Who Is This Guy?
primalbeet? Beau Pritchett IV? Rick West? yes, no, maybe…
My name is Rick West. I’m a writer, a traveler, and—by long practice—the designated handler for Beau Pritchett IV.
In some circles he’s known as primalbeet. Lately, he’s softened on the moniker. Wants to be called Beau again. Happens when a man’s lived long enough to outgrow his aliases but not his appetite for trouble.
Rick West—the public-facing version, anyway—comes from the southeastern United States. The humid stretch of land where stories sweat before they speak. He wanders now. Portugal, Istanbul. Albania. Even Florida. Other coordinates still blinking on the map. He takes notes, asks bad questions, drinks whatever’s poured, and passes the signal along. That’s his role. Conduit, not hero.
Beau is the current.
Beau Pritchett IV has been a lot of things: regional nuisance, minor legend, cautionary tale, accidental philosopher. Ersatz poet who seized a guitar by the neck when he was a kid. He’s driven too fast through towns that didn’t deserve him and stayed too long in places that did. He’s made a habit of finding the soft underbelly of systems—cultural, financial, romantic—and pressing more or less gently until they confess.
I’m here to tell you what Beau’s been up to. Not in a polished, brand-safe way. In the way stories actually happen—sideways, half-lit, occasionally illegal, funny after the fact. These are dispatches from the margins: of the South, of masculinity, of ambition, of whatever happens when a man refuses to become tidy.
The Southern Writers Guild isn’t a feed. It’s a place. You come in, you sit down, you listen. You might hear Beau. You might hear someone else entirely. Sometimes you won’t know the difference. No matter.
If you’re here for certainty, this won’t help you.
If you’re here for a good story well told, welcome.
The Rooster
I wasn’t there the night Grant killed the rooster, nor the morning after when Connor carried the body to the big house like a preacher carrying a dead child to the altar. But I poured the bourbon that loosened Grant’s tongue, and I scrubbed the sink till the porcelain forgot the blood. I know the yard the way a groundskeeper knows a graveyard—every divo…
Absolution
When he considered all of his paths to absolution, he took the long odds on the pretty one in the sky blue sundress. He mapped her small verbs. The way she folded a napkin twice, the tilt of her chin when she talked to a stranger. He mimicked them at night in the sink light.
Raymond
The kitchen at Raymond’s house buzzed with the small chaos of morning. Della herded Chloe toward the door, juggling shoes and backpacks that seemed to grow legs and wander off whenever she turned her back. The minivan idled in the driveway, coughing its warm exhaust into the cool air.
