“I crashed down on the crossbar
And the pain was enough to make
A shy, bald Buddhist reflect
And plan a mass murder.”
-“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
-The Smiths

We had come to see Morrissey at what seemed most non-corresponding venue in the world.

Myrtle Beach’s House of Blues is a compound. After passing five miniature golf courses and at least six versions of Wings, that family mart of all things beachy*, you come to a light where there’s a swampy, overgrown ex putt-putt course on your right. You then hang a right off the main road onto an access road and drive through a Siberia of parking lots. Past Dicks, that tourist restaurant chain where waiters are mean to you on purpose, a Florida-pink Hampton Inn and further in still, where you finally park, across another giant expanse of parking lot from the Alabama Theater, which I think is the rough equivalent of House of Blues for FM country music. You park and you walk and you are subsumed.

HOB is a fortress covered in a cosmetic varnish of folksy appeal so insistent it becomes its opposite. It’s advertising itself. Corporate folksy appeal. I’m telling you, The House of Blues sports more Howard Finster than Paradise Gardens in Georgia. It’s made to look like a tin jukejoint, only some of the folksy signs are painted with messages like, “No cameras inside. We will confiscate.” We sat and ate sweet potato fries and quesadillas at a table in the behemoth restaurant, because they told us if we ate there, we’d be let in earlier and get better seats. I had wanted to order the Blues Burger, but I was stopped by the price combined with the idea of Morrissey fans truer than I—which are most Morrissey fans, actually—shooting me “Meat is Murder” glances. It felt like the start of fan one-upsmanship that undergirds some element of the experience of seeing a show, or did to me, because my extent of knowledge of Morrissey and the Smiths runs to about fourteen of their billion-song oeuvre. To say you are a Morrissey fan feels to me like saying that you hated your mother in high school: It feels like a cliché just to say it even if it’s true, and it is true, to some extent, for many people within three decades of my age. In a way, dining at the restaurant was like a return to high school. Everyone stared at one another. Who were these other people, we all wondered, these Morrissey fans who were Morrissey fans enough to buy tickets and drive to this place and sit, now, here, and wait, sipping Cokes and bobbing their heads a little now, to the sounds of BB King and the Staple Singers?

The staff of HOB is legion, and they are not happy. Our waitress worked with the dull knowledge of a night of poor tips ahead. The man we asked the location of the bathroom when we first arrived pointed it out with a dutiful sigh. Workers in black-and-bright-yellow shirts stood around in unhappy clumps in the bar/courtyard between the entrance to the restaurant and the ticket window. My friend tells me there was an attendant in the other bathroom, and that she looked grim. A scowling woman directed us to the Special Restaurant Diners line. Then an older man, less unhappy, took our receipts and gave us special orange wristbands, for being restaurant diners.
Their misery was, of course, oddly fitting.

We got in line with everyone else, diners and non-. We stood for a long time as the line grew, winding around a log-cabinish ramp (here, the painted “No cameras/We will confiscate” sign). Minutes and more minutes passed. We shivered in the not-quite-spring-yet air. Several recorded announcements came on about what was and what wasn’t allowed inside. Two slightly cross men came and metal-detected everyone and endured the lame quasi-racist "We're not gangsters" jokes of the men in line ahead of us. For some reason, they collected people’s spare change too, which also was not allowed inside. At the door, two more workers confiscated drinks people had purchased outside. When we went to order more at the bar, the two bartenders were having a loud argument. The woman-bartender slammed the small fridge. “I don’t even wanna hear about it,” she said to the man-bartender before turning on her heel and facing me. “Yes?” she said.

My friend and I went and stood in the crowd before the stage. We were a mixed group, wristbandwise. It seemed the restaurant perk thing had been a ruse. Two more announcements came on, about emergency exits and proper behavior. There in that big crowd, my sympathies with cattle felt stronger than ever. It had been at least two hours of measured steps of submission. Despite this, it was beginning to feel more like a show. There was a crazy guy shouting things into the crowd. My friend, who loves Morrissey, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet in anticipation.

The man himself, when he came on, was, of course, just a man. His six-something frame was human flesh that scowled and preened across the stage, that flipped the long microphone cord dismissively again and again, strutting around, his band so far behind him and ignored by him completely, the players indistinguishable from one another in their jeans and tucked-in blue seersuckers, their shorn hair, their polite finesse with their instruments. He was just a man, but he shined. He frowned and he lamented; he beat his chest and pointed and leaned down to grasp the entreating hands from the front rows.

This crowd had paid not only to hear the songs they equated with huge parts of their lives; they had paid to be paid attention to in this precise way. To take part in a show in which the man pretended we were his private mirror. He sang his fictional trials to us--You understand, you understand, he was crying, because no one understood but us, of course; not these seersucker guys; no one. He was all strange sex appeal and raw egotistic need and gentlemanly aplomb; “Thank you so much,” he said quietly after each song, bowing at the ravenous applause.

All of this came down to the giant backdrop, a two-story black and white photo of a young, muscled man circa WWII, flexing his muscles and chomping a cigar. After the show, my friend said, “There was something really comforting in that photo. Something so Smiths about it, you know?” Yes, but blown up to the nth degree, revealed when another curtain in front of it fell with a dramatic flourish before the start of Morrissey’s set and flashing in different shades of foreboding with the colored lights of each song, the giant photo completed the feeling that we were truly at a rally of some sort. And I liked it. The parking lot wasteland and the militant lines, the guards, the timetables and wristbands; all of it had led up to this, so in this way, it seemed fitting as one of his blue-shirted minions swung and hit the heavy gong and the man sang the words, “Life is a pigsty/And if you don’t know this, Then what do you know?” before shifting into the final song, no encore, just the Big Lonely vacuum of “How Soon is Now?” with its strobelike guitar echoed in actual strobes, beating like the promise of violence against the giant face of the young son of war, against our small bodies as we swayed in ecstasy.

(*My friend once spotted what we agreed to be in the Top Five of Worst T-shirts Ever, at a Wings store in the Outer Banks. Beside an illustration of a stripper-pole, the shirt read, “I support single mothers.”)

Predictable Me.
So of course, unemployed and with dead car (yes, that, too) and with an uncertain future in Atlanta, a weekend visit to Beachtown to turn in my thesis and hang out with friends becomes one of the best weekends ever. It was Place-under-glass good. It was Awareness-that-this-is-a-golden-memory-in-the-making good, the way only fleeting moments can be. Moments lived under the weight of awareness of their finite nature. That we know we can’t keep.

During a Saturday morning sunny drive to the beach, a friend and I listened to Smog. Smog, as you may or may not know, is the alias of musician Bill Callahan, a man whom I’ve long assumed, from the sound of his seasoned voice and wise old lyrics, to be a creepily handsome but weathered old man, in the tradition of the Devil character from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I recently found out that he is not; this was disappointing. Rather than a figure of fable, he’s like, a completely normal thirtysomething dude who’s bedded both Joanna Newsom and Chan Marshall. (And yes, I am aware that the word “bedded” makes everything sound worse and makes me sound like a writer from freaking Star magazine.)

The album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is so beautiful, I feel kind of unworthy to listen to it and claim it for my own, and then I realized that this is precisely why I never listen to it. Even though I’ve had it for several years, my one wish with this album is for it always to feel happened-upon and new. I don’t want to learn all the words. There is so much lurvely music out there in the world, and I fill as many free spaces as possible with it. But something about this album. It’s so good that I harbor this sneaking suspicion that it’s too good for me. That it’s too good for the rest of my records, even. That it will raise the bar and wreck the happy equilibrium I’ve cultivated in my current community of cds.

Basically, there’s a concern concerning balance, Henshaw. There’s a fear of seesaws. Luckily, on this geographical end there is Marshall, who is pretty damn heavy in terms of import, and at least one amazing friend here (you know who you are, Missy-sitting-next-to-me), too, but I’ve gotta shake a leg and I dunno, where to go with this metaphor? Toss some gold ingots down over here. I am looking forward to the day when contentedness is not accompanied by some necessary “Carpe diem” sting. Does this happen? I have created a bad, bad precedent of not staying anywhere long enough to find out.

Greetings!


A hearty hello to you, Henshaw, from the Roadtrip I’ve so far been Too Chicken to Name, but will now call my

Country Death Tour.*
*By the way, an internet search on “death tour” yields no fewer than eight different heavy metal-themed entries. These include but are not limited to: “Conquest of Death Tour,” “A Matter of Life and Death Tour,” “Dance of Death Tour,” “Monolith of Death Tour, “Doppel Uber Death Tour,” “Valley of Death Tour,” “Under Pain of Death Tour,” and “Kiss of Death Tour.”

The fear thing is because my car’s about to fall apart, but I keep driving it across this great land of ours anyway. Because doing so sort of jacks up the stakes of the whole thing and makes it more exciting, despite the terror involved. Even announcing this as a roadtrip, at this two-thirds-through point, feels tempting of, um, Satan. This personal brand of extreme superstition comes up again in a bit and yes, it only gets worse.

To be specific, so far, this tour has consisted of burning miles and oil across: zee Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin. To come: Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia. And back. If I make it.

While driving, when I think to, I keep track of the closest mile-marker on Highway 70 or 74 or 95 or wherever I happen to be, and then I can think, “138, Mile 138, okay, okay,” and know that I’ll have that knowledge handy when Ghostcar becomes a smoking mess on the side of the road in approximately thirty seconds.

So far, the trip’s been totally worth it, despite the Triple Foolish Factors of 1. injured car (bad news delivered by kind mechanics in Pittsburgh), 2. high gas prices and 3. lack of job this month.

High stakes, high adventure. That’s our mantra, Henshaw.

So far, I’ve: Biked down old railroad lines under green, green canopies of cool leaves in Pennsylvania with mi padre and talked about biking from Pgh. to D.C. together next summer. Hung out with extended family and felt the stress drift away with the cool temperatures and lush, leafy hills, bottles of wine and grilled-out food.

Then drove to Springfield, Illinois.
This drive, through cornfield after sundrenched cornfield at sunset, afforded me time to get all choked up about how much I love my family and then, partially because of the topic of this book I’m working on forces/allows me to, I then became completely freaked out about how sooner or later I will lose my family members. Then I thought about independence in the largest possible sense and what that means. People close to me have lost parents in the past year and by contrast, I feel coddled sometimes. In a sense, compared to a lot of people I know, I’ve felt coddled for a long time, and maybe I’m nearing the end of it. Who knows. I am too scared to say it: I am too lucky to speak. Too scared to lose my luck. Too scared to even talk about it. Typing it here feels very Fates-Tempting, frankly.


Near Death in Springfield
In Springfield, I visited the Museum of Funeral Custom, which abuts Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Lincoln’s buried. And which is across the street from a faux log cabin tourist trap that sells Lincoln black velvet paintings, Lincoln coin purses and Lincoln backscratchers.

The Funeral Customs museum itself was incredible: Victorian mourning jewelry made from human hair, antique cooling boards and ads for old hearse companies that doubled as ambulance services. This is my principle travel recommendation to you when you are next in Springfield.

At the Lincoln family’s Springfield home, I suspected abridgement of the usual tour by my group’s National Park grey-hatted guide. I think a lot of this suspicion sprang from terse explanations such as, “This bedroom is where the maid would have slept. Any questions?” It also came from the fact that one of the tourists in our groups was a YOWLING infant. I feel for parents with yowling infants; it’s not like there’s anything you can do about the yowling half the time. I understand: It’s so humid today that your sweat is sweating; you’re tired; it’s four in the afternoon and you have two other cranky youngins on a mutual sugar crash to try to keep from killing each other when Young Yowly McScreamerson suddenly pitches a fit of such impressive length and volume as to DROWN OUT THE VOICE OF THE TOURGUIDE.

Still: Maybe you could leave the tour? Maybe? When it becomes clear that not one person can hear Mr. GreyHat’s lone sentence about Mary Todd’s sleeping quarters?

All this became prematurely moot in the final room of the tour, however, when, eight minutes after we arrived, rain began tappa-tapping on the Lincoln roof. Then hammering. Then, well, insert your metaphorical language here; it was raining, but really hard. Midwest in 2008 hard. And then two more grey-hatted state park staffers ran up onto the Lincoln back porch, clad in these perfect old-style grey rainsuits buttoned up over their uniforms. And they tell us to leave if we plan not to spend the night at the Lincoln house; this is not the worst of the storm. There are tornados coming.

So I ran back to the Ghostcar and floated, inside of it, back to my motel room, and didn’t die. And that was Springfield.

In Which Alice Finds the Town of Her Dreams. Again.
Now I’m in Milwaukee busy doing more research thangs and visiting my wonderful old friend, Jane, and her beau and being all floored to the ground by Milwaukee.

Some facts about Milwaukee as I see it. It’s:
1. lush and green with the perfect degree of postindustrial grittiness/gorgeous old architecture, like Pittsburgh (aka The Homeland)
2. Filled with organic farmers’ markets and festivals and neat community activities like Madison

only

3. with actual jobs and bustle and activity, unlike the former, and
4. without the irritating self-righteous self-importance of the latter.

I’m kind of smitten, Henshaw. I’ll have to come back and visit in the wintertime and get back to you, but oh! What a place! It also helps to have two town historical buffs walk and bike you around the place to tell you about every little thing, too, from the train trestles to the Milwaukee brick.

All righty. I’ve gotta get to tonight’s activities with J and her sweetie. Take care and drive safely yourself this summer, Mr. H. And get out there and see this land of ours if you can. A late Happy 4th to ya.

Kidnapped by Cowboys, (that's where I been.)

Or: New Mexico!
has a superabundance of…


1. Motels.
Especially Albuquerque. Albuquerque is at least half hotels. Or else motels. All of which ask you if you have triple-A when you call to request their rates. As a child, my favorite thing about AAA were the Triptiks my parents would order, those three-ring-bound portions of full-color maps, your route highlighted in friendly, blazing yellow. Ah, Triptiks, mapquest has nothing on ye. But also: Who the hell has triple A anymore?

Central Avenue, home to the resident Hipster/ Expensive as Hell/Then Sketchy district©, also used to be part of Route 66, so it’s lined with a gazillion old motels with in a parade of colors and lights from the ‘50s and ‘60s. So many of them, we stopped pointing out places like the Gung Ho Inn after awhile. We stayed at the Hiway House our first night. The Hiway House has an amazing vintage sign, cheap rates and lacks room-controlled air conditioning.

2. Nice people.
In the tiny, Old-Westy burg of Las Vegas, NM (not to be confused with the monstrosity: this Las Vegas was the Official Film Site of Portions of Movies of 2007, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.): We soak in hot springs, breathing in sulfur and some insanely sweet flower, eyes closed, breathing fast to abide the heat, listening as the crickets and cicadas start up. As we towel off and put on tennis shoes, our muscles lazy and langourous, a man, apparently a local gentleman, arrives. “Did you enjoy the springs?” he asks eagerly, setting down his own towel, and we nod like crazy. “Good,” he says, with seemingly real satisfaction. As we leave, he tosses out a genial “Careful out on the roads, tonight. A lot of locos out there!”

We arrive back in town to find that all the restaurants have closed. Sheepishly approach a man and woman smoking cigarettes outside the tattoo place. When we tell them our plight, they’re immediately outright apologetic that nearly all the town restaurants are closed. We soon find outselves waited upon by the Most Conscientious Teenage Boy Server ever to work a Pizza Hut.

Over the next two days, same deal in the very nice and crazy-picturesque towns of Madrid and Cedar Crest (where we stay in a hostel with goats. Not in the same room. With the goats. Not each other. Never mind.) But arriving in Albuquerque, the biggest, sprawlingest city since Atlanta, our luck's sure to run out, right? No. Enter hardcore night at local bar, where we talk to the nicest-ever metal drummer for a good 20 minutes. He turns out to be from a town near Pittsburgh, though.


3. Food. That's really. Really, Really good.
(With portions like the very desert horizon.)

Frontier Restaurant (Central Ave. Albuquerque)
It’s shaped like a barn, a yellow barn, with willy-nilly annexed rooms, each decked out in splashy western paintings of John Wayne, Noble Horses, Noble Natives and even a Noble Native Elvis (but no Noble Elvis Riding Horse or even Noble Horse Elvis.) When you get to the order window, the cashier, who’s really nice on both occasions you go, is wearing one of those old-style paper diner hats. But beyond all this: green chile stew. It is cheap. It is addictive. It arrives with fresh-baked, warm, thick flour tortillas and honey. How to convince the owners to move the Frontier to the east coast so I can eat this every week? I mean, despite the whole, um, southwest cuisine thing. And the however-many-years-in-this-exact-spot tradition-thing.


Olympia Cafe. (Um, also Central Ave. Albuquerque)
Oh. My god. So, first: I grew up in Pittsburgh, which, among other things, means this: I have consumed more than my earthly share of Greek dressing, spanikopita and gyros.

(Flashback! To Three Rivers Arts Festival, circa ’85: Mother of a Really Good Childhood friend flaunting her NPR-worthy pronunciation abilities--in a town whose local dialect proscribes that you order “JIE-roes.” In stage-voice, to cashier at stand: “We’ll have three ghhhhheeeeeros, please!” Full, gutteral thrust that caused Maria Hinojosa, wherever she was at that moment, to bow her head in amazement and envy. End flashback.)

The term “succulent” is overused, but what else have we got? I mean, without it, where would Lynn Rossetto Kasper be, week after blessed week, right? But still, let’s see. Our alternatives, according to Mister Oxford, are: “juicy, moist, luscious, soft, tender; choice, mouthwatering, appetizing, tasty, delicious; [informal] scrumptious.”
Yeah.

Our two plates of gyro meat, pork souvlaki, stewed potatoes and accompanying Close Encounters-like dollops of tzadziki sauce put us in instant twin foodrapture paroxyms. Meaning: We ceased both speech and eye-contact as we ate, save for the occasional helpless lifts of the eyebrow, pregnant with meaning, that meaning being, “Oh, mygoodLordinHeaven.”
We fed.

And yeah, to be fair: this was a post-campout meal: First non-energy bar or raisin-based meal of a day whose previous morning and afternoon had seen us hiking the astonishing cliffs of Chaco Canyon. (I mean "astonishing" like beautiful, not like we were using crampons and rope or anything.)

True. But also the best post-camping meal I’ve ever consumed. And, I should note, that I, who was raised in a childhood twistedly based on Clean Plate Philosophy, couldn’t finish this portion, it was so generous, and so rich.

I’d have shared it with you, though, Henshaw, had you come. Next time, maybe.


(Not noted: delirious/delicious cookout grub, above. Nor nearly equally delicious pre-grub high-gravity beer of which author took two sips at high-altitude after full day of desert hiking and got immediately giggly and ridiculous from, but still managed to snap this Bon Appetit-worthy photo.)

Hi, Henshaw.
I’m not dead. Just at the start of a very active summer here in Beachtown. Some highlights.

This week, I am busybusybusy, pitching stories to magazines and radio shows and interviewing embalmers and such for The Book. It feels good to be so busy.


Much more fun.
I took a break from all this on Tuesday to drive all the way over the Chapel Hill to see X, one of my favorite bands ever, ever, ever. It was a reunion tour without that irritating reunion tour feel. Really, it was tight and energized and lurvely.

I don’t have any friends here in Beachtown who like X, so I went alone, but that fact actually felt like a perk. The drive was great and it was great too, to revel in my nerdy fandom rather than having to explain anything to anyone or worry about someone else’s good time. Instead, it was me and the rest of the crowd, mostly male, future versions of me: 50-ish dudes in black-rimmed glasses who had come alone, a few with girlfriends/wives, and at least one with a little girl who was probably eight or nine.

It was glorious. The goofy quirk being, of course, Billy Zoom, the band’s platinum blonde legendary guitarist. One of my favorite things about Billy Zoom is that, in reaction to the bullshit GuitarFace that a lot of '70s musicians were known for, he plays--these uniquely difficult and weird guitar parts--without ever looking at his hands, and just standing stock-still, grinning.

He's also known for turning this grin on individuals in the crowd. Staring, especially, at ladies. (And it's not just me.)

I’d somehow forgotten this. Maybe it was because last time I saw X I was clearly there with a boyfriend and this time around, I was clearly there sola.

I’d parked myself between Exene and John Doe, but Billy Zoom, down at the other end of the stage there at the Cradle, took a turn gazing into the eyes of every chica near the front of the stage, leering/grinning and grinning/leering. And part of me’s all like, you know: we were all standing there staring at him; why shouldn’t he have a turn? But then part of me feels fucking odd when I’m dancing my arse off like a fool and singing along with Exene and she’s got her eyes squeezed shut into her mic a foot in front of me, but Billy Zoom’s closer, leaning over the monitor singing straight back at me with a trace of that trademark mockery of his. I want to be like, Dude, Exene, do something about this. But even punk rock royalty can do nothing about other punk rock royalty.
And all worth it. And all worth it.



Tourist in your (Ghost)town.
Last weekend, Marshall visited so we decided to be tourists.
We went to the beach, something I never do here by myself, and we went on a walking ghost tour. The confusingly pirate-y dressed tour guide started off the tour by warning us that, in addition to ghost stories, there would also be some history. For this, she apologized. It was unavoidable.

This was especially funny because we had decided on the ghost tour mainly because we couldn’t afford any of the town’s fancy historical tours, most of which require eclectic transportation forms, like horse-drawn carriages, houseboats and double-decker busses. Mostly, I guess, because it’s old people who actually go for this sort of entertainment, not kids under 40 like me.
At any rate, learning about the history of Beachtown through half-bullshat stories was our only way.

Some fact-ishes we picked up: 1. A dueling ground here in town left disgruntled ghosts right and left and 2. Our wonder-of-1970s-archetecture library is also haunted by a racist asshole from the 1800s.

One awesome woman in our tour group (not me) kept things lively by frequently shouting things like, “I want to stay one night in that haunted house! I would pay them money!” Another awesome woman (not not me) kept things lively by remarking loudly, “That’s true!” when the pirate-guide announced that, in addition to housing a lively ghost, one particular house on the tour is also the home of a very friendly cat. This house was the house next door to the house where I started out here in Beachtown, see. So I knew.

Marshall said it sounded like maybe I was a plant on the tour. Oh, well. It was a nice cat. No lie.

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.

News in Briefish

The move – It’s over. The three of us began our move on the morning of an extremely muggy Saturday, under the direction of Yammers, the neighborhood streetcat. Yammers has successfully charmed Ginger and Carmelita’s block with his street-hustler brand of affection, his prodigious drool and equally generous gifts of dead mice, voles and—most recently—a squirrel the size of Yammers himself, on G and C’s front porch.

Interlude/Ode:
A jolly little song for Yammers (named for his sweet potatah’ color and disposition) by Ginger:

Yammers, oh Yammers.
Our new Gentleman Caller.
He doesn’t leave his Calling Card;
He nails it to your Heart.

Turns out that Ginger and Carm’ are not the only ones who’ve been caring for Yammers. He goes by George across the street, where they feed him wet food and dry, and down the road, he’s known as Sam. We found out about one other life that last day. Turns out that next door, Yammers is Walter. There, he lounges around inside and out, and enjoys free-form jazz music with the elderly bachelor who lives there. Oh, Yammers. You’ll be just fine.
So, Yammers/George/Sam sat in his usual spot on Ginger and Carmelita’s porch, looking on with slit-eyed approval as the three of us lugged their heaviest, most unwieldy furniture down G and C’s steep staircase and onto the Oldest UHaul in Beachtown. I’m serious: When I drove the thing off their lot, I first thought it did not work at all, since there was zero forward motion until I had the acceleration pedal flush with the floor.

The Oldest UHaul also turned out to be rusted-through in spots, so when the subsequent noon downpour came, it also ruined a couple boxes of Ginger and Carmelita’s books and soaked through their mattresses as well. Word to the Wise: This is not covered by U-Haul unless you buy their special “Your UHaul is a piece of Crap and Will Ruin Your Personal Belongings If it Rains” Insurance. S’true.
Around noon, two friends came and kicked much moving ass with us until long after the sun went down. Things went a lot faster and both apartments were translated to Mansion House.

Mansion House has many small, quirky, things wrong with it. It is, however, utterly amazing on the whole. I had a friend over for supper the last week and she walked around slack-jawed for about five minutes at the place’s high ceilings and wood paneling and awesome antique peacock wallpaper in the dining room. I remembered, suddenly, doing the same when last year’s tenants had me over for supper for the first time. And thought of how we take for granted what we’re around every day. And how maybe Lorrie Moore is right in this one short story of hers in which one of her characters posits this notion that we can only love what we don’t understand. In some small ways, at some small moments, maybe. Maybe, Lorrie Moore.
Anyhoo.

Chicaaaago! — is where I am, at present. Visiting my sister, yo. This morning, she asked me what I wanted to see, so I looked up all these “Haunted/Weird/Historic Chicago” activities online, but they all cost more dinero than Lowly Grad Student Me wants to spend. So instead we went to Wicker Park for the Haunted Consumer-Whore Tour of Chicago. Ducked into one shoe store where I flipped over a price tag that read $485, and immediately had that sort of scary nightmare idea about What If I somehow destroyed these shoes completely?-->like, dropped them and then jumped up and down on them repeatedly with the hefty mary janes I wore into the store? That whole fear-of-walking-too- close-to-the-edge-of-the-Scenic-Overlook,-because-what-if-you-just-jumped? thing.
Gives you goosebumps.

Tonight, we take in one stop of the cheap and yummy Salvadoran food tour, so I am psyched about that.

Also, about Chicago: The stranger-type-men here are all stare-y and flirty, (and in the worst cases, cat-call-y.) It’s a little jarring after Beachtown, where the creepiness was more in the vein of “Wait, isn’t that guy dating that 19-year-old, 40?”

Also, about Chicago: At any hour that I sit down on this couch in this apartment, there are children playing in the street down below, with at least one screaming in a repeated car-alarm-like pattern. This includes midnight.

Eyelid twitching – I was lying down reading the very last issue of Punk Planet (huge sob. possibly more about this later), dozing off to said screams and shouts. It was that sort of quasi-sleep that involved a To Do list of things that must be accomplished upon return to Beachtown. It also included a brief worry session over the fact that I often have trouble recalling the perfect descriptive words right when I want them, and does this mean I have some sort of early-stage brain disorder or perhaps a tumor? The poor word-recall is part of the reason that my Real Writing™ takes so long, part of the reason I’m an abysmal arguer who often scripts perfect witty and biting come-backs several hours or days after the argument. So I’m lying there falling in and out of sleep, worrying because I’m trying unsuccessfully to come up with the word “integrity,” and then I really fall asleep. And then I wake up and my left eyelid’s twitching. Still is.

Something Like
Homecoming. That’s it.
I’m back in Beachtown. It's been about three minutes since I stepped into this apartment, this place presided over by this Dangercat, (presently yelling and twining himself all around my legs), and it’s weird: A few weeks’ absence isn’t that lengthy a stretch of time, but when I opened my apartment door, extremely unwieldy suitcase in tow, and looked up that mammoth staircase, I inhaled sharply. I swear it surprised me, Henshaw, to see everything still there, that brown, shiny banister and the horrible fluorescent lighting and the dust.
I breathed it in, and breathing it in made me think these exact words with sort of a detached wonderment.
“It smells just like my old life.”
My first weeks and first semester here, a time which, as I pulled the giant suitcase up those 32-million steps, came rushing back in a disjointed and distant little montage (Thunk, thunk, thunk, went the suitcase.) Everything so far away, feeling about as personally related to me as do childhood memories that your elder relatives tell you about: “You remember that, don’t you?”
Sure, I do. Sure. Absolutely.

The feeling didn’t cease once I came inside. My belongings, all these books on this cherry-wood shelf, this black-and-white photograph positioned just so, currently far above the head of the little furry beast loudly proclaiming its ownership over me; someone named me once put these things together in this space and decided it was home, which, at the moment feels, not sadly, but utterly, ludicrous.

Things Seen Along the Way
This weekend I drove down to Charleston, South Cacalacka to work on a story. The great thing about the drive is that you’re actually on a road, rather than an interstate, and that actual road winds through actual towns. You know you’re really traveling, rather than just relying on duplicate green signs to tell you.
Anyway. A couple things.

1. The whole sign-with-cartoon-pig-outside-the-barbecue-place has been made fun of, pretty much to death. You know, “Come partake of me! I am deeelicious!” But I saw one on Route 17 that I think brings the whole thing to a new level. The cartoon pig not only was parked before a heaping plateful of bbq, but underneath were the words, “Gut-Bustin’ Portions!” And Sir Pig’s expression as he looked up toward the viewer, clutching a fork, was that of bug-eyed horror, something akin to looking like he was about to:

a-vomit
or
b-bust a literal gut.

That is, die an excruciating death like that gluttony guy in the movie Seven, or like a duck whose insides are intended for pate, and good god this is a horrible line of thought, so I’ll stop there…

2. Around dusk yesterday, I drove by a golf course that looked like it hadn’t been mowed for a number of months. Right there, at the side of the road, and for some reason, really inviting, somehow. It made me want to pull over and have a picnic and then roll down one of its manmade hills, now soft with weeds and flowers, human negligence having robbed it of some of it manicured bite.

Also: Favorite song lyric from favorite song at present: "I had this friend, his name was Marc with a C./His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV."
Because you needed to know that.

Nuestro propio animal.

The Camping.
I am: home. Under a ceiling fan. Sitting beside a loudly purring cat. Alone, alone, mercifully and finally alone. Sunburnt and happy. Did I mention the ceiling fan?

Back from the mentoring conference and subsequent jaunt from the beach on which I live, to another, more remote beach for a camping weekend with old and new friends, where I:

was gifted with and wore all weekend long, the world’s ugliest, $5 bejeweled flip-flops.

laughed harder and in merrier company than I had in a long, long time.

climbed giant sand dunes.

kept reenacting portions of The English Patient on said sand-dunes, till my one friend said, “Hm. This is just an English Patient kinda day for you, huh?” after which I stopped.

got passive-aggressively scolded by a lady in one of those beach convenience stores for bringing in an ice-cream cone from another beach-convenience store down the road.
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I can just stop selling my ice cream, here.” Followed by big smile. Weird.

ate the best campfire grilled fish, ever

read a novel in two sittings. (The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. I didn’t like it at first but then suddenly was halfway through it and then completely. And it’s still reverberating around my head. Let me know if you’ve read it. I want to talk with someone about this book.)

saw more stars than I’d remembered there were. No. Really.

made new friends/kept old.

This summer-vacation-from-school thing, I’m beginning to not hate.

In Which the Fish goes Inland for a Swim
There are periods in your life that feel more stagnated than others, and then there are periods in which so much is changing so rapidly that you don’t even have time to think about how to classify what’s going on.

I met a woman at dinner tonight who reminded me of this. I introduced myself and she said,
“Oh, we’ve met.”
When?
Five years ago, it turns out, back when I was a student at this same conference I’m mentoring at this week. This woman was a mentor at the time, and she remembered me. Flabbergasted I was, at this. I swear, I don’t even remember me, back then. So much has changed.

The conference is taking place in the town where I went to college. The funny thing is that I spent the days preceding this week just dreading it.
“I don’t work in media any more!” I thought. “How can I possibly mentor some young kid on how to do it??” So many of these completely illogical thoughts. (It’s been what, nine months since I was last “in media”?)

Once I arrived, I realized that these fears came as a result of a dip in courage that I’ve experienced only lately. During my months in Beachtown, I have felt, in large part, rather stagnated in many areas of life in which I want to grow. It’s true that I’ve been faced with the potentially self-esteem-annihilating challenge of being in a new geographic location, doing a completely new thing every day, surrounded by completely new people. But then you also have to take into account that (at the risk of offending those of you who are one of these, err, people), there’s the fact that most of these new people are younger, and lack the same brand of maturity/drive and self-confidence that characterized folks whom I surrounded myself with back in ‘Lanta. I’m not counting my very best friends in Beachtown. So chill, ya’ll.
However, the general climate in any creative writing program is gonna be more laissez-faire than that in an urban journalistic environment. Put that program on the freaking beach and boom: You have the possibility for extreme stagnation for goofuses like me, who rely an awful lot on my immediate environment to supply get-up-and-go. So the energy is lacking and you’ve neglected to find a way to refuel it and you start to lag, to be less than the Kicker-of-Ass you know you are. Then you start to blame yourself for your own lagging, and the next thing you know, you’re thinking all sorts of illogical things. Things like, “What if I don’t remember how to use that piece of equipment I used every day for four years?”

Cut to tonight. A night out, after a great day of mentoring and, well, general kicking of ass. To a healthily beer-enhanced dinner out with a few of the coordinators of this program, and a fiery discussion about the future of communication and news and media, what it should be and what our respective roles should be. Tra. And la. We got there around 6:30 and started right in on this talk and at some point shortly thereafter, I looked up from the table for a gulp of air and glanced at the clock. It was past nine. And I wondered: Where the hell had I been hiding myself all these months?

I haven’t jumped to the conclusion that I’ve made the wrong decision in leaving Small Publication for grad school. I just need to find a way to remind myself of the wider world that I love while I’m immersed in academia and the strange social milieu of Beachtown. To remind myself, that while I love the time I have available now, and the things I am learning; the wider world I prefer is still there and it’s still mine. I don’t have to completely unplug from one, to benefit from the other.

By the time I got back to my hotel, I was in this weird, rare state of complete ecstasy with every conceivable aspect of my surroundings. There were these lovely, intelligent, snappy people I’d just eaten with. And then there was the fact that I was driving through my college town, which is also my favorite place forever and ever amen in the land.

How I love it here. I drove back to the hotel from dinner with the windows open, turning down each street by instinct, amazed how well I still knew the way. Here’s the tree-lined street I used to bike to campus on a-million-and-a-half years ago, I thought, and look, there’s a pack of old hippies on bikes, now. Here’s that street right through the center of campus and look how nothing’s changed! I drive right by some girl crossing that street carrying a backpack and the thought floors me: she’s having her college experience right now. The thought is both heartening and lonely-making: I don’t own this place. It never was mine. Still I drive through it; I catch the air in my hand as I surf it out the window. I let it go again.

Lately, I’m mostly interested in hanging out with old people.
To contrast: I talked with Hunter, my ex-boyfriend, now best-platonic-friend last night on the phone, about his weekend up in Madison. Ah-! he told me. The sun's been shining, it’s finally warm, and everyone’s coming out of hibernation. Spontaneous parties start up left and right at friends’ houses all around town and the Coup played a free show on this esplanade at the university. It was a giant lovefest and suddenly he has some magnetic Lady Attractor Beam going on too, because women are flirting with him left and right and yes, summer is starting out allllright.

I laughed, because I also had a great weekend, but I spent the whole thing with senior citizens. I’ve been visiting my grandma in her small town a lot lately, and drove there again, this weekend. Nona is 91 and lives by herself, still, in the house where my mom lived out her teenage years. Also, as I’ve told you before, she’s my favorite person on the planet.
Now that she’s just a few hours away, I find it hard to resist the urge to spend quiet weekends sitting with her on her screened-in porch, watching cardinals and bluejays and drinking coffee or pink wine and cackling together.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother had a fall going out to her garden. It was really scary at first, because we didn’t know if the cause was a stroke or what she’d broken, or anything. Turns out that there was no stroke and that she didn’t break anything, just bruised her pelvis badly. But I did spend that weekend at the hospital. I’ve always thought of hospitals as places where all your needs are met, and although this one wasn’t too bad, I did find out that you actually have to speak up just to get basic things: a napkin and a straw for your grandma who can’t bend her spine enough to sit up and eat the soup they’ve tossed unceremoniously on the tray beside the door; an extra blanket because her bed’s right beside the vent.

Nona’s better now. She’s still using a walker, which she hates and refuses to go out into public with, for fear of “looking like an old lady,” nor can she get very far before becoming too achy. But this weekend, a neighbor came and picked the both of us up on a golf cart (how do people get these things? At what point in your life does a golf cart become a normal item that you decide to purchase and have to keep in your own home?) and we went to a pig picking at a neighbor’s across the street.

It was huge. The back yard itself, the set-up, and the massive group of people who came to eat the crazy-delicious pork right off this gigantic smoker, along with hush puppies, broccoli slaw, boiled potatoes, and my favorite thing in the world for dessert, banana pudding.

What always startles me in Grifton, my grandma’s town, is to see the number of young married people and their kids. This idea that there’d be a new generation at all. What startles me even more is to meet people who don’t know my grandmother and therefore worship her as the undisputed queen of town. Actually, I’ve never met anyone there who doesn’t know who she is. But I never trust anyone who lacks what I deem to be the requisite affection for her.

All in all, I’m much more comfortable hanging out with senior citizens in Grifton. Part of this is that the cultural difference between the elderly people and me feels, for some reason, much less pronounced than the yawning divide that I feel between me and the New Country Pop-Rock listenin’, SUV-drivin’ “Yee-haw!” yellin’ young folks.

All of whom seem like interlopers to me. In my mind, I’ve realized, I’ve turned Grifton into this town defined by and equated to my grandma’s generation. There is some suburban sprawl going on outside the town’s old center, but that’s not the part that I consider even to be Grifton, really. I think of its short stretch of downtown, the mostly sad, empty storefronts—one of them once belonging to a store owned by my grandfather. I think of the railroad tracks crossing through the center of town, the old depot that used to be the center of the town’s operations and now is just sort of quaint. (That curse.)

I love to sit with the elderly people and hear about family histories and scandals and how things used to be when my mother’s family had relatives on every block. Because a selfish part of me thinks of Grifton as somehow belonging to my family. I imagine that once we finally have no immediate tie left there, the place will be swept up from the Earth. Going back there in some period after my grandmother, would be like visiting your childhood home after some new people have bought it and made it theirs. The smell in the air, the roads you take to get to Grifton, all of it feels like, to some degree, it belongs to me.

And so I sat at the pig picking with the elderly people at a group of tables set up on a small rise, while the young families ran around at a faster pace down below. There were two guys of indeterminate age, somewhere between 25 and 35, both of whom I chatted and joked with in line while fixing plates for Nona and me. Both came up separately a number of times, to get Coke from the table where I sat with my grandma’s friends, but I didn’t really engage them again. I was too engrossed in listening to what this childhood friend of my mother’s had to say about a teacher they both had.

There are a lot of end-of-year-blowout, alcohol-fueled get-togethers going on here in Beachtown, too, with the school year winding down and a number of people getting ready to move. But somehow, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to participate in all that, either. Right now I prefer the porch, the birds, and more than anything else, Nona’s face as she bursts into laughter.

The friendliest of skies.

I wrote this in one of two airports in Chicago a couple days ago; still not sure which one. Then I tried to open up el internet and found that you had to pay for it. So here it is now, m'dears.


This is my first time using my laptop from an airport. Chicago. Visiting a friend over this customary weeklong respite from formal academia that I understand the kids call Spring Break.

In the row behind me on the three-hour plane from Atlanta, was this Young Business Dude with a really loud voice hitting on a young British businesswoman. He enthused over bars in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood and over Jennifer Love Hewitt (“Hey, I'm just saying I wouldn’t say no.”) He punctuated many of his sentences with “Sweet!” I thought about tallying up the number of instances he said it, but then decided I’d prefer to try to shut it out altogether. But then that turned out to be impossible, too.
So I—and the poor man and woman sitting to my right—got to sit through several hours that began like so:

He: “So, you’re English, huh? I’ve always wanted to visit England. What’s the best part?”
She: “Really depends on what you like. Err, what do you enjoy?”
He: “Oh, beer—pubs! Castles, I guess. And I’d like to jaunt up to Scotland, too. You know: Wear a kilt, play some bagpipes, the whole deal!”

So I waited for the put-down. But instead, she started flirting back. I’m trying to think of how to frame this for you, Henshaw, in a vein of pure humor, one not colored by my cramped up legs after multiple hours in the air and one on the ground (We were delayed before take-off by everyone’s surplus carry-on luggage, and after landing by another plane that was having technical difficulties pulling away from the gate.) These things, they make a difference.

One thing.
When all of us were just getting seated, my seatmates and I exchanged a few friendly words. But as the trip progressed, the three of us grew increasingly reserved with one another, even growing to avoid eye contact. This, however, was a silence of camaraderie: We were attempting to make room for one another, to replace for one another some of the space the loud people behind us had thoughtlessly pilfered.

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.

My Secret Shame…
I went a bit overboard this year. I went and bought myself some extra reading matter for this vacation back to the Homeland. Even though there is already reading galore on most every table and table-like surface in this house. Even though some of this consists of books I’ve been meaning to read and even though I have a pile of books at back at my apartment in Beach Town that I’ve also been meaning to read, as well as a book that I brought with me, a good one -- a borrowed one -- that I’ve been making teeny wee dents in since before this month began.

It’s not that I don’t like these books. It’s that, well, gosh darn it, there are so many good magazines out there right now. That’s right, I said it. I went into Giant Bookstore and came out without a single book. Instead, I had copies of ReadyMade, Venus, and Kitchen Sink.
“I’m on vacation,” I told myself. I probably also told myself, “No one back in my MFA program has to know,” though that last one wasn’t exactly conscious. I got home, sat down at the dining room table and immersed myself for what turned into a couple of hours - in articles, short stories and essays by some really good writers, doing exactly what I want to make my own living doing.

…I Lived for Month-Long Affairs !
It was when I was lying in bed that night, devouring the latest Kitchen Sink, that I found it. The payoff. An article by a writer named Jessica Hoffman called “Better Than Books: Or, How I Learned to Stop Fronting and Love the Magazine.” Hoffman writes of an experience eerily similar to mine earlier that day: Going to a giant bookstore with a friend. The friend come out with two books, Hoffman with like, three or five magazines. She’s a bit embarrassed before she blurts out basically that Okay, maybe she just likes magazines better than books, all right??

And while I wouldn’t go as far as to completely prize periodicals over so-called “real” literature in my own affections, Hoffman’s arguments in favor of the magazine are compelling:

One is the relative freedom from corporate and consumer whim: be it a short story or an essay-piece, a new, provocative or unorthodox writer is far more likely to find publication in the monthly (biweekly, whatever) format. Well-edited, independent magazines and journals are cropping up all over the damn place out there right now. From McSweeneys to Punk Planet (my choices here), you can find a range of experiences and writing styles in the pieces within, some of which book publishers, obviously, cannot afford to take a chance on. You might find a writer you come to love who’s never had a book published, Hoffman points out. And who won’t, for years to come. Why miss out?

Hoffman makes a few more stellar points; Conciseness, for example. Having worked as a copyeditor, she says she’s seen too many books get padded way the heck down with excessive prose just so the buyer can leave the store feeling good having shucked out 24 dollars. And there’s more, but you should just read the article. And those of us who get our greatest kicks creasing back the new covers of Bitch and The Believer, can feel better just saying so.*

*(And feel better too, claiming that such writing is our goal, when it is. While, for example, correcting our closest relatives, politely, for the billion-dozenth time, when they tell their church friends at a Christmas party that, “Alice is in school to write the Great American Novel!”
Ahh, not quite.)

When I was very little, I confused these phrases:

A: Heimlich Remover
I’m back in Pittsburgh for ten days. This length alternates between feeling like waaay too much time here and not nearly enough. Today my father needed to get some last-minute food for when the rest of the family comes tomorrow. I went with him, being in that weird position of being home for Christmas and suddenly having no life other than Family Life. If I were married and had kids, it’d be different, but I don’t, and so I might as well be eighteen.
“You want to come?” my dad said.
“What are you getting?” I was finishing up some Christmas presents for my mom and sisters that involve glass marbles and magnets and felt a bit dizzy from inhaling epoxy all morning.
“The turkey. Some cheese,” he said. “Come along.”
“Sure.” I put down the current issue of ReadyMade, this great crafts magazine. If I were a housewife with lots of money somewhere, I swear I’d be a total craft freak. I’d have a different website, and it’d be all about yarn and glitter instead of mundane epiphany and words. Hell, I think if I weren’t trying to do something creative for a living, that’d be me in a heartbeat.

As it is, crafts have become my fallback measure whenever I’m not writing, for whatever reason. If I’m feeling blocked, the hazy notion of creating a collage from 1930s etiquette manuals becomes an imperative. So does gluing erasure poetry onto paint-by-number pictures of golden retriever puppies (a real - and awesome - Xmas present I made for someone this year. No, it wasn’t you.)

For three weeks, I’ve been elbow-deep in Mod Podge, paint, epoxy, Wite-Out and little scraps of paper. And thankfully, since I’ve left Beach Town and gone on this holiday hiatus travelin’ spree, ideas for el writing have been coming from every direction. I take little breaks from the gluing and the snipping to scrawl them down. It’s like they were blocked by some force field around Beach Town, but now that I’m gone, they’re free to make their rightful beeline for me. Which, hehe, isn’t true. Of course. I can write wherever I want. Errmm…

At any rate, I don’t write yet. I bide my time. I epoxy glass beads onto magnets and straight pins. I Mod Podge and I glitter. It works on a similar impulse: pure escapism. There’s nothing like the dissociative pleasures, Henshaw, especially when la vida private is less than stellar. A wee bit of heartbreak? Fears of inadequacy of some sort? Cover over all that ugly stuff with some bright pictures from a 1967 National Geographic, and maybe when you look up from the beautiful paper vistas in a month or so, the real world won’t seem so harsh.

B: Nailpolish Maneuver
So I go with my dad for the turkey and the cheese and to find a neat crafts projects for my nieces -- and also to get Altoids tins for some of my presents. (The notions for these gifts grow ever more lavish, both in mind and on the desk that has accidentally become my gift-crafting command center.).

My dad, who, in my family’s, well, family, days, drove a rusted-out VW Rabbit, has graduated to a luxury car whose vanity plate announces the goofy nickname we’ve given him in recent years. The car is huge; it’s senior-citizen silver. We’ve crossed some line. That car, when we borrow it, marks my sisters and me as people who used to live here.

Today, my dad and I drive down Route 19 through extremely hectic Friday-before-Christmas traffic to Michaels, which is housed in what was in the late ‘80s, a dying little mall. There used to be a Hills there, which smelled permanently of the hotdogs and bright yellow popcorn they sold up front. In high school my friend was caught shoplifting hot pink women’s XXL underpants there. (Not her size.) Except, no; that’s not true. That was Woolworths, also long gone now, in South Hills Village, the mall across the way. SHV used to be one of those malls with a video arcade called Tilt! and photo booths and pigeons. A middle-class twelve-year-old’s dream. Now it’s one of those Ann Taylor, Brookstone malls, which is really every current mall nowadays, I guess. At any rate, when I have to go there now, I feel underdressed and filled with malcontent no matter what I’m wearing or what mood I was in before. And now the Hills is a Home Depot. And the old Giant Eagle/Pharmor across the street is the most gigantic grocery store I’ve ever seen. That’s across from where the old Scandinavian was, now a Best Buy.

On the way home, we drove past the houses of three of my friends from high school. I’ve completely lost touch with all of them. Tonight at supper, my mom tells me that Iron City Beer has gone bankrupt and later I’m rummaging around the internet to see if there are any good rock shows and it turns out two of the clubs that I remember from when I was younger, Metropol and Graffiti, have gone the way if the old I.C. Light jingle.
Hey. Gimme an I.C. Light.

This is Shangri-La, ah, ah.
I’m writing you from the town where I went to undergrad. I’m here this weekend visiting an old college friend I haven’t seen in years and now she’s at rehearsal for a play she’s in tonight – or, no, what’d she call it? An “ensemble performance piece.” Ahem, ahem.

So I’m sitting at the coffee-shop/earthycrunch market that’s sort of at the crossroads of this town, (around the corner from the delicious diner housed in the old mill where we had breakfast, across the street from the organic ice-cream store, across the way from the town farmer’s market, where else.)

It’s a ridiculously beautiful day. I remember coming here from Pittsburgh as a college freshman and rubbing my eyes, whose pupils were not used to shrinking down so far past the first of October. The sun! The green! Today is a day that feels like those early days. The sky is a big, blue dome. The plants and trees that are Just Everywhere are waving, dancing, in the welcome autumn breeze.

So are the people. This place is all a-bustle with young families whose children wear brightly-striped knit hats and sunglasses that match their parents’, professors on bicycles, a thousand-one hip grad-studently types.

They tote cotton and hemp grocery bags. They wear scarves made of cashmere or hand-dyed wool. They smile brightly at one another, the whiteness of their teeth practically blinding in the bright sunlight. And there’s a diversity among the populace that makes everyone look like they wandered over from some ad for a computer printer company: they’re well-dressed; they’re perfectly integrated. Dreadlocks and expensive glasses and organic clothing. In Polish and Spanish, Southern drawls and New York terseness, you hear arguments about Asian politics and sociological theory. Gene-pools that range from around the globe to converge on this spot and make the most beautiful babies in the world, babies whose first words are, “I WANT some carrot juice!”
Which is one thing.

But who wouldn’t be making babies? Who could resist? I mean, did I mention it’s not just the tykes, that there’s an overabundance of physical comeliness, here? I mean, I don’t know what people are making of me right now, for I am staring. I am all eyes. I am sitting here and there is lust. Lust in my heart, not just from the loins but from that part of myself that eyes white teeth that match the superfluity of IPods, that soaks in this multi-culti, intellectually superior and upwardly mobile brand of healthy freshness. O, you fair-trading, volunteering professionals and scholars reading your Utne Readers in the morning sun, you. Are. Beautiful.

[And did I never notice this as an undergrad? I must have, coming from Pittsburgh, where inhabitants are, in large part - and I am sorry all my dear, dear Pgh-brethren- but: pasty. And clad at least half the time in sweatshirts advertising sports teams.]

I will take this thin layer of this shine back with me, to the coast when I return. And I will try not to whine.

You Can’t Ask Alice Anything Anymore.
Like, I’m in Beach Town.

This is how I felt when I woke up this morning, as if I’d teleported from Atlanta to here, rather than paying half-a-thousand dollars for a UHaul and packed it up in the rain with Marshall, then drove in tandem with him, communicating via walkie-talkie - down I-20, up I-95 and over to here - eight hours in all through the un-air-conditioned mug, my drugged cat in the seat next to me never quite drugged enough to stop meowing in slurred bewilderment, his third, shining eyelids draped halfway across his glazed, tearing eyes, turning around and around in his plastic blue carrier, asking me, it seemed, the same thing I was asking myself this weekend, “Why is this? What is this?”
And as if we hadn’t arrived here in the twilight on Sunday and unloaded it all from car and from truck in several hours; Marshall and me, hefting bureau after desk after box of books up the narrow steps and around the corner into my new, tiny apartment till the sweat ran not rivers but sheets (Sheets are wider than rivers) down our faces and our backs and our fronts.

I woke up this morning alone, and I miss Marshall terribly. Otherwise, I feel not-yet-sad for my old life in Atlanta and not at all settled in this one; I feel instead like I’m in limbo. I, who usually have a ravenous energy for nest-making, am finding it hard to work up the energy to unpack and settle in. I don’t feel like this place where I know no one can really be my home. I feel dread at the prospect. This is not the right foot, Henshaw.

I may very well talk to no one in person today and I’m feeling very lone-tree-in-the-foresty. And very numb. Did I say that, Henshaw? That’s where the first sentence in this entry comes from; there’s this pulp novel that I and a million other teenager girls tore through from the 70s called Don’t Ask Alice. It purports to be the actual found diary of a teen drug addict, and in one entry, after you’re supposed to believe she’s been in recovery back with her parents safe in suburbia with kittens and shampoo and baking, one entry suddenly begins with the sentence, “Like, I’m in San Francisco.” Because she’s back off the wagon, man! And, being there on the side of that road, she’s also really stoned and listless as she writes. (The book’s forward says some of the entries like this one were found on paper bags and such; the ones where she didn’t even have her diary with her but was instead rolling around Golden Gate Park with dozens of other dope fiends.) Cautionary tale. Adventure travel can be not experiencing everything, but rather the opposite ‘cause the new place does not feel real, so watch out. Different topic, Henshaw. I digress; I apologize. Haven’t talked to anyone in a while. I know it’ll improve.

Because yeah, I have this big old To Do list that in many big and small ways includes shifting my identity over: getting a student ID and parking pass, getting a North Carolina driver’s license and voting card and working toward Becoming a Resident. Which is just the thing, I know. Just the thing to make me feel better, like there’s this process and I’m in control of it – charged up instead of just a plug yanked out from la vida.

Happiness is a Warm New Thing
Ah, the ways to spend money you don’t have without thinking about it. There’s buying a present for someone. Fourteen-ninety-five for a paperback at Walden’s; a paperback and see, it’s one of these books that like, totally changed your life and you know it will blow the recipient’s mind away so there’s nothing but good feeling and smiles as you whip out your credit card.

There’s the iced coffee(2.50) and cappuccino(2.95) for you and your father, respectively, on the way back from the visit one morning to the county prison where his student is interning. It was something about the four-concrete walls that the place boils down to in the end, together with the overcrowding with people who are really just mentally ill, the overmedicating of all and the resultant hopelessness of the administrative staff. Something about those things causing you to want a beverage that was both extravagant and caffeinated on the way home. For you and him to have the very beverages of your choice, and then to drink them while driving the rest of the way home with all the windows cranked wide open to summer’s excessive verdancy and air and light.

There’s the fancy salad (6.50) plus 82-ounce bottle of water (.85) at the Whole Check Natural Foods store on your first real weekday sans job (save a freelancing gig.) And the chick mag (5.50) to read while eating. Salad’s good for you, though. And that magazine was one of them-there quasi-feminist dealies, so that’s, like, sticking with your core values, there.

Then there’re the Necessary Expenses for the Moving. The sofa bed for your new teeny-tiny apartment – how smart!- that you bought at Swedish Four-Letter-Word store that pimps itself as being All Things Necessary. It’s the Real Simple magazine of the shopping world; you feel smart for spending 350 bucks there. That Muktajk (®) slipcover was a hundred dollars off! You fucking saved! Space *and* money! Pat on the back fer you!

These are a few of the expenses I’ve incurred in the week since I was dropped from the payroll at Small Publication. Which amount to way more than most any given week when I was on it.

Current Contemplated Future Ways of Spending Money I Don’t Have:
Haircut w/ favorite hairdresser
Eating out yummy Ethiopian food one last time before I leave Atlanta
Getting an airport card for this here computadora