved fruits, which we admired during the meal and then enjoyed the ornaments as dessert.

Sadly there were no children at the early meals, since they were few in number in the outlands and too precious to expose to others who may or may not be trustworthy attendees.

The sole non-meal decorations were the dried flowers and herbs we all brought to share and trade from the previous summer’s grow season. This trade was our sole means of gathering medications we all needed to survive.

We departed after clearing the site of any signs of our use and presence, silently bidding one another by hand gestures peace and enduring strength.

— typed in early 2026

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