History’s been lied about from both directions and I’m tired of it. Edison, Ford, and Diamond Jim Brady none of them are who you think. This week on Duwali Bottoms, Tony and Dusty get out of jail, Alana shows up, Dave Tilton pays the sheriff a visit, and somebody comes flying around a curve on the two lane who has no business being there.

This week, I talk about two days in a row when the world said no, and I kept going anyway, a flat tire in the rain, a camera on the concrete floor. I’ve been asking myself ever since whether the thing in me that always chooses the harder path is strength or scar tissue. I don’t have an answer, and I’m starting to think that might be the point.

A hard call. The fella in me who ain’t a friend of reason wanted to hoist the black flag. The wiser part asked me to slow down and do right by the folks counting on me. This one’s about knowing when to swing and when to walk away clean. Two wolves. Both still in the room.

Back in Duwali Bottoms,

A fog-thick morning on the Bong Song plain, 1966. Carl Sr. hears something in an empty village he can’t unhear, and the choice he makes there will follow him into the dark. Back home, a jail cell, a swollen eye, and a Papaw with a foot of beard and a full head of steam.

Some lines get people killed. Some just keep us small. From the Driftless region of Minnesota to a joint that’s legal on one bank of the Mississippi and a criminal act on the other, JW walks through the imaginary lines men drew with rulers, and the smaller ones we draw inside ourselves.

Plus a new episode of Duwali Bottoms Texas. Sixteen hours out of a flooded Houston, Tony and Dusty roll up on Duwali Bottoms in the dark, and the homecoming Tony spent a decade trying to aviod is waiting for him on a farm road.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The five labors of growth are complete. But before we close the series out JW has one more thing to tell you — the part he hasn’t said yet. These tools won’t fix everything. The world is full of people stomping around in their meat suits leaving wreckage behind them and a subscription to dogmatic belief doesn’t insure their humanity. What the toolbox does is give you a foundation that doesn’t move when those people show up. And they will show up. A man on a plane between Wisconsin and Houston trying to use what he’s been building. Plus a new episode of Duwali Bottoms Texas.

Hurricane Ike has had its say. The Heights is flooded, the generator is pinned under an oak tree, and the power won’t be back for weeks. Tony packs the Martin. He packs the napkin too. Duwali Bottoms is calling.

I charged into trust thinking I had it figured out. Confucius stopped me in my tracks. From Jesus to Hemingway to Epictetus a deep dive into what trust actually is, what distrust actually costs, and why the wall you build to protect yourself might be the most expensive thing you own.

Plus a new episode of Duwali Bottoms Texas.

Hurricane Ike is hours from landfall. Tony rides out the storm in the Heights with Dusty and Tinker, a joint, a Weber grill, and the Martin. Eighteen floors above the city, Amber sends her friends home and listens to Blue October alone. Neither one knows the other is out there. The storm doesn’t care.

Humility was supposed to be the easy episode. It wasn’t. JW traces the concept from Aristotle to Augustine to a back porch in East Texas, then takes his own road to Damascus in the middle of writing it. Two sides of the humble coin, some stories about getting knocked off the horse, and a hard look at the difference between real humility and the fear that’s been wearing its clothes. Plus a new episode of Duwali Bottoms Texas Season Two: as the storm draws closer, two displaced souls find themselves in the same Houston bar on the same restless night.

Mercy is a word we think we understand until life puts us in a room where we have to actually practice it. JW explores what Jesus, the Stoics, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, and Twain had to say about mercy, then tells the story of a hospital room, a dying woman, and what happens when mercy gets corrupted into self-protection and called something else. The second labor of growth starts here.

In Duwali Bottoms, a bloody nosed Tony Haines finds his way back to his papaw and an old man who knows that sometimes the most merciful thing you can do is let the big ones go.

I was handed a broken blueprint for love early on. Spent a lot of years building damaged things with it. This episode is about the people and moments that handed me a better plan and why love isn’t a feeling you fall into, it’s a labor you pick up. Season Four starts here. We return to Duwali Bottoms just in time for season two, Hurricane Ike is still just a disturbance in the Atlantic, but the storm is already building closer to home.

There’s a woman from Laird Hill you haven’t met yet. Her husband spends his evenings covered in grease keeping their Cavalier running. She’s quiet. A preacher’s wife. The kind of person you pass in a hardware store and don’t think twice about.

She knows exactly where she’s going this morning.

Danny Ware has been carrying something since Korea that most men never have to carry. He’s made his peace with most of it. An old soldier knows what he knows.

Tom Levins is running out of road.

And somewhere in Duwali Bottoms a lawyer named Dave Tilton has a briefcase full of things that are going to change everything for everyone still standing.

Episode 13. An Old Soldier Knows.

The season finale of Duwali Bottoms Texas. Thirteen episodes. One complete story.

Some debts get paid in ways nobody sees coming.