This is one thing on the road from Atlanta to Beachtown.

But it’s really near the end in the multi-hour scheme of things.
The very first thing you do as you drive onto the first highway on-ramp onto the first road that’ll start to take you back northeast, is listen to the good songs on Foreign Affairs, the Tom Waits album. You do this and entertain your own melancholy. Consider the relative insanity of driving hours and hours just to spend your life away from all the people you care about most, who care about you, to return to a place about which your feelings are mixed and where you spend most of your time alone. Realizing that this is probably the five-dozenth time in life you’ve experienced this. Surprisingly, this makes it easier.

The rest of the drive. You listen to the Nina Nastasia record On Leaving, twice, even though you’re not the sort to normally listen to albums twice. You drive the speed limit. You briefly entertain horrible scenarios like what if you crashed into a person coming out of that car parked on the side of the highway, and what if, when you did so, one thing you noticed in the woozy-nightmare moments just after, is that the person’s car is just papered with bumper stickers you don’t agree with? This would surely make you feel even guiltier and more horrible about the whole thing, somehow, like you planned it.

You listen to On the Beach, that Neil Young record, and you don’t sing along at all; you just notice that you never noticed the moment when the hills turned to coastal flatness.

You’re almost home when you flick on the radio and there’s this amazing radio special of audiodocumentary stuff told by soldiers of past and present wars. It’s Memorial Day.

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.