[ad]

FEMALE VOICE:
Chapter I.

BRIAN REED (narration):
When an antique clock breaks, a clock that's been telling time for 200 or 300 years, fixing it can be a real puzzle. An old clock like that was handmade by someone. It might tick away the time with a pendulum, with a spring, with a pulley system. It might have bells that are supposed to strike the hour or a bird that's meant to pop out and cuckoo at you. There can be 100s of tiny individual pieces, each of which needs to interact with the others precisely. To make the job even trickier, you often can't tell what's been done to a clock over 100s of years. Maybe there's damage that's been fixed, or fixed badly. Sometimes entire portions of the original clockwork are missing, but you can't know for sure because there are rarely diagrams of what the clock's supposed to look like. A clock that old doesn't come with a manual. So instead, the few people left in the world who know how to do this kind of thing rely on what are often called witness marks to guide their way. A witness mark can be a small dent, a hole that once held a screw. These are actual impressions and outlines and discolorations left inside the clock of pieces that might have once been there. They're clues to what was in the clockmaker's mind when he first created the thing. I'm told fixing an old clock can be maddening. You're constantly wondering if you've just spent hours going down a path that might take you nowhere, and all you've got are these vague witness marks which might not even mean what you think they mean. So at every moment along the way you have to decide if you're wasting your time or not.

Anyway, I only learned about all this because years ago, an antique clock restorer contacted me, John B. McLemore, and asked me to help him solve a murder.

[intro music]

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Something's happened. Something has absolutely happened in this town. There's just too much little crap for something not to have happened and I'm about had enough of Shittown and the things that goes on.

BRIAN REED (narration):
From Serial and This American Life, I'm Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

"John B. McLemore lives in Shittown, Alabama." That's the subject line that catches my eye one day in late 2012 while I'm reading through emails that have come into our radio show, This American Life. The email's from John B. McLemore. Shittown is captalized. "I am an old time listener who just recently rediscovered your show," John writes. "I live in a crummy little shit town in Alabama called Woodstock. I would like to tell your producers of two events that have happened here recently. I would hope you have the facilities to investigate."

One of the events, John writes, involves a local police officer with the county sheriff's department. John's heard that a woman's been saying this officer sexually abused her. The guy's still on the force. So, that's one.

The other event is a murder of a guy in his early 20s named Dylan Nichols. The murderer, John says, is a son of a prominent local family. His name is Kabrahm Burt. The Burts are millionaires. They own lots of land in the area as well as a large timber operation, with lumber yards and sawmills all over, one of which is right near John's. It's called K3 Lumber. John says it seems the But family has effectively made this event disappear, except Kabrahm is now going around and bragging about it. Quote, bragging about how it only took 30 seconds of kicking this boy, Dylan Nichols, in the head for him to become a paraplegic, and only a few more days for him to die.

"We really need people like you to come down to this pathetic little Baptist shit town and blow it off the map," John writes. "I would like to talk to you by phone if possible. This is just too much to type."
[phone ringing]

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Hello?

BRIAN REED:
John?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Hello?

BRIAN REED:
Hi, it's Brian.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Hey.

BRIAN REED:
Here we are. This is happening.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
[laughing] That awkward moment of silence when you realize after about a year it's finally happened.

BRIAN REED [narration]:
When I make this call, it's been a year since John first emailed. We'd written back and forth a couple of times over the months but we never talked until one day he sent me a message and this time it had a link to a news report. The news story was about a sergeant with the Bibb County Sheriff's Department -- Bibb County is where John lives -- who'd been indicted for pulling women over and forcing them into sexual acts, both on the side of the road and back at the station. Another guy allegedly helped cover up this abuse. I thought if corruption like this existed in the Bibb County Sheriff's Department, then maybe the other rumor had written to me about could also be true. That maybe it was possible a murder had happened and had then been covered up. So finally I get him on the phone and we talk for a while.
JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Yeah, you know my life is kind of a nut house, because I take care of my mom that has Alzheimer's and we're in about our 7th or 8th year of that so sorry about the other day when you tried to call and all hell had busted loose.

BRIAN REED:
No I'm sorry you have to deal with that, I'm sorry.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Of course losing the dog the other week that didn't help. You know I take in strays which shouldn't surprise you, you know considering where I live you shouldn't be the least bit surprised these people out here just dump their dogs out on the side of the road. One time I had as many as 21. I got 14 now, well 13, yep, so that was really hard because that was an old dog and a good dog but -- yeah, that's another one of my projects that I take on. I'm sort of the local humane society

BRIAN REED:
Do you -- do you have a lot of property?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Uh, I like to say it's my grandfather's property. It's 128 acres.

BRIAN REED:
You grew up in Woodstock, is that right?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Yeah, Woodstock, this whole area needs to be defined. If you look at the demographics charts of the state of Alabama and go over the poorest counties, Bibb County is maybe the 5th worst county to live. We are one of the child molester capitals of the state. We have just an incredible amount of police corruption. We have the poorest education. We've got 95 churches in this damn county, won't have two high schools and no secondary education and we got Jeebus cause Jeebus is comin' and global warming is a hoax and you know there's no such thing as climate change and all that. Yeah, I uh, I'm in an area that just hasn't advanced, for lack of a better word. I'm gonna have to eat a Tums here, sorry about that, oh it's one of those awful cherry-flavored ones, that would be the first one to hop out.

BRIAN REED:
Is your stomach bothering you?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Oh I have constant acid reflux, you know had it all my life.
BRIAN REED:
Can you tell me -- why did you email me?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Well you know the original reason which I gave you which is some of the things I had heard about you know some of the goings-on down here. Remember I told you about the boy Dylan Nichols that got murdered and apparently that was swept under the rug, I guess we'll cover that one first.

BRIAN REED:
Yeah, so tell me, I guess just tell me what happened, you kind of mentioned this is an email but there wasn't a lot of detail and I did a lot of Googling online and didn't really find much yeah so tell me what you know

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I'm hoping that's one of the things y'all have the capability of doing is finding much. All I've managed to find out is that Dylan Nichols went to school down here at West Blocton High School. Basically I've got these kids out here digging a hole between the house and the yard in the summer and we're going to plant some cast-iron plant. That's Aspidistra elatior, in case y'all don't know.

BRIAN REED:
I don't know what either of the things you just said are, but that's fine.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
(laughing) Okay, well, that's cast-iron plant. You know how these kids talk on cell phones all day long? You can't get 'em to do nothing 'cause they're on the cell phone, and they're tweeting and they're YouTubing and they're always on Facebook. I'm out there on the back porch. If you keep your mouth, you'll be surprised what you can learn, cause you know kids around here have grown up so destitute they don't have a sense to be ashamed of anything, they just tell everything, yakking away that Dylan Nichols is in such-and-such hospital, he's a quadriplegic now, he just got into a fight with Kabrahm Burt and he's not expected to live through the night. Well, buddy when I heard the last name Burt, you know my attention just peaked. I just decided I'd stick my nose in and ask, "This isn't by any chance related to the famous Burt family down there that runs the K3 Lumber store in Greenpond(?) and the KKK Lumber Mill in Vance(?), is it?" "Oh yes, that's Kendall's son." Took 'em a day or so to do their work out here and they chatted and chatted about it, of course in the next few days of them tweetin' the girlfriends and tweetin' to other friends it come to pass that indeed Dylan Nichols had died. Deader than hell. And Kabrahm Burt's whereabouts was unknown. Well, later on I had the Goodsons working out here, two boys, that it just so happens one of them, Jake Goodson, apparently he knew the Kabrahm boy and right at the durned Little Caesar's Pizza in Woodstock just happened to run into him, hadn't seen him for a year, asked him where he'd been. "Well, I've been in drug rehab. You know I've spent such and such months in rehab." "Well, what's happened?" That's when the Kabrahm boy just got out there and spilled the durned beans. And the story that I was told is that they were at some party and the Nichols boy, Kabrahm and his buddy had ganged up on him and call him a bitch boy and a bitch boy or a bitch boy and all that and the boy eventually smacked one of em and jumped on him. Well the boy they jumped on that's Dylan Nichols pulled out a little knife and cut the throat of Kabrahm's friend. Well Kabrahm pulled his belt off and wrapped it around the neck of the friend whose throat got cut and got the Nichols boy down the ground somehow and kicked him in the head repeatedly and kept kicking him in the head until he was basically unconscious. Well of course you know the rest of the story from the first part that I told you. You know the boy, paraplegic, died in a few days. Well Jake is noisy, he asked him, how'd he just get by so easy? And you know Burt boy, Kabrahm Burt told him they just claimed it was self-defense and the other guy kept his damn mouth shut. Course Kabrahm's family has got plenty of money so naturally it wasn't murder. Now --

BRIAN REED:
So, just to clarify, so you're hearing this from a guy named Jake Goodson?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Mmhm.

BRIAN REED:
He ran into Kabrahm --

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Mmhm.

BRIAN REED:
and Kabrahm told him that we told the other guy to keep his mouth shut and to claim self-defense, that what he told him?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
There you go. Now at sometime I was up there at that hardware store and Kendall, that's Kabrahm's father, is up there on the phone, yakking that big mouth, he's one of these big mouth Rush Limbaugh types, loves Glenn Beck. Running that mouth, running that mouth. And what I heard come out of that office was, "He's my son, I love him, but he's guilty as hell and I know it." Now he finally realized that someone was standing out there waiting to be waited on and pulled up slam the hell out of that damn door and then got a lot quieter with that conversation.

BRIAN REED:
Really.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
We've obviously got too much little dipstick gossip going around for something not to have happened. We've got the kid out bragging about it in front of the Little Caesar's Pizza Hut, and we've got a teeny little snippet of conversation inconveniently audited over at the store one afternoon. So this crap happened.

BRIAN REED:
And as far as you know is Kabrahm Burt just living in town now?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
He's walking out there at the damn K3 Lumberyard. He's covered up in tattoos, he's all skin and bones, he looks like a crackhead. Hell I saw him this week! You know I contacted you for a while and then I quit contacting you. And you know I go through these stages of depression. When you live in an area like this, it's like the Darfur region of Sudan, you realize, it's one of these areas where stuff happens and you can't help it. And after this dude got arrested, you know that recent email I sent you about that Ervin Lee Heard that had been you know basically falsely imprisoning women and using them for sex slaves, no one talks about that, [voice keeps talking as fades out]

BRIAN REED (narration):
Ervin Lee Heard is the police officer who'd been sexually abusing women he pulled over.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I decided, you know what, I need to contact him again. I need to get over my depression. I need to get over this attitude problem I've got that you know nothing can be done. And tell someone some of the crap that goes on down here.

BRIAN REED:
'Cause -- what do you get depressed about?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Oh my god. I am 49 years old, or is it 48? Well, I'm closer to 49. I should have -- boy, if you use this in the future, you'll sure have to have a cuckoo bird bleepin' -- I should have got out of this goddamned fucking shit town in my 20s, I should have done something useful with my life. I love my home, I don't know why. You know I've lived here all my life, my mom's lived here all of her life, my dad's lived here most of his life, and Grandpa Miller's lived here all his life. Places like that should be important. I'm looking out over a yard -- I've got a rose garden here that's 300 fuckin' feet long. I've planted a hedge maze out here. It's the only one in the state. You can go to Google Maps and enter 33.202465, -87.13 --

BRIAN REED:
Whoa, whoa, slow down. Let me type this in as you're telling me.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
That should actually bring you to the center of the maze

BRIAN REED:
Tell me the numbers again?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
33.202465, -87.1 --

BRIAN REED (narration):
I'm gonna hide a couple of coordinates here for John's privacy. I type them into Google Maps.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
That should be close to within a few feet.

BRIAN REED:
Oh, there we are. That's your yard?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Yeah.

BRIAN REED:
Oh my god.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Yeah [voice keeps talking as fades out]

BRIAN REED (narration):
It's an aerial view of acres and acres of forest and then there in the middle of the woods is a huge labyrinth made of concentric circles of wedges with a path weaving through them.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
[fades back in] It also has little gates in it now, which that picture doesn't show. So you see, you can swap the solution around. it actually has 64 possible solutions depending on how you swap the gates around.

BRIAN REED:
Oh wow. So it really is a maze.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
64 possible solutions, yes!

BRIAN REED:
That's crazy. Do you ever just go in and get lost in the maze?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Well, it's not tall enough to get lost yet, it's only about hip high, you can still see over it. You'll be able to get lost one day. Yeah it is -- in other words if you're asking, do I use it to walk around in when I'm thinking? Sure, sometimes I do.

BRIAN REED:
Yeah.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
You know, I've never really had anyone to sit here and ask me, I guess, what I'm depressed about, 'cause I'm looking out over the trees here and I realize that the people in the South 40 trailer park have a much worse life than I do. But I think the thing that's happened is I've gotten myself in almost, you know, sort of a prison of my own making where you know all of my friends have died off, 'cause I only had contact with people much older than me, even when I was a kid in school I didn't want to hang around other kids, 'cause you know kids are talking about you know getting girls or deer huntin' or football, whereas I was interested in the astrolabe, sundials, projective geometry, New Age music, climate change, and how to solve Rubik's cube. But you can't tell a redneck that the cool yknow Greenland melt falling directly into the left dense(?) water of where the Fumba(?) Heyline convector(?) normally hits back south is sufficient -- firstly, try to explain that the Earth is more than 5000 years old --

BRIAN REED:
John, is there, is there, I'm curious, is there anyone down there that you're able to talk about these gripes and ideas with and you feel like you're on the same page?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
My lawyer! (laughs) The town lawyer, he is the only -- everything I've talked with you about, I've talked with him about. He lives in Tuscaloosa, he's got too much sense to be living down here, but absolutely, I go over there and talk with the town lawyer every now and then.

BRIAN REED:
But that's it, that's all you've got?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Ah, you're beginning to figure it out now, aren't you? So why don't I move? (sighs) There's gotta be people in Fallujah right now, or Beirut, that just asked each other the same question, you know, why the hell don't you get out of here Hassan, you know? And Hassan's answer is, you know, "I don't know." You know Hassan's probably got there a maze, a sand maze or something, and his aging mother can't decide which one of her hijabs she's gonna wear that day and she ends up peeing all over herself and he has to clean her up or some damn something and he keeps thinking, okay, maybe one day it'll get better, although secretly he knows: it never will. You know, I have this old crummy Ford truck. You can't be a redneck and live in Alabama without a damn Ford truck, can you? And I keep thinking, can I put everything that I would put in that truck and drive down that driveway for the last time? But then again who'd take care of momma? You know, who'd feed the puppies? Who'd water the flowers? Who'd prune the maze? You must think I'm just totally nuts at this point.

BRIAN REED:
No, I understand. It's home.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I'm sorry if I got off subject and all that.

BRIAN REED:
No, it's okay, I can pull you back to it a little bit. Why do you think it's important to try and figure out what happened with this?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I believe we have a genuine murder that resulted from some kids probably picking on a boy that defended himself that's almost certainly been covered up.

(music)

BRIAN REED:
After that first conversation with John, I do some research online and I find no evidence of this murder. I see there is a place called K3 Lumber owned by the Burt family. K3 in rural Alabama? Is that just a coincidence? The family also owns a large timber operation, John called it the KKK Lumber Mill, but it's actually named Ky Ken Kei Inc., and on their website they explain that the Ky, Ken and Kei in Ky Ken Kei refer to the three brothers who currently run the family business. Kyle, Kendall and Keith Burt. Kabrahm Burt is Kendall's son. His name begins with a K too, by the way. I discover a Facebook page for a Kabrahm Burt in the area, with just a single disturbing post that tells people to raise hell and kill black babies, though he uses a word other then black. I don't know if Kabrahm made this page or what. I also find court records for a DUI charge that suggest maybe he did disappear for a little while, like John mentioned. At one point there was a stretch of court dates he didn't show up for, and a notice from his lawyer telling the court he hadn't been able to reach Kabrahm. Other than that, I find nothing. Nothing about a murder or even an assault involving Kabrahm or an obituary for a Dylan Nichols or any event in newspapers or court filings that seems like it could be the fight John's talking about. Honestly, there's not much about Bibb County online at all.

[John's voice fades in from background as Brian keeps talking]

But John kept emailing me. He kept insisting this was a story I needed to cover. And when I call him back to say I was having trouble finding anything or just to quickly double-check something with him, almost without fail, we'd end up on the phone for hours, with him going on and on, not just about the murder, but about his life and his town. We talked on weekends. Once he got in touch at 1:30 in the morning because a bunch of cops had been in his yard.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
And I had the praetorian class towering behind that uniform.

BRIAN REED:
It felt as if, by sheer force of will, John was opening this portal between us and calling out through it, calling from his world, a world of

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
proleptic decay and decrepitude, or

BRIAN REED:
So, eventually, I decide I'll come check it out.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I was just dyin' for them to search this house without a warrant. I think they knew it.

BRIAN REED:
That's right after this.

[ad break]

BRIAN REED:
John says his hometown is filled with proleptic decay and decrepitude. I'm not ashamed to say I had to look up the word proleptic. It means using a word or phrase in anticipation of it becoming true. When I go to Alabama, I don't want to cause any trouble, proleptically speaking, so John and I discuss a plan. After all, what he's alleging about the murder -- that Kabrahm Burt has beaten someone to death, feels comfortable enough to make small talk about it out in the open, and a bunch of people know, but no one has done anything -- it's pretty scary. A reporter showing up from New York, asking questions, who knows how people might react?

BRIAN REED (on phone):
I do not want to do anything that's gonna put you in any kind of danger.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
You've got more experience with this than I do. This is your stock and trade.

BRIAN REED:
Well, I've never gone into a small town and investigated a murder. And this is your small town.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
It's up to you -- [voice fades out]

BRIAN REED (narration):
John and I agree when I come I need to keep a low profile. I won't talk to any authorities yet. The one thing I want to do, I tell him, is meet with Jake Goodson. That's the guy John originally heard the rumor from, the one Kabram supposedly admitted everything to outside the Little Caesar's.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
It's whatever you want to be with it, if you're fine with it, I'm fine with it.

BRIAN REED:
Okay are you sure?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I guess so.

BRIAN REED:
You guess so?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Too damn late to back out now.

BRIAN REED:
No, I don't -- see that's what I don't--

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I think you're second-guessing this more than I am.

(music)

BRIAN REED (driving):
That's John's road.

BRIAN REED (narration):
On a windy afternoon in October 2014, I'm driving through Woodstock, Alabama, about 40 minutes southwest of Birmingham, headed to meet John for the first time. To get to his house, rather than use his address, he suggested I navigate by latitude and longitude. And even then I miss his place the fist time past. It's just thick woods all around. From the road I have no idea there's even a house back there. When I come back by, I notice there's an opening in the trees and a dirt driveway cut through the forest. It takes me deep into the woods, trees arching over it, until finally I reach a clearing with an old wooden house with three chimneys that looks like it hasn't changed since the Civil War. The whole place feels like it's of another time. And it is, literally: John doesn't follow Daylight Savings. So his property's on a timezone separate from the world around it. The front door of the house opens and a man comes bounding out of it.

[sounds of doors, steps]

BRIAN REED:
John, how are you?

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
and all that bullshit, you found it

I found it, nice to meet you.

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
I hope it's [voice fades]

BRIAN REED (narration):
There's no nice-to-meet you back, no how-you-doing, no handshake. John just takes off around the side of the house with a pack of dogs following him

JOHN B. MCLEMORE:
Let's see if we can see next to the petunias blooming. [dog barks] C'mon Pipsqueak!

BRIAN REED (narration):
He's a redhead with red goatee and glasses, looks a bit younger than his 48 years in ratty jeans and ratty sneakers and a Sherwin Williams T-shirt that he probably got from buying a can of paint at the hardware store. Presumably he's giving me a tour, but I'm scrambling to keep up with him. He's naming the plants all around us as we move. Goldenrod. Russian sage. A climbing Ladybanks rose. There are stonewalls everywhere, wildly colored bushes, a giant bed of purple petunias stretching for 100s of feet. There are apple trees leaning on trellises, tilted at a precise angle to lengthen their stems. There's a sweet smell floating on the breeze, the smell of the thorny eleagnus bush, John tells me. John's 13 dogs are running around freely, and they have a doghouse that is an actual house, with two floors and a small swimming pool outside made of stone.

You're not afraid to walk 110 feet are ya?

Nope.

John and I go past his workshop, which I'll later learn is filled with disassembled clocks, as well as the rare machines and tools and chemicals he uses to restore them. We go past a big trailer and two old school buses, one yellow and one blue. They're filled with lumber for John's house that he's aging, to get the wood as close as possible to what they used to build the house 200 years ago. We go through a small gated cemetery where the people who built this place have been buried since the 1880s. "Having finished one's duty," one footstone reads, "they now sweetly rest." Later we'll also meet John's mother, Mary Grace McLemore.

(door opens)

MARY GRACE:
How d'you like down here?

BRIAN REED:
I'm sorry?

MARY GRACE:
How do you like down here?

BRIAN REED:
I'm enjoying myself very much.

MARY GRACE:
Sir?

BRIAN REED:
I'm enjoying myself very much.

MARY GRACE:
I'm glad.

BRIAN REED:
Yes.

BRIAN REED (narration):
She's a tiny brittle-looking woman who I swear to you can go a whole conversation without blinking once. She's been on this land her whole life. Forever seems about right.

MARY GRACE:
This is a old area.

BRIAN REED:
Yep.

MARY GRACE:
Where we live it's real old.

BRIAN REED:
How old?

MARY GRACE:
(laughs) It's time I reckon.

(transition)

JOHN:
Rosemary that the winter killed, an old house that looks like Nosferatu...

BRIAN REED (narration):
Finally John and I reach a hill. We come to the crest and there it is: the maze, stretching out before us, though he and I have completely different reactions to it.

JOHN:
Oh god, here we go, see the brown from here?

BRIAN:
Oh my gosh.

BRIAN (narration):
John's upset. They've been in a drought for weeks, a D1 drought, he's been monitoring it, and he sees the hedges turning brown. But I'm just in awe. The maze is so cool.

BRIAN:
Oh my gosh.

JOHN:
--of climate change

BRIAN:
I mean, you might see climate change, but this is an incredible approach, John.

JOHN:
Yknow, we're gonna have to get the damn cutters. I said before y'all came out here, I was gonna get out here and do something, but it never happened, I just got miserably depressed and said, "Ah screw it."

BRIAN:
It's, I've got chills.

JOHN:
Chills! I have chills looking here at all the brown bushes on this side.

BRIAN:
I don't even see the brown, there's all these green -- this is incredible.

(narration)
We enter the maze and John rearranges the positions of three gates inside.

JOHN:
So I'll go ahead and put this one here --

BRIAN (narration):
To set a new solution.

JOHN:
With this one off to -- there you go, now it's all screwed up now, let's see.

BRIAN (narration):
John built the maze as a series of splits. One path comes to an end, then it splits left and right. Each of those paths end, then they split left and right. Over and over again, you have to choose which way to go. John and I are walking through trying to reach the middle.

JOHN:
You know, I designed this thing myself, so it was designed by a madman. That's what people tell me.

BRIAN:
I do feel like I'm walking around in your brain or something.

JOHN:
Just imagine when it gets over your head.

BRIAN (narration):
Saved on John's computer is a comic, and when I think about it now, I realize it captures his worldview perfectly. It's three drinking glasses with arms and legs and cute little faces, each with the same amount of liquid inside. The first one smiles and says, "I'm half full!" The next one frowns and says, "I'm half empty." The last one throws both arms up and says, "I think this is piss!"

Later, John will take me on a tour of Bibb County and this worldview will be on full display. He'll rattle off a constant stream of grievances as we go. Historic buildings are being demolished overnight. Dollar Generals and Walmarts are popping up in their stead, serving a populace that is getting fatter and more tattooed by the day.

JOHN:
another junkyard...

BRIAN (narration):
No positive comment, no matter how innocuous, survives his virtuosic negativity. At one point I mention that the landscape around here is really quite pretty.

JOHN:
There you go. There's our legacy, going down the road.

BRIAN:
Lumber truck.

BRIAN (narration):
Carrying away that pretty landscape, one tree at a time. In the afternoon, it'll start to thunderstorm, something John's been saying all day that they desperately need to combat the drought. So that's good, right?

JOHN:
We're getting rain what about 10 weeks too late and everything's died.

BRIAN:
Be glad you're getting something?

BRIAN (narration):
Everything I say --

BRIAN:
That's a beautiful butterfly.

JOHN:
Yeah, we don't have as many butterflies as we should have this year, that's something else that disturbs me.

BRIAN (narration):
It's a comprehensive tour.

JOHN:
Off on the right is where I went to high school. I like to call it Auschwitz.

BRIAN (narration):
Yeah.

JOHN:
See the crematorium? See the long low killing facility on either end?

BRIAN:
No, it looks like a high school, with like a baseball game going on in front.

JOHN:
(laughing) To me, it looks like Auschwitz.

BRIAN (narration):
Before the jaunt around Shittown, back inside the maze, John and I have stopped walking for a second. We've hit dead end after dead end, and now John is craning his neck.

BRIAN:
He scouts his direction --

JOHN:
It is, it's kind of funny to be lost in something you designed yourself, isn't it. What do I think... Oh no!

BRIAN (narration):
We're stuck.

JOHN:
Oh no!

BRIAN:
Are we really lost or are you putting it on for me?

JOHN:
We are actually lost in our own maze. Isn't that exciting? Oh oh oh I see what I did, oh I see what I did...

BRIAN (narration):
Evidently, while the various gate combinations create 64 different solutions, there is one combination that leaves you with absolutely no way out.

JOHN:
Oh god, it's possible to set it up where there is no solution and I accidentally did that!

BRIAN:
It's like a null set or something?

JOHN:
A null set, there ya go.

BRIAN (narration):
I can't tell if John's being straight with me. John seems so smart and in control, it's hard to believe he can accidentally be stumped by his own maze. I can see him engineering this

[in progress 30:38]