Rooted to the place that you spring from.
And so I am.
Henshaw, I’ve been remiss. I could tell you I’ve been busy. I could tell you I’ve been working like a squirrel among the oak leaves on my thesis, that I’ve been singing and playing music with my friends, that I’ve been packing for another great, big move, that I’ve been feverishly sick abed and then lashed with bouts of insomnia during which I still didn’t write—

And all this would be true, but it’s no excuse.

I really wanted to write you about the insomnia, about its varied forms: the fitful thrashing caused by the codeine-containing cough remedy, the dry-throatedness caused by radiator heat in an old house, the perfect midnight alertness caused by oversleep during day during sickness, all this and the usual, caused by hamsterwheelbrain. This all seemed interesting for a moment, then it didn’t.

I wanted to write you about how much I’ve come to love my Beachtown friends, and how sad I’ve grown that a good life must be broken apart, in order to move forward. And then that started to sound eerily familiar, and my own sister told me, “This is a pattern with you,” and then I got embarrassed about it and just wrote nothing.

So now I’m in Atlanta again. I’ve moved back, and in with Marshall, my sweet, sweet b’friend and now I'm sitting at my computer, listening to Lois Reitzes talk all sultrily about Camille San Saens. We have a house with a porch and two cats who haven’t met yet. Dangercat’s residing in the bedroom for now, suspicious and pacing. Marshall’s cat, Enoch, a 16-pound cumulonimbus cloud of a cat, saunters lopsidedly by the bedroom door, but seems not to notice the foreign male cat smell—- or, I posit, does not care. He wobbles up and meows for his meals and for affection. He rests on the couch. Such is the life of Enoch.

On the way down here, I listened to friends’ mixed cds and got all choked up and teary, and then resolute. And, lo and behold, it’s good to be back. Atlanta is a city of wretched planning and sprawl; it is also the city whose street map is blueprinted in my mind when I close my eyes. The roller coaster of 75/85’s Grady curve, Mayor Franklin’s metal street plates (pothole resolution of the future!), the layout of the enormous produce section at the Dekalb County Farmer’s Market, where we went on a shopping spree yesterday along with half the city, these are the landmarks that somehow comfort me.

Marshall and I, we’re having a blast rearranging the house. My little corner of the office is cozy, and yesterday, as we schlepped his mint-green kitchen table down to the basement, I realized the potential there: “Craft center! Craft center!” I started chanting. A forest of mod podge and fabric and paper. Ah, yes. It shall be.

And I’m re-learning Atlanta. It’s been just two-and-a-half years, and this house is in a familiar neighborhood, but there are all these nifty back road shortcuts to friends’ houses and to unfamiliar Publixes, and these require routes with which I’m wholly unfamiliar. I’d like to announce with pride to my fellow Atlanta denizens out there: I’ve been here 48 hours, and have not once driven on Moreland Avenue, the nightmare main drag that this neighborhood surrounds.

I’m going to see how long I can keep this up, in our current frenzy of thrift store furniture shopping and eating at a different friend or family member’s house each night. Tonight we go to my sister’s house, to see my nieces and the first floor of their house, whose every inch, square and spare, the girls have apparently swathed beyond recognition in Christmas decoration.

I’m still nervous, but it’s good to be back, Henshaw, to finish out my final semester from afar and ease myself back in to the Big World. I’m excited to share a life and a home with Marshall; in some ways, I’ve become the person I never thought I would, and it’s funny to see that in these pages: I am in love with and living with a a technical writer--which, as a profession, is about half-a-click away from the computer programmers I whined about when I was 26, and we are fixing up a house in a neighborhood in which, yes, we are the lightest-complected people around. And if the two of us did have a dog and if there were a dogpark, and if we had salaries that would allow for some real home improvements, I would totally be one of the home improvement chatters. Well, to an extent. Then I guess I still would get bored. I'd rather talk crafts. Or music. I guess some things don't change. At any rate, life is good and we are all lucky people. I miss you Carolina folk this much (that's a lot), and I’ll write again soon.

So, it’s the end of my last June in Beachtown, and I find myself thinking increasingly about Next Year at This Time, because: 1. I am just that laissez faire and fancy free, and 2. it’s the middle of the damn night, a late night I didn’t expect to even be awake to see, several hours ago, when I was sitting on the couch, munching on popcorn and watching Annie Hall, a movie in which I can see both the innovations of the period and this horrid datedness.

So it's that perplexing duality that I'll blame. Let's blame Annie Hall, you and me. Together. What the hell.

But anyway, now, somehow, it’s one in the damn morning. And I just ran across this thing I wrote back in March, when I was visiting Atlanta, you know, that town I spent years trying to escape:

“Driving along in one’s car, seeing someone talking on her cell phone one car over, you notice her nodding vigorously, listening. Seeing this, you are certain: you feel closer to this stranger-woman than the person on the other end of the phoneline could possibly be capable of feeling.”

Who wants to go back to this world, right? Not you. Not when your shoulder blades have finally unclenched, when you finally live somewhere with clean! air!, where it doesn’t automatically take 20 minutes to reach any given destination, where this annoying term: “roadrage,” has faded to the status of Archaic Fake Word invented by television pundits in the early nineties and then quickly forgotten about by real people.

Why would you ever go back there? I mean, by choice?
Oh, Henshaw. I’ll explain in the morning. I really, really should go to bed, now.

St. Patrick's Day Log
Beachtown, Carolina
In the late afternoon, the public radio station left on in the bedroom turns to Thistle and Shamrock-style new age flavored Celtic-lite. Dangercat leaves the room immediately. Upon arrival home, he is found on the sofa instead of his usual spot on the bed. The fiddling from beneath the bedside table explains all.

Later, Marshall emails these photos from Oakland cemetery in Atlanta. The tornado damage is really bad, much worse than he'd thought, he says. It's hard to look at them.

Can you hear me S.O.S.?
I was literally on an island this weekend with zero cell phone reception or media, assisting with this writers' retreat, and someone says something to me Saturday about there having been a tornado in Atlanta.
"A tornado." I say this really more than ask it, sure this person's either got her storm-system-type or her town wrong.
"Right through the downtown!"
Well, mmmaybe, I think. A bad storm. But certainly not an actual honest to goodness, Beware Dorothy, hide-in-the-bathtub tornado.
I come back to Beachtown today, to become the last person in the nation to find out that actually yes one did: Friday night, hitting not only downtown, but also my favorite, dearest neighborhood, sweet Cabbagetown, where a number of friends live (all fine, thank god). I'm glad you guys are okay. Jeez. Still kind of in shock, though. I came home a half hour ago and I'll I've been doing is staring at internet footage.

Anyone know: What's the deal with Oakland Cemetery, though? I actually visited there just last week to write about the place for part of The Book, and now, apparently there are trees down all over the beautiful old place. Any other damage? Atlanta peeps?

City-Dwellin' Vagabonds are We.
Not American Apparel models. At any rate, something in this series of photos comes very close to the core of whatever it is about this town that fills me with both a deep satisfaction and an ineluctable longing. I'm back visiting Atlanta this week, the city where where I lived for six love/hate/hate filled years. The dirty politics, the unplanned development, as if all decision-making is taking place in a vacuum with no template or precedent whatsoever, meanwhile, everything just vibrates with this burgeoning hum, of art, community, kudzu. The way crumbling old buildings with decrepit storefronts sit cheek-by-jowl with crumbling old buildings with shining new storefronts. The side-streets lined with crazy old houses with original works of arts-and-crafts beside ancient oaks in the front yards between the porch and the broken sidewalk. And right nearby, those old train tracks, and crawling all over everything is the kudzu, whose leathery green bulletproof leaves curl around all of this: old industrial-era architecture, Civil War shells half-buried in the woods in the backyards, the Wal-Mart up north of the city.

9:52 a.m., this local coffeeshop: The punks and the climbing businessfolk clad in bluetooth and the clutch of neighborhood men whiling away the morning at the local coffeeshop arguing about economics and local politics.

It all just makes me sigh and sigh, even as I'm here again, visiting. There's something telling you you can grasp it but it all moves so fast. Any. Way.

Here're some observations from Creative Loafing's Ken Edelstein that link to this series of eerie photos.
Drink and enjoy, Henshaw. And I hope you're having a nice week, too, and thinking of your own only love sprung from your only hate.

The Fairest Books of All
Well, I’m back in Atalanta for a few days, and el great big writing conference is over.
Best part was wandering around meeting folks at what they called the “book fair:” tables and tables (something like 250—Crackergal, lemme know if I’m way off) where folks from literary journals and small presses sat.

I scored a number of really cool free or cheap literary journals. Beautiful writing, beautiful design. Also a book of matches from some lit mag in New York.
(Had this interaction with guy at that table or another:
Alice: So, where are you published?
Guy: Brooklyn.
Alice: Oh, New York. Cool.
Guy: Well, Brooklyn, actually. There’s a difference.

If I’d gone around in opposite order, I could’ve smacked him with the flyswatter I got from Crazyhorse, but I didn’t have it yet.
(When the nice gal at that table handed it to me, the woman the next table over immediately began making bondage jokes in a loud, “Hah, hah. I am so very naughty,” voice. Hm. Maybe I wouldn’t have swatted Mr. Brooklyn, after all.)

So exciting. There was this giddiness in the air at getting to say hello, hello, hello to everyone. Really, lots of nice people. (None of them attractive menfolk, Henshaw. Geez. What do you take me for? I’ve told you; we’re all pale, homely, garret-y, scholarly sorts. [Ahem.])

Anyway.

So there was the book fair—which, by the way, did your elementary school ever have those? That’s all I could think about whenever anyone mentioned it. Like, in 4th grade? Where you’d get a glossy folded thing advertising Garfield books and Mad Libs and Bunnicula and all those pre-teen books that were popular when I was ten about girls diagnosed with terminal illnesses? I swear there was one called I Want to Live, and another called Six Months to Live. Girls would pass them around like Playboys in homeroom. That’s what I think of when I think, “book fair.”

(I just did an internet search and apparently the Dying Girl books were written by this woman named Lurlene McDaniel. Her webcopy says, “Everyone loves a good cry, and no one delivers heartwrenching stories better than Lurlene McDaniel.”
Though it says she also does lots of psychological research for each book and her site also has volunteer organizations for kids wanting to make a difference. Well.)
Still.
This was a step up from that.


Found in Atlanta
One journal at the writers’ convention was having a contest whose deadline was sometime this week. The topic was “Found,” and we were to frame it around our experience here in Atlanta.

What have I found. Well.
I’ve found that this town, which I spent so many years hating with such venom, always half-plotting escape, now feels more like home than any other place.
Mostly, it’s rather unlovely here. Still, it’s such comfort. I drive the streets without thinking. The sidewalks feel like some private part of a house that belongs to me. I check the skyline at night for my favorite building—the Bank of America tower—and I can exhale. That belongs to me, too.

Mostly what I see behind my eyelids when someone mentions “Atlanta,” is a map of the city’s layout of freeways: 75/85 slithering through the center, like some two-headed, two-tailed serpent. Like some version of a river in a city that’s pretty much riverless (unlike the one I grew up in.) (No. Not counting the Chattahoochee.) 400 poking its head up there, too. I-20 belting the center and 285 circling it all. It looks like some primitive child’s drawing of a present.

It’s what my older sister first drew for me on the back of a Creative Loafing, the second or third day after I’d moved here.
“This. Is…Atlanta,” she said, scrawling it out and labeling each road, scrawling and then scratching out and re-drawing 400 to get it right. I was looking for an apartment. I was intimidated beyond belief.

In the time since then, that drawing has become my one blueprint for life in the past six years or so. The layout on top of which I superimpose nearly every change that’s taken place in my 20s. That one, I think, recalling. And then, again. Addresses lived at, worked at, roles played:

Cheery nonprofit worker fresh from college, dead-broke backpacker, blissed-out girlfriend, disgruntled punkrock coffeeshop chick biking down Moreland Avenue, PR writer for hire, shop clerk, younger sister, roommate, pained girlfriend, freelancer, reporter, aunt, award-winner, “area personality,” depressed girl at 2:00 a.m. grocery store visit, dog-owner, single girl dancing wildly at Lenny’s with friends, singer in short-lived rock band, new neighbor, old neighbor, ex-girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend again and then, gone.

And every cheap, delicious restaurant. And every closed rock-and-roll venue (Echolounge, RIP). And every friend. I drive down rusted out Dekalb. The Krog Street tunnel. I see us all like shadows. Only vivid.

What You Wish For
A few years ago, I hated Atlanta.
I worked in a coffeeshop where most of the people I saw day in and out were customers who could afford to lay down three or five bucks every morning on some coffee and steamed milk, could afford to take fifteen minutes to stand around with neighbors and friends and chat and laugh and catch up, could afford this little world, this community paid for with this hot paper cup they grasped between their hands. I was jealous of them.

There were also those, yes, who swept in on their cellphones and swept out in their Miatas, who threw their bills down each day and barked out their orders or worse, waved their hands in a manner both impatient with and dismissive of the baristas who knew their drinks by memory. There were those who were rude or mean, and - worse somehow - there were those who were friendly, who would strike up conversations day after day. We became fond of them and felt the flower of friendship begin to spring up, a bud that never saw the light of day – doomed because, all things considered, there we were behind the counter, and there they were on the other side, and sooner or later all it came down to was whether we’d toasted the bagel well enough or whether the silver canister was out of half and half. There was nowhere for those friendships to go. They were stunted from the get-go.

I took that dynamic with our customers and the resulting Comrades-on-a-Lifeboat, Fuck-‘Em-All dynamic with my coworkers and, on four or five hours of sleep every night plus days spent on my feet eating muffins and drinking caffeinated beverages, I carried that outlook into the rest of my life. I was a bike rider in a world of shiny Cooper Minis that zoomed by too fast and splashed water on my legs and butt as I pedaled – me, a tattooed, tank-topped clerk with unshaven armpits, always buzzed or crashing from caffeine.

Who was also at odds with those lifeboat-comrades. The coworkers/friends/only people I ever really hung out with because they were the only ones who understood every detail of daily life. I was the girl who had gone to college - who had loved college - who respected authority and was shitty at poker and missed rules and health insurance and routine and talked with her parents for long stretches every week or two and got along quite well with all her kin. I felt patted-on-the-head and was patted on the head by coworkers who joked good-naturedly over Ambitious Alice and thought me naïve and sweet and a tad dizzy. And I had a boyfriend with whom I lived and fought over about money and loved madlymadly. And he was one of the lifeboat-comrades, which complicated matters. And we hated Atlanta and its car culture and its nouveau riche tackiness and one day he did something about it and left. And then things changed.

I started working full-time at Small Publication and left the coffeeshop. I started spending time with people who valued passionate careers and who weren’t afraid of trying for something they might fail at. And then I started popping into the coffeeshop a few days a week when I could afford it. I’d go to parties where I met people who did everything under the sun and made their homes here Atlanta. It wasn’t just the place they lived while they squirreled away money. They were writers and city planners and accountants and bartenders and cheese purveyors and ACLU lawyers and massage therapists and hardware store clerks and high school teachers and international fax technicians - and everyone had something to say and I joined a rock band and I learned to knit and I learned still more about this city and state as I wrote stories and interviewed people doing still more fascinating things here in this town. I went jogging and bike riding on weekends along trails that run through town and hiked Stone Mountain. I started dating a very, very sweet man. I started spending more time with The Best Nieces in the World. I started participating in activities at my Unitarian church.

Now, all of a sudden, I have the opportunity to leave. I found out Friday I got into one of the top nonfiction MFA programs in the country at the University of Pittsburgh, and suddenly, it’s real; it’s a voice and it’s saying You can go. It’s a ticket.

And I will go. I’ll take it. I’ll either go there or to one of my other top choices; I’ll figure it out as responses continue to trickle in. But now it’s not so easy.

Today I had lunch with a guy with StoryCorps, an amazing oral history project that, err, Small Publication is hosting during its stay here in Atlanta, and I was telling him about The Beltline project and about a thousand-one quirky, cool things here in and around Atlanta to make sure he does before he leaves, and I was a god damned motormouth; a bouncy, bubbly – possibly a bit dizzy-sounding – motormouth. Someone who sounded like she really loved her town. Her town.

Four Things about alice
Yowza! Mister Sweet/Sour Chutney done tagged me, so here-a-goes:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life
1. Purveyor of espresso
2. Wrapper of chimes
3. Scrawler of news storays
4. Bleach-soaked vendor of bleach-soaked flowers

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. The Big Lebowski
2. Waking Life
3. Joe Versus the Volcano
4. Arizona Dream

Four places I have lived
1. Pittsburgh, pa
2. Chapel Hill, nc
3. Washington, dc
4. Sevilla, spain

Four TV shows I love to watch
1. Six Feet Under (R.I.P.)
2. The Daily Show
3. Mary Tyler Moore
4. Freaks and Geeks
(Only one of these shows actually exists on television now; hmm.)

Four places I have been on vacation
1. Grifton, nc
2. Jackson, nh
3. Mexico Beach, ga
4. Mexico Mexico, mexico

Four of my favourite dishes
1. Chila-fucking-quiles
2. Olive Chicken
3. Broccoli Casserole
4. spicy Indian chickpea dish concocted by Marshall

Four websites I visit daily
1. yarhoo mail
2. Salon
3. The Comics Curmudgeon
4. Overheard in NY

Four places I would rather be right now
1. Guanajuato, oh.
2. In my parents’ kitchen in Pittsburgh; cooking, drinking wine and shooting el shit
3. Somehow, out dancing to really good music.
4. Working really hard at Dream Radio Show of the great midwest

Four bloggers I am tagging
I don’t really know bloggers; only people.

Hatched
Tonight, I hung out with Marshall. We ate palaak paneer and dosai at Madras, grabbed a couple Zesto milkshakes and drove up I-75 to check out the Big Chicken, since neither of us had ever been. Yes, this is what you do in Atlanta at this end of the twenty-first century: You eat really good food, and then you drive.

And it feels perverse to admit I’ve noticed, but ever since the Katrina, Atlanta has had the most beautiful weather. Cooler clear-skied days and almost no humidity. Tonight it smelled like fall for the first time, and the wind through the car windows was a little too chilly for my t-shirt. We drove in silence for a good fifteen minutes listening to the New Pornographers’ album Twin Cinema with the windows down, peeling down the rollercoaster ride that the Downtown Connector feels like on nights like this: all irresistible curves and bright lights on either side like a midway.

And all that fat and refined sugar in my belly plus the good friend and the good music and the night made me think: This time is okay.

Something about every summer in this city feels like a battle, but as I surfed my hand out the window (as I was of course, utterly compelled to do), I knew this to be true: That when I pull out this cd in five or ten years, from a shelf in some strange new town, it’ll bring this all rushing back. And I’ll realize I was lucky. I’ll miss it: This night, the smell of your car, the expression on her face as she dances; that one at midnight on any given Friday, laughing open-mouthed, beer in hand, perched on the edge of a green metal lawnchair, those two with foreheads furrowed in concentration over the song they’re playing, and you and that day and that time; oh, tell that story and don’t forget the good part. I forget I am lucky; I’m blessed.

Requisite Statement to Criminal Records Guy
We had a deal: You don’t look up at me or say anything as you ring up my cds.
I give you money.

Hey, I didn’t set this standard; I only agreed to it.

And so when I brought my purchase up to the counter this time, it seemed we were going by protocal.
“That it?”
“Yeah.”
“Credit or debit?”
Etcetera-blah.

But then, right there in Cooler Than Thou Record Shop, you tried to get all freaking upsell-y me. Not very well, either, I might add. When I declined the ten-dollar DVD that accompanies Medulla, your subsequent “Fourteen-ninety-nine, then,” came with a sneer.

I used to work at Waldenbooks, where we had to try to sell people more stuff, and I can tell you: it will not work if you don’t make an attempt—even if it’s a lie-- at rising from disdain at some point in the transaction.

Oh well. I know why you tried: you’d thought me one of those Bjork fans. One of those Bjork!xoxoxo-Bjork fans.

Nah. This cd in particular had just been a find. Spoke to me from the listening stand, and all that. Promised to get me through the months ahead - that I’d just found out the forecast for, earlier that evening: Harder and harder.

And there was Bjork, singing to me in her Lars-Van-Trier –ingenue against-adversity-voice: I’d get through it, I would, I would, I would! And be ever-so-much-stronger, tra-la!
Tra-la to you, punk.

All hell
Okay. Might’ve spoken too soon about old Ivan. The storm wasn’t so bad throughout the day, yesterday, but then around 4:30, all hell broke loose. I should know, because I was in the passenger-seat of Hunter’s car with a pizza from Johnny’s in my lap.

We were trying to drive down Euclid Avenue like normal people, when suddenly the car was in water that reached the top of the tires. Thank God for the Suburu Legacy – Hunter’s fortress of a new car that looks more like a Mom-Mobile that my sister’s minivan. Thank god for that car’s beautiful All-Wheel-Drive-y-ness!

We made it out of the River Euclid and over to Moreland, where it looked like more of the same river gushing down the hill. We turned into a gas station and considered our options. Every route really seemed impossible. Just about every street between that gas station and our house is narrow, hilly, tree-lined. No big deal unless the ocean’s falling from the sky and those streets don’t have gutters. And the trees and power lines are falling into them.

It was strangely exciting to think of a city – a real city, planned (though not so much) by real adults – rendered so completely chaotic. All was Fend for Yourself. And for a flash of a second, I imagined this was permanent and felt scared and wildly optimistic all at once. Imagined joining some band of people as we floated into a new primitive age.

Then we managed to make it down Dekalb Avenue, and home. Ate pizza in the dark while watching The Office on my laptop.

Later on when there was a lull, we took a walk with Otis through our neighborhood. Extreme quiet except for some rumbling thunder. Trees down everywhere and soft candlelight whispering out front windows of every house. Yes, I’m a ridiculously, foolishly incurable romantic about these things, but last night was the first time I’ve felt completely relaxed in months.

Rock you
No. Not unlike a hurricane at all, now that you mention it.

Today Small Publication has that sort of Snow Day feeling, even though we’re the ones you might think would be the most busy during all this Ivan hullabaloo. Well, we were busy, earlier on, but now my boss says to “Watch and Wait.”

We have the local news on tv, where scripted panic has ensued. Schools are closed - and outside, guys who look a lot like my boss, save their unruly beards, are walking the streets handing out brochures about the end of the world. Not to downplay the severity of this hurricane for those who are actually feeling its acute effects, but Atlanta-

Atlanta makes me laugh. Atlanta that closes its schools when there’s frost on the ground. I swear I remember crawling through snow to get to my bus-stop in Pittsburgh as a lassie, and then standing there for a half-hour, my snot freezing under three layers of scarf. Finally the bus would come up the hill, snow-chains rattling – We’d all rush the bus and try to sit close to the front, where the heater was. (Yes. Cool operated in reverse on our school buses in February.) And school would go on as usual.

They say Atlanta is a city of transplants, so you’d think people wouldn’t be so freaking wimpy about the Elements. Maybe it’s because all the wimpiest people have left their hardier towns to come here.

(Okay, so I’m conflating matters and yes it’s true this city also has roads that flood after a half hour of rain, let alone two days of it, so there might be some cause for concern, there.)

Telling the devil
I think part of it is that (knock wood), I have led an extremely lucky life so far, in terms of random, devastating events like these. Forecasters’ projections make Ivan look like it’s going to wend its way around Atlanta, as if the city had some kind of force-field around it, and this does not surprise me.

Yes, I just typed “knock wood” up there, but I don’t actually believe in luck, per se.

Except I do, I guess, in small ways. For example, I believe I am not the type of person who ever wins raffles or other random-drawings.
My coworker is eerily lucky in this way. He’s won like, $300 in the Pick Three Lottery, five times in the last three months. After the third time he won, I started buying Pick Three tickets myself. To no avail.

I’m more of the Lucky type in terms of hitting rewind on a cassette tape, and hitting stop at exactly the spot before the song I want to hear.

Really, I know none of this “lucky” or “unlucky” business is true. Every one of us lives guided by more superstition than we care to believe. It’s weird, the little patterns and parameters we set up for ourselves, the things we say are so, just so we don’t have to see all that scary uncertainty that’s out there. And all that scary freedom.