Finding mercy

Are you really digging for peace?

Or is that just a lie?

Tell me, help me sleep.

Sure that you really want real behind all the stories that go.

Still remembers fire, grass remembers rain.

Every scar tells a story carved out of rain.

Welcome to the Wrecking Yard.

I'm Jerry Wayne Longman, y'all, and presumably still y'all.

All are welcome here in the Church of Internal Combustion.

We just ask, of course, that you arrive in an open heart.

We've got a lot of ground to cover today.

I need to turn my mouse around, so it's pointing in the right direction.

And this place is a haven for those of us who are,

was raised by folks with dirty hands and complicated hearts.

I have a quick little shout-out to my sponsors, Outlaws and Gents Grooming Company.

It's my favorite products I've ever found.

It's a great little small business right here in Texas.

It makes fine grooming products for men.

And already a couple of my people that went out in the bottom have reviewed them,

responded back to me and told me how much they love the products.

I'm just really happy to be a part of this organization.

They are one of the companies bringing Wrecking Yard podcasts to y'all today.

The other, most notably, being World of Outlaws Racing Series.

Whew, about to send me all over the daggum country, but I'm excited about it.

World of Outlaws Sprint Series goes all the way back to 1978 when the organization was formed.

And the real reason they did it was back then Sprint Cars was kind of crazy, man.

Like every different region had different rules about engine size and car weight and all that kind of stuff.

And it was real hard for guys to go around the country and compete

without having to carry an extra trailer full of about six different engines, you know,

depending on the series they were trying to compete in.

The World of Outlaws kind of went in and sanctioned all these tracks

and made all these rules so that everybody's racing by the same rules all the way across the country

when it comes to the Sprint Cars.

And it's a fantastic series.

I couldn't be more excited to be a part of it.

I'm about to have my Hunter S. Thompson moment, except without all the drugs,

because Dari did them all.

So that is going to be a fun bit of business.

Get my timer going here.

God dang it.

My phone is not cooperating with me.

I need to keep the timer.

I need to keep the phone up here, though, because Rachel and my youngest

are headed off to the Wally World to pick up some prescriptions.

And my oldest is in the house.

I got the gate unlocked.

I need him to be able to get ahold of me if he needs to.

Oh, my goodness.

It has been a little bit of a week, guys.

It's not even the week's not over.

I'm recording this at Wednesday at 4.22 in the PM.

I just got done writing it all.

And this is kind of an emotionally heavy episode.

I'll tell you that if you need a trigger warning right up front,

I'm going to be talking in depth about some details of my mother's passing

and some of the time surrounding that area

and an effort to talk about mercy in a real way.

But alongside that, so in the morning, I got to get up at about 6 o'clock in AM

and get headed to Missouri.

And I was thinking it was like 600 or something.

It's like 750 miles one way.

So I've been trying to get the avalanche ready for that trip.

We've got new transmission.

We've got new differential.

But boy, the front end was just about, the front end just wore slap out,

which is a little surprising on a 185,000 mile pickup SUV.

What the hell do you want to call it?

I don't want to give you shit.

People are like, oh, that's not a pickup.

You know, whatever.

I've called lesser things trucks myself.

But whatever you want to call it.

It seemed a little premature for the front end to be wore out.

That's just me talking.

I couldn't figure it out.

I got in there.

I ordered some new shocks and some new hubs.

I didn't get the hubs changed because the calipers on GM on the front

have that Torx head, big old Torx head screw holding the caliper, T55.

And I don't live in the rust belt.

This truck didn't come from the rust belt.

Now it did.

I will say it sat in a field for about seven years, right?

In a field that held water.

So maybe that's what happened.

You know, we found a bunch of rust in the transmission.

Even though the transmission was working fine,

we went to rebuild it.

We found a bunch of rust in the transmission.

I can't get them damn caliber bolts off, save my life.

I've gone after it with an impact ratchet, PB blasted it.

It's just going to have to wait until I get back from Peevely to tackle that next week.

I think I might have to go after it with heat and a map torch to try to get these.

But you got to be careful because of the rubber brake lines right there.

So I need to put a shield or something in there and really get after that boat

in that house and see if I can get it busted loose because it is welded in there.

Welded in there.

I mean, I beat on that sun 50 and cheater piped on it and everything else

and can't get that rubber brake out for loose.

I ain't never run into that.

That's a new one on me.

But I hear stories like that from my brethren to the north.

Constantly telling me about these kind of problems.

So I'll get back next week and I'll tackle that.

But I did go ahead and change the shocks on it.

When I changed the shocks out, I think I figured out why the front ends so beat the piss

because whoever owned this pickup before David put oversized shocks on it

and they put these weird bushings in there and I don't think they put them in there correctly

because the damn thing was just riding on the shock bushing.

Just not the rubber part, just this metal bushing in it.

I mean, it hit a bump like it knocked your teeth out, right?

And sway and the shocks are just blown out, blown out.

There was some kind of worn oversight.

Look like they're for a four-wheel drive.

Did not look like for a two-wheel drive pickup.

And way longer than the stock factory replacement shocks that I ordered for it

because I just want it stock.

Well, I got it and got screwed around.

And I remember people doing this cranking.

It's got them little torsion bars and people twisting them torsion bars

to make trucks sit higher, kind of like a four-wheel drive.

And some guys would do it on their Z71s and stuff when the front end was getting a little war out.

They cranked them torsion bars up, tried to make it feel a little more secure.

Man, whoever I got on there cranking on this thing had them torsion bars twisted up

like I would know tomorrow.

And I got all that straightened out.

It still sits at a nice height, but it was almost squatted looking the way they had it.

Trying to level it, I'm sure, but really dumb way to go about it.

All it did was just prematurely beat the piss out of that front end.

Tyrods, all that shit need to be gone through.

Didn't have time to tack all that.

Might tack all that next week.

But at least got the shocks under there and it's driving a lot better.

And I did the intake gaskets on it.

And I tore it all down and Rach had to go to the store and do a bunch of stuff.

I had ordered some gaskets off Amazon.

Lo and behold, they sent me the wrong intake gaskets for it.

So I had to wait a couple of hours for her to get back to the store.

We were on all the grocery shopping and all that sort of thing.

She likes to do all that on Monday and it's a big trip.

She had Costco and HEB and, you know, takes a little time.

Everything at Houston's an hour away from Houston.

Houston's an hour away from Houston.

That's the same.

So I waited around a few hours for her to get back.

But then it was getting a little later on in the evening.

And I went out hitting local auto parts place trying to find the right gaskets for it.

Finally found them.

Got back here starting to get dark.

I got in a rush to start putting that thing back together.

Got them gaskets on, torque it at intake.

It's got a little pattern, you know, torque it at intake down.

I'm old-timers like a bitch about them plastic intakes.

I don't mind doing a little weird pattern to bolt them down.

And there, I have a lot easier.

Yank off the top of the engine at a weird angle.

I got that thing I'll put down.

I started plugging back in my little fuel injector clips back on the fuel injectors.

Got down to the next, last one was missing.

Traced the wire and the wire was going under the intake.

And then I immediately thought, oh damn did I just break my fuel injector clip off in the intake, off in the engine.

And that thought was a little overwhelming that late in the evening.

It was getting dark.

And I uttered a string of curse words.

Whereas then I referred to myself and the avalanche as a dumb sea sucker,

at least about eight times in one sentence.

And then I just very calmly turned the drop light off, shut the hood, went inside and cleaned up,

hung out with my wife the rest of the evening, got up the next morning and tackled it.

Fresh eyes.

And lo and behold, I did not break the fuel injector clip.

It was just neatly hanging off right there in the port, didn't mess up the gasket, that good stuff.

So I got it all back together yesterday.

And it was a good day yesterday.

I can't go into too much detail about something amazing career happened yesterday.

We're about to make an announcement about that too.

It's going to mean some big stuff.

I'm excited about it.

And I was excited about it.

Here's what the best part of my yesterday was.

You know, my youngest is autistic.

And I struggle a little to connect with him sometimes, you know.

He just has his own world and his own things he likes.

But he's really, since I got the pickup, I guess it kind of reminds me of the one I had when he was little.

I'm sure it does.

He likes riding around in the front seat with winded down.

That's his thing.

He likes to go for a little ride with daddy.

So I got ready to test drive it.

And I stepped off in the house.

Hey boy, you want to go for a ride with daddy?

I got to go test drive my pickup.

Boy, a little booger.

Shot off to his room to get his shoes.

Before I even had the gate unlocked, he was sitting in the passenger seat in the truck, ready to go.

We was backing out of the driveway and rolled my winded down.

He was rolling his winded down.

I said, boy, the best thing about working on a car is getting to test drive it afterwards.

And this little booger adjusted his glasses and throwed that arm out there and said, yep, with all the confidence of a 30-year season mechanic.

And it just tickled the piss out of me and just had my whole heart lit up all evening.

I was just in the best mood.

Even after test driving, find out I had created a new code that I didn't have before.

I came back with a map sensor code.

I went to try my code scanner.

My code scanner wouldn't work.

I was assuming I broke my code scanner.

Walked over to my buddy James' house, my neighbor James' house.

I said, hey man, you got a code scanner and brought any code on this truck.

My code scanner broke.

He said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He brought his out.

We plugged his in.

His didn't work neither.

It turns out it had a blown fuse for the cigarette lighter, which also powers the OBD2 port, the data port.

I knew I couldn't charge my phone, but I guess I should have dug a little deeper in why that was a problem.

So we swapped the fuse out and ran code, had a map sensor code.

It didn't worry me too.

I just wanted to make sure I wasn't getting a lean error code from one of them banks or something.

I didn't have a backing leak or something like that.

I had a feeling I might pull a map sensor code because I took map sensor apart and cleaned it real good.

And the only thing a map sensor hates worse than being dirty is somebody screwing with it.

Sure enough, I've got mess around with it.

I just didn't have it seated back in the air box port just right.

And it was sucking air.

Seated that, hadn't pulled the code again since.

So I think we're okay.

Boy, boy tickle me.

First thing about working on car, getting new test drivers.

Yup.

Throw that arm out.

See?

Fixin' the glasses.

Feena autism.

Boy, I've got a...

I made a new friend recently.

And you guys might, if y'all went and watched the podcast I did with him, a fellow named Clifford Brooks III.

Clifford Brooks III is a world renowned Pulitzer nominated poet and owns his own publishing house.

And does...

He teaches at Mercer University.

He teaches at UCLA.

A really intelligent man, a Southern man.

A man from Georgia.

And Clifford is autistic.

Founded out a little later in life.

But it helped him deal with some of the stuff he'd been going through in life.

And I like to joke around calling weaponized autism because the man is brilliant.

The man...

He's been working with me.

We're going to...

I'm publishing a book of poetry with him.

A secondary that don't have nothing to do with the Wreck and Yard book.

This is just another...

He read a bunch of my poetry.

He loves to stand up.

And he's like, man, I really want to publish a book of poetry for you.

So I'm doing it.

Me and him are going to put this book of my poetry together.

But he's such a good teacher in that he like really helps me understand concepts that I struggled with in school.

He has such a unique way of teaching that he really...

I would have argued with you till I was blue in the face about the Oxford comma and not had any understanding of why it was useful.

Until the way he explained it to me and taught it to me.

And he's taught me how to reach deeper into my poetry and how to provide better imagery and really use my mind to put people in a place.

You know, I'm really excited about it.

We've got...

He's a great dude.

He has a...

I'll put some links up.

He offers...

So he teaches a class called adulting with autism and it's to help not only people who have been diagnosed with autism later in life.

And it, you know, it gave him some answers, but still left him with a bunch of unanswered questions about what to do about it.

And also for working with children who are autistic.

And I've been talking to him a lot about my son.

He's been helping me understand that situation better.

And I'll put some links up those sign classes.

Maybe you have somebody in your life that is autistic.

Maybe you think you are.

You just don't know for sure.

You know, that kind of thing.

Clifford keeps trying to convince me I am, but I was like, I don't think I am, bro.

I know I got a lot of weird traits, but really interesting guy, super interesting guy.

I'm really excited to move forward with him on some projects and do some stuff with him.

Like I've done my good buddy Adam.

You know, as you go on, you meet more people and people help you understand.

You always got my theory on learning is I'm always looking for new teachers.

I'm always looking for, I go over to James.

I asked James questions.

James knows more about building engines than anybody I know.

He's a brilliant man.

He knows all the old tricks and all the new tricks.

He's built everything in between.

You know, David teaches me stuff about business and life.

Clifford's been teaching me stuff about my writing and how to explore my creative writing better.

You always got to be looking for a teacher.

You always, if you want to keep learning, you know, and there's a lot you can teach yourself for sure.

You know, I'm a big proponent of reading everything.

You can get your hands on teaching yourself everything you can because it's got me pretty decently far in life.

But I wanted to recite one of my, this is going to be one of the poems going in my book.

And I thought I'd recite it for you guys and you guys tell me what you think of it.

The title of it is Flesh and Brass.

Lying on my back underneath my Chevrolet, bruises forming a slip.

My allies in this battle are gone, like curses quieted by pain.

The concrete in our clothes stained with our efforts.

Good men, husbanded, fathered out of the fight.

This dirty business is mine.

With arms that no longer rise above without shaking.

With a back that hates the cruelty from the concrete.

My eyes despise the shadows from the droplet.

My grin is honest.

Anyways, that's one of the poems that's going in my book of poetry.

Hope you enjoyed it.

If you didn't, don't tell me.

I've got enough people constructively criticizing me right now.

Now let's get off into this thing, man.

Let's talk about some real shit.

Let's dive into mercy.

The second of what I think are the five labors of growth.

Mercy is where the rubber meets road.

Everything that we talked about in the episode about love.

Of course, the teachings of Jesus, Jesus had a lot to say about mercy.

The most direct statement is Matthew 5.7.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Short.

Oh, it's mechanical.

You get what you give.

But the neighbor teaches in Matthew 9, when the Pharisees question

why he's eating with tax collectors and sinners.

He says, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

It was kind of a shot across the bow of religious formalism.

He's basically saying, ritual obedience without compassion

misses the entire point.

He says it twice in Matthew, meaning a minute both times.

There's also the parable of the unmerciful servant later on in that.

I can't remember.

I didn't write it down, but it's basically a king or a ruler

forgives a servant some kind of impossible debt.

And then the same dude walks out and immediately throws

another man in prison over a few dollars he earns.

He owes him.

And the king finds out and revokes the forgiveness on the debt.

It's a brutal, specific lesson.

Mercy isn't just something you receive.

It obligates you to display it.

You can't genuinely accept it and then withhold it.

The Stoics all had a lot to say about mercy.

And the Stoics, it gets interesting because they're complicated.

Marcus, in his meditations, writes extensively about gentleness

and patience towards people wrong.

Not because they deserve it, but because anger corrupts whoever holds it.

Anger, you know, does, God, I got it later on.

I'll talk about that a little more, but anger corrupts a person who carries it.

It's close what Jesus was saying, but from a different direction.

Jesus extends mercy from love.

Stoics extend it from self-discipline and reason.

Seneca actually wrote an entire essay called Did Clementia on mercy

and it's addressed to young Nero.

And his argument is that mercy is the virtue that most becomes a powerful man.

Cruelty is easy when you have power.

Choosing restraint and compassion is the harder, no-border thing.

That's what I always say about kindness.

And Seneca draws a sharp line between mercy and weakness.

Mercy is a choice made from strength.

Pity is what weak people feel.

Mercy is what strong people do.

It's like it's the difference between nice and kind.

It's that same thing all over again.

Epictetus, former slave, goes out a little differently.

He argues that when people wrong you, they're acting out of ignorance.

They don't know better.

Extending mercy isn't excusing the behavior.

It's recognizing the limitation of the person in front of you.

And I really want to double down on that one,

because that one really brings a bell to me.

I make it a point to display mercy in my life towards people who wrong me.

And it's not something I come about easy.

It took a lot of years of practice.

But it also took realizing that they may never do right by me.

They may never apologize.

They may never act right.

They may never try.

They may never be a better person than they were when they wronged me.

That's none of my business.

All that's my business is how I react towards them.

But everybody seems to agree on this.

Mercy is active.

It's not passive.

It's a choice.

It costs something.

And withholding it corrupts you more than it punishes the other person.

They're already miserable.

Nothing you're doing is going to make them more miserable.

That connects directly back to my story about a chest thumping guy who went to Iraq

and then witnessed some things and come back feeling differently.

That was Mercy beginning to take root in my soul.

There's millions, you know, every major philosopher, every author at some point has tackled.

Sorry.

Got something eating up down here.

A little mosquito's probably.

But all these people have tackled the idea of Mercy

and all their definitions land a little different,

but somehow still in the same trajectory.

Schopenhauer is the German pessimist, right?

Who by all accounts was a miserable son of a bitch in real life.

Built his entire ethics on compassion.

He called compassion the great mystery of ethics.

The idea being when you genuinely suffer with someone, you've stopped seeing them as other.

That's like the very deepest root, I think, of what Mercy means.

Nietzsche, he broke hard from Schopenhauer specifically over compassion.

He came to see compassion as a weakness, not a virtue.

To show pity for others in his views, to treat them with contempt.

Better to encourage them to face their difficulties and struggle against them.

Nietzsche thought Mercy was Christianity's way of celebrating weakness.

He wasn't entirely wrong about the corruption of it, though.

And when I tell you my story, I think you'll understand that a little better.

But Mercy can be a cover story.

Mercy can corrupt.

When you forget to direct Mercy at the people you love,

when you're too worried about your own Mercy, it can become a cover.

And it can become corrupted.

Dostoevsky is where it gets extorted.

Father Zosima and the brothers Karamazov says,

and I quote, there are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world.

But overwhelm such a soul with Mercy, give it love,

and it will curse what it has done for there are so many germs of good in it.

We also believe that criminals are more likely to undergo genuine reform

if loved by society rather than punished.

Merciful responses are more effective than harsh ones.

Dostoevsky understood that Mercy isn't soft.

It's the most destabilizing force there is.

It breaks people open in ways punishment never could.

Here's the other one I want to talk about.

Mark Twain.

I sort of like to think of as my literary grandfather.

He didn't write any treatise on Mercy, but he circled it constantly.

One of my favorite lines of his is forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds

on the hill that has crushed it.

That's Mercy is something the giver produces, not the receiver earns.

And to nail the point down farther, he also says that anger is an acid

that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored

than to anything on which it is poured,

which directly echoes Marcus Aurelius's sentiments.

When you withhold Mercy, you're not punishing the other person.

You're just failing yourself.

You're just taken away from you.

That's all.

Papa Hemway.

He's the one who got closest with that name.

He never wrote about Mercy directly, but he wrote this.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

And the best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks,

the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.

Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable.

They're often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Arguably, Hemingway's whole body of work is about what happens when Mercy is absent.

Being too damaged or too proud to extend it to themselves or anyone else.

He lived it. He died by it.

And I think it probably rings true with a bunch of you.

You're either raised by a man like that, or you're new one and mentored under one.

I knew, it feels like hundreds.

The only reason I read all this stuff is the reason I work on this stuff is I'm trying not to end up like some of them.

I'm not condemning them.

I'm just saying, that's not what I want at the end of my line.

But the through line, Mercy isn't weakness.

It's not even primarily about the person receiving it.

It's not what kind of person you choose to be in the moment when you have power over someone's pain.

Back in the end of 2012, my mother was dying from liver failure.

Talked about liver failure causes a number of things happen in the body.

Liver failure causes temporary psychosis when your ammonia levels get all out of whack.

Memory failure can do a lot to your mind.

And my mother's mind was fading. She was struggling.

She didn't die from alcoholic liver failure. She died from non-alcoholic liver failure, fatty liver failure.

But she also had a portabane defect from birth that was never diagnosed, you know, in little East Texas.

My mother was also a beast. She was overweight my whole life.

And she would yo-yo up and down like a lot of people do like I have, which is really hard on your body.

We tried every fad diet, the Atkins, all of it.

It would work for a little while and then when she'd come off of it, she would gain even more weight back.

She had a lot of demons. She was sexually abused as a child.

Her mother hadn't taken care of her in that respect, my grandmother.

And she was also the child of a 16-year-old, my granny, who was knocked up by a 27-year-old grown man who bailed on him.

That's my blood grandfather.

It can leave a lot of demons in your life.

And she struggled with her weight insecurities her whole life, right up until she died.

But when she was dying in that hospital, she was in there for a couple months and

she would forget what was happening to her.

She would wake up crying. She'd go out and sleep for hours at a time.

She'd wake up crying and say, what has happened to me? Why has this happened to me?

I've seen it. I've seen it with my own eyes a number of times.

My father made the decision that we shouldn't tell her what was happening to her.

He said it was out of mercy to her to not tell her she was dying.

And I complied out of obedience to my father.

Mainly because I didn't know him better, but I've sat with him a long time.

I've sat with him a long time, but regular with him a long time.

I feel a great amount of guilt that complying with that.

I don't.

I think it was mercy for him, not her.

I think he was giving himself mercy.

And I think I probably let him.

I want you to have all the information so that you understood.

Everyone just say, hey, my dad was a dick while my mom was dying.

I'm not trying to be funny, but life just fucking is.

The whole concept, comedy is funny, tragedy is funny because there shouldn't even be none.

But it's the one thing what connects us.

Of course it's not as simple as he was just being a dick.

He came from an abusive home too.

He was just trying to survive while going through probably at least the second.

I know his mother, the loss of his mother was really hard on him.

But my mother was probably the second hardest loss of his lifetime.

He had built his entire life around her and their plans.

He wasn't being a dick.

He was a wounded man, a survivor of an abusive home.

Do an only thing he knew how to do when the ground fell out.

Protect himself and call it protection for somebody else.

It's not evil.

It's just human and broken and sad.

I often now wonder if it would have been more merciful to her to explain the situation better to her.

But there were other times going on with that.

And there were times, one of the times when I went to her hotel room,

I very much resemble in a lot of ways her younger brother Bobby, my uncle Bobby.

And my mom being the oldest, him being one of the youngest, they had kind of a chaotic relationship.

Also they grew up in a warpath of the home.

And Bobby screwed up left and right and did a lot of terrible things.

I ain't here to paint him as a saint for sure.

One of the last times I saw my mother alive, she was in that rehab hospital.

She was having memory failure that day. She was all over the place.

And I tell a story on stage about her wanting to name me Chad and all that.

And that's a true story.

But one of the worst days of my life was walking in that hospital room

and her not recognizing me at all. She thought I was Bobby.

And she spent an hour and a half telling me a lot of horrible shit

she wanted to say to my uncle Bobby, stuff she needed to get off her chest.

And my mom was one to hold back.

And I didn't know what else to do but take it.

And I want to try to correct her.

I just wanted that moment for her to get that out of her system

because I knew that she was leaving the world soon and I didn't want to carry that.

That's where I learned mercy.

Stay in that room while she berated me for things another man did.

Not correcting her. Not stopping her. Just letting her do it.

And it broke me. I drove home in tears. Just shattered.

This is one of the very last times I got to speak to her.

There's a lot of different ways to look at mercy there.

You know what I mean?

This is different. My father needed mercy.

He needed mercy in that moment.

He couldn't explain to this person he loved every time she woke up

why she was dying again because it would break him.

He needed to survive that moment. He did.

But it's that whole story about how mercy can become a cover

and what mercy can become corrupted.

It's the very thing Nietzsche warned against.

It's another one of those words that gets thrown around it.

I don't think people have fully thought about it.

I believe the biggest moment of pure mercy I've ever offered in my life

was standing in the hospital room and not telling her I wasn't body.

Allowing her to, regardless of what damage it was doing to me

and what damage it left me.

I sat in that room and let a dying woman mistake me for her brother

and unload on me.

It's the mercy I try to practice towards people that are wrong now.

It's that same thing.

And the reason you do it, the reason you practice mercy, it's not for them.

It's not for anybody. It's for you.

Mercy is to help you.

Mark 20 nailed it, bro.

It's like carrying around a jug of acid inside yourself.

I carried around anger and vitriol for years.

I carried anger at my father.

Anger at the world. I was mad. I was angry at everything for years.

And all it did was eat me alive.

Made my Crohn's disease worse, made jobs worse, made my relationship with my wife.

It affected every single detail of my life carrying around that vitriol

until I learned how to be merciful, until I learned how to apply mercy in my own life.

Not for others, for myself.

Not to give myself mercy, but to give anybody I was mad at mercy

to alleviate the pain, the anger I was carrying inside myself.

And I have met men in their 80s that have not figured out how to do that.

You're still carrying around some grudge, some deep bitter resentment.

That just does nothing but blacken your heart.

I've met men in their 20s that feel like women.

I've met people from all walks of life who carry that thing in them.

And until you learn to get past that hurdle, you cannot grow in any other direction.

There's no part of you that can grow.

You cannot expand your mind. You cannot expand your relationships.

You cannot deepen your relationships until you figure out how to let that go.

So that's my thoughts on mercy.

Let's wrap it up right there and you know what time it is.

Come here, man.

That's all I have to get to without trying to cry.

That whole ball on camera.

Let's go back to the Wally Bottom's text.

By the late 90s, residential property values had plummeted in rural East Texas

as a result of the late 80s oil crash.

Small schools who relied heavily on their tax base for funding suddenly didn't have enough.

The state had come up with some long-winded strategy called the Robin Hood Plan

after the Edgewood versus Kirby lawsuit had forced restructuring of how schools were funded.

Like most plans invented to equalize things, it just created chaos in rural areas

as many small schools were shuttered for low enrollment and consolidated into bigger districts.

It was a fate that the Wally ISD and Levers Chapel ISD high schools succumbed to.

It just so happens that the Wally High shut down the summer before Tony Haines senior year

and he was forced to attend Kilgore High while some of his classmates got sent to Henderson.

The copry smell of his blood seemed to permeate his senses.

He stared at the Bulldog mascot on the door of the nurse's office through his swelling left eye.

A little blurry, but the Bulldog seemed to be locked onto the water moxin on his Wally High t-shirt.

He hadn't even seen the punch coming, just felt it connect with his nose and cheek

and the wet, warm liquid that immediately began running down his lip.

Of course, amongst his attackers friends, there had been no other witnesses,

just a wildly incongruous story about them not seeing him on their way out of the locker room

before an accident with the heavy door of the fill-in.

The nurse didn't believe the story.

Neither did the principal it seems, but the football coach did and that was enough to let them get away with it.

The nurse was a kind, gray and woman who had lived in Kilgore her whole life.

Taught Sunday school at a Pentecostal church right down Fritt Swanson.

She was on the phone in the corner of her office talking to his father Carl Jr. in hushed tones.

His head was ringing, but he heard her saying, bullying a few times.

Tony laughed to himself.

How do you like that, Mr. All-Star quarterback?

Raised a pussy.

He muttered to no one in particular.

He didn't have athletic bone in his body, slim, and his friends had found at a younger age

that he was much better at getting hit with a dodgeball than catching it.

It was okay when he was with them and to Wally High though, they knew he was good at other stuff.

He drew all the banners, could play just about any instrument you put in front of him after a little experimenting,

but none of that was currency in this place.

He didn't go looking for trouble.

The girl Lisa in his art class had started talking to him.

She wanted to see the rest of his drawings and he had invited her to meet him in the parking lot

so he could show her his big portfolio and his old dodge pickup.

That's when the trouble showed up in the form of her boyfriend,

a senior offensive lineman on the Bulldogs that looked like he'd been bred in a test tube of testosterone

with hands the size of frozen hams and just as hard.

He'd humiliated him in front of his new classmates and torn his portfolio into shreds

that scattered in the wind across the student parking lot like sick and war lose.

It had only escalated from there. Tony didn't carry more, he just wanted out.

Tony, the nurse jarred him when she said his name.

Your father'd like to speak with you as she motioned him towards a receiver.

His head throbbed as he stood and walked to her.

He pulled the phone to his ear and said, hey, his dad was in work mode.

His voice had a really terse quality when he was at work.

He wasn't half hidden like he was trying to fit in with the other engineers

who hadn't come from a small shit old town.

You want to tell me what happened, son?

What do you think happened? It's the same shit he half muttered and whined back.

Boy, watch your language. You don't speak to me like that.

Tony's obedience kicked in.

Sorry, dad, my head just hurts.

It's okay. The nurse told me you took a good wallet.

What's the other guy look like? You give him one back?

No, sir, I was too busy falling and bleeding.

Well, it'll probably be over now. They know you're tough.

Tony's mind reeled at his father's delusion.

Okay, dad. They're going to let you go home early.

I'll get your papa to come check on you.

Maybe y'all can go fishing this weekend. I'll be back Tuesday.

Maybe we'll go find you some boxing classes or something.

Okay, dad. Tony brightened a little at the idea of seeing his granddad.

He'd stayed with him a lot after his mom died a few years back.

His dad had responded to her death by doubling his travel work

and his mama, all Atlanta had done her best to help a 14-year-old skinny kid

learn to function in a world his mama no longer existed in.

Son, yeah, dad, cheer up.

High school and college are some of the best days of your life.

Well, that depressed him again.

He mumbled a goodbye to his father before hanging up the phone.

The nurse gave him a note to leave campus

and some ibuprofen along with an invite to her church for Sunday service.

Everybody fits in at church, baby.

She smoothed his hair as she said it.

The brightness of the sun pierced his swollen eye

and made the drum in his head play louder as he walked to the old Dodge pickup.

His father had given it to him when he got his license

and him and his papa had spent the summer breathing new life into the old machine.

His papa had bought the pickup new back after a small engine shop

and finally started making money in the 80s.

Once when they were working on it, his papa told them

about how his friend Danny had drove over to the dealership

and loaned you a co-sign for it.

Tony pulled into Wally Bottoms a little after five.

There wasn't anybody else on the road, really.

There never was anymore.

Most everything on Main Street were just boarded up old Art Deco buildings

whose grand facades look far less grand in their debt composition.

The fella that bought his papa's old small engine repair shop

seemed to run a perpetual garage sale out of it.

Waking up early each morning to drag out old cast out clothes racks

from the clothes JC Penney's.

Full of clothes, the women local churches donated

in hopes that 80s holy roller was a trend

that would catch back on fire in East Texas someday.

He walked into the empty house that still smelled like the heat of the day.

He walked around opening windows about halfway

before cranking up the big attic fan to suck the fresh cooler air in.

In his parents' room, everything still looked the same.

His mom's vanity where she put her makeup on in the morning

while she listened to the weather before work still had all her things on it.

Her clothes still hung in the closet.

It was a stark reminder that things are just things

and the cancer had taken the most important part.

He couldn't cry anymore for her or anything, really.

He'd cried himself out night after night in Mama Atlanta's apron

while she stroked his hair softly and whispered,

Let it out, baby.

It just ain't right.

I know.

He heated up some Chef Boy R.D. in the microwave

but wasn't really hungry.

Instead, he found himself sitting at the table

with the warm 1950s Martin guitar in his hands.

His dad gave it to him when he was about nine

and discovered it in the closet.

They drove over to a big music shop in Longview

and got some new strings for it,

and the music store owner, Gil,

had shown him how to put them on and tune it.

Come natural to him, really easy.

He was picking his way through a tool song called 46 and 2.

It always made him feel better to lean into it

and scream it out when no one was home.

He was deep, his vocal straining at the first chorus.

My shadow's shedding skin.

When he heard his granddad's characteristic shave

and a haircut knock on the door.

Come on, boy, open that door.

Your papa was too old to stand out in his son for two damn long.

I'm liable to melt like that old witch.

Carl Sr. bellowed with a chuckle at his own outdated joke.

Tony's face cracked mid-scream into a smile that split his face,

genuinely happy for the interruption to his darkness.

Coming, papa, he hollered as he sat to Martin by his chair.

The Martin might have been glad for the interruption too.

It wasn't meant for that kind of music.

It might have not cared.

It was just a guitar.

When the door bust opened, Carl Sr.

wretched out and cradled as grandsons bruised and swollen face

with gnarled hands that rebuilt a thousand engines

and knuckles that had been busted on an aluminum and steel

so often they resembled the material of what had split them.

He turned Tony's head left and right

before letting out a low whistle

and looking the teenager in the eye.

Boy, that got you good, Rocky.

How many of them was it?

Tony laughed a little sheepishly.

It was just one, papa.

Carl Sr. winked and chewed on his lip a bit before saying,

Boy, it must have been a big ol' son of a bitch then.

Tony laughed for real this time.

He's pretty big, papa.

It's the damn antibiotics in the chicken these days.

Half these high school meatheads look like

they belong on the cowboy starting line.

You built more like me than your daddy.

Guess you're getting about the age.

I'll show you how to bring them big boys down.

I don't know about that, papa.

You don't need to know about it. I do.

Now go grab your stuff.

I want you to stay with me and ma'am all night.

She's making chicken.

And we're going to hit Lake of the Pines early in the AM

and see if we can't find one of them monsters

everybody talks about.

Bring your guitar.

Maybe you learn a happy song. You ain't got a scream.

I'll turn you on with some goodin'.

The old man smiled at his own joke again.

Tony replied a quick yes sir,

while he run off to pack a bag.

Thrilled at the thought of his grandmother's fried chicken

and just bein' with him.

Later that evening with the belly full of chicken

he felt like a young king beneath the slow moving antique

ceiling fan that whined just enough to make you drowsy.

Surrounded by his ma'am all sowing machine

and treasures in the form of ceramic salt shakers

of every kind in the guest room at their house.

He'd practically lived in here

in the summers before.

Damn it, why'd he have to let that thought in?

He stared at the fan and thought about his mama

lying small in her bed at the end

until he passed out from exhaustion.

Seemed just a few minutes later

his pap always shakin' him.

Come on boy, we got to get out on that lake

before the fish wake up.

He'd sleepily threw his jeans and tennis shoes on

before heading the door.

His mama was a whole kitchen smell like boiled cabbage

and bacon.

She handed him a thermos full of the hot cabbage stew.

This kept the mosquitoes off you too.

Then she handed him another thermos full of coffee

and a cup of cold Dr. Peppers from the ice box

wrapped in a napkin and foil

the way that only ladies from that era

seemed to be able to do correctly.

He helped his granddad hook up the boat

and they were bouncing down the back roads to the lake.

Carl Sainier preferred whistling to the radio

and said about whistling and half singing

Mr. Bojangles as Tony dozed on and off

till they got to the lake.

The sun was just starting to peak up

from the east side of the lake

and long ribbons of rose gold and copper

followed the choppy lines of the wake

as the aluminum John boat

skipped across the surface of the water.

Its oily exhausts mingling with the fishy smell

of the cut perch Carl Sainier had prepared for bait.

Then big ones go after the small fish

it's the only way to catch them.

He had reassured his grandson as he packed the bait

in the little boat.

Carl Sainier anchored the boat a few hundred feet

north of the dam in the deep water.

There was a handful of other boats already stationary

on the hunt, same as these two.

The teenager and old man said about the business

of baiting their hooks and getting them tight lined out

in the deep water with a heavy weight to keep them in place.

They fished for hours not catching anything spectacular.

A few decent sized channel cats that they threw

in the ice chest to take home and clean.

Tony was watching the end of his own rod

when his grandfather's rod dipped hard.

Take off boy I'm going to get the net ready.

I'm going to get him the heavy Zebco classic.

Tony jumped to his feet as the rod bent

damn near double and started reeling against the big fish.

All right, all right, let them fight for a minute.

Just hold the line. Let that old booger wear himself out.

The old man was giddy.

A good 20 minutes passed before they wrestled

the hard headed old beast to the surface.

He was a biggin and Carl Sainier just managed

to scoop him up in the big net.

They worked together to remove the hook before

hanging them on the old scale Carl kept in the tackle box.

16 pound four ounce shovel head.

The old man hollered to the other boats.

They responded in turn with cheers or jabs

about it being a baby before him and turning

turned it loose in the lake again.

How come you always let them go Grumppep all?

Well, they've been here a long time.

Don't belong to us.

Got to give someone else a chance to catch them.

Besides them old bastards don't taste worth a damn know-how.

Tony Green.

Carl Sainier winked before looking out at the lake and saying

best thing about fish like that is it can keep growing

every time you tell the story.

He laughed and looked up at the sun that was high

down and beating down on.

Oh Danny caught one that was up to about 40 pounds

by the time he died.

His laughter got so out of hand after that

he had to cough a little bit to get his bearings.

Tony wiped his hand off on a blue Scots towel

before handing the fresh one to his granddad.

You tell a lot of stories about him.

You must miss him a lot.

Carl Sainier's face softened some.

He was my best friend.

I can't believe someone shot him in Diwali.

Tony said before he could catch himself.

The old man wiped his hands for a minute

and looked back with mischievous eyes.

Oh boy.

If you'd known Danny you'd be surprised

it took someone that long to shoot him.

He began to fall and again

till there were tears in his eyes.

Mama told me that my guitar used to be his.

The old man stuck the used towel in a trash bag under the seat.

He sucked on the tooth for a minute before he answered.

Well kind of.

He bought it for his younger brother

who didn't turn out worth the damn.

Then he gave it to his nephew.

He got killed.

It was a nasty bunch of business back when it happened.

His name was Tony too.

Him and your daddy was thick as thieves as kids.

You should play ball together.

Tony sat with that revelation for a minute

realizing his name was borrowed

and so was his guitar.

They didn't stay friends.

Carl Sr. took a sip of this coffee.

No.

They got sideways about a little old gal

your dad was starry-eyed about in high school.

She was a good girl

but sometimes when three people all want something different

it makes a hell of a mess.

They never got back eye to eye before that boy died.

Tony run his hands through his air.

I can't imagine that much excitement

in the Wally bottoms, Papo.

Much less my dad in a love triangle.

I don't think he loves anything no more.

Carl Sr. wretched out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

We couldn't eat it, baby boy.

We couldn't eat it.

Don't be so hard on your daddy.

It ain't that he don't love nothing.

He's just so mad at the world for taking your mom away from him

he don't know what to do with it.

Sometimes when man's hurt like that

works the only thing that makes any sense.

Tony didn't press further.

Carl Sr. picked up his rod and reel.

When we get back to house

see what your mam always cooked up for lunch.

Tony started reeling his line in.

I bet it's cabbage, Papo.

The old man laughed the full belly laugh.

You're damn right it's cabbage, sonny.

Damn right.

Tune in next week

for more from the Wally bottoms text.

We do some testimonials.

We'll wrap this little show up

and get on down the road for the day.

I got everything put together.

Let's go.

Our old buddy Gene Bond.

Thanks for another great one, J.W.

Glad to hear some new opportunities working out.

Hope to catch you live again soon.

I'm thinking about hitting the world outlaws race

in Hobstout, Indiana in a couple weeks.

Not sure if you'll make that one,

but I hope so.

Keep the faith, brother.

Man, thank you, Gene.

I'd love to see you at a show again for sure.

Based on what I found out yesterday

there's about to be a lot more of them.

Your boy's about to go crazy for a minute.

Ooh.

A couple people have asked me about Hobstout, Indiana,

and that is not one of the races they have me scheduled for.

I'm going to give you all the full schedule here

just in case anybody's thinking about making it out.

April 10th to 11th,

I'll be at Federated Autos Parts Spring Classic

in Peebley, Missouri.

April 30th through May 2nd,

I'm going to be at the Daryl Ann Showdown.

That's at the Mississippi Thunder Speedway

up in Wisconsin.

I think it's called Fountain City, Wisconsin,

if I'm not mistaken.

June 24th, I will be at the Fergus Falls Frenzy

at the I-94 EMR Speedway in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

July 29th, I will be at the Brickers Bash.

That's at the Baps Motor Speedway

in York Haven, Pennsylvania.

August 21st through 22nd,

I'm going to be at the Hawkeye 100.

I'm probably going to say this wrong.

Makaketa Speedway in Iowa,

I believe Makaketa, Iowa.

I don't know how to say that name yet.

I'm sure somebody there will tell me.

September 12th, I'll be at the Gunslinger Stampede.

That's Dodge City Raceway Park, Dodge City, Kansas.

October 23rd, I will be at the Jason Johnson Classic

all weekend at the Texarkana 67 Speedway.

That's also the Nationals in Texarkana, Arkansas.

October 24th, I'll be at the World of Outlaw.

Oh, that's the same thing.

Sorry, we got it listed twice,

but it's also the same weekend as World Outlaws

Short Track Nationals, Tex King.

And then finally, November 4th through 7th,

I'll be at the World of Outlaws World Finals

at the Dirt Track at Charlotte

in Concord, North Carolina.

So if any of you guys are wondering,

we're also trying to do a thing in Knoxville, Indiana,

but I don't know if we're going to get that worked out

but we are in talks with some people

to come up Knoxville, Indiana for one of their events

and, I mean, not Knoxville, Indiana, it's Knoxville, Iowa.

Come up there for one of their events

and also do a show at a local place there.

Moving on.

At our buddy Randy Carlisle, 68-14.

Glad you're back.

Well, this season be on Spotify.

I usually listen while driving for work.

A little easier on Spotify.

Randy, let me apologize to you

and all the other audio fans right now.

Something screwed up this past week.

I, for the life of me, can't figure out what happened.

Nobody at my RSS distributor can figure out

what happened either.

But for whatever reason,

something happened with the upload and it didn't go out.

Even though it showed it uploaded on my end,

it just didn't go out and get distributed.

But we've corrected it.

Episode one of season four should be out

on all the audio episodes.

And, of course, this will be available as well

and the rest of them for this season.

I haven't done any of the Patreon stuff yet.

I know I keep promising to do that.

But I want to reiterate, somebody asked on Facebook

whether they were just going...

I want to reiterate again

that they're not just going to be on Patreon.

Patreon is just going to be for people who want to pay for

and had free experience.

They'll still be free everywhere else.

You just got to deal with that.

You know, don't make a damn of me one way or another.

I'm just offered some people queried

about having an ads-free experience.

So I'm trying to offer another thing.

But I've got a lot of work to make that happen.

Right now I'm trying to figure out

how to get the right server

to host all the videos

without ending up with ads.

So, I'm still tanking on that

amidst the 9,000 other things

because I'm trying to do it all the time.

At Camp Cat 6089

I just love your marriage origin stories.

It reminds me of my beautiful wife of 34 years.

Well, I sure hope I get at least 34 years from 9.

I feel like no matter when it ends

I'll feel like I didn't get enough time

but that's probably just the selfish person inside of me.

Let's get this thing wrapped up

and get on out of here today.

We'll get this booger edited.

Mercy is one of those words we throw around

like we know what it means and we don't most of the time.

Not really.

Not until life backs us into a corner

and shows us what it actually costs.

Philosophers argued about it for centuries.

Stokes thought it was a weakness.

Nietzsche thought pity was contempt

dressed up in soft clothes.

Schopenhauer said it was a great mystery.

The bethets.

At the moment you truly suffer

another person you stop seeing them as other.

You recognize yourself in them.

Jesus didn't argue about it all.

He just kept doing it

to the people nobody else would touch.

The one society had already written off.

He moved towards suffering instead away from it.

Every single time.

I learned what mercy really was in a hospital room.

Mother was dying, liver failure.

Her mind was going in and out.

She didn't always know where she was or who was with her.

She looked at me one time when I come in that room

and she saw her brother.

And for about an hour she said things to me

that were meant for him.

Hard things, painful things.

I sat there and took it.

Didn't correct her.

Didn't leave.

Just let her have it.

I didn't know at the time that was mercy.

I just knew she needed something

I could give her by staying still.

That's what mercy actually is.

When you strip everything else away

it's the moment you stop making

somebody else's pain about yourself.

It's the decision to hold still

when everything in you wants to move.

If it's absorbing something that wasn't meant for you

because the person in front of you

needs somewhere to put it.

It doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't feel noble.

It usually just feels like sitting in a hard chair

underneath a bad fluorescent light

watching someone you love not know who you are.

Dostoevsky said,

oh well my soul with mercy

will curse what it has done.

Because mercy doesn't shame people

and the goodness it breaks them open towards.

Mercy is the second labor of growth

because you cannot get there

without love underneath it.

Love's what makes you stay in a room.

Mercy is what you do while you're there.

We're all going to be in that room eventually

on one side of it or the other.

The question is whether you'll have the chance

to practice this.

The question is whether you'll recognize it

when it's time.

I told you that the best thing about mercy

is how much it helps you to give it.

It ain't about the person you're giving it to.

Mercy is to unburden your soul.

So you're not carrying around anger,

vitriol and sadness.

And you can't do any growing until you figure out

how to give it.

I'm rooting for you.

I tell you that every week,

I'm rooting for you.

I'm rooting for you to understand these things.

I'm rooting for you to be able to give mercy

when you need to.

Not for somebody else, but for you.

I'm J.W.

And I love you.

I don't know whose problem it is.

Man, me and my wife always joke.

It's been my running joke because I grew up

in this little small town.

My running joke is always because we were

paying a cost to live in a rural town

that we was always about 15 years behind.

True to form, I've just stayed that way

my entire life.

I just discovered the Alabama shakes

about 15 years later.

God, I ain't just in trend.

I bet I'll listen to that album,

but well, no, I ain't got a stereo in the truck.

I bet I don't listen to shit.

Woo!

1,400 miles of driving with no stereo.

We'll see how I feel when I get back Sunday.

I'm gonna try to be here in the chat

as much as I can, but I may still be driving

back from Missouri.

Anyways, I love you guys.

Thank you for sharing your Sunday with me.

And, uh...

Hell, that ought to do it.

Finding mercy

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