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.

Greetings from Charlotte. Gate C19. It was C14, but now it’s changed. There have been delays and outright cancellations galore; apparently something about storms in the northeast. (“They’re having weather up there,” one man said to me by way of explanation back at C14 about half an hour ago.) I, who live my life blithely, now, out on the coast, know nothing about these things called “storms,” or “rain.” There is sun out there, there is heat that makes us scurry inside all day till the worst of it has passed, but in all the recent months I can recall with plain memory, there has been none of this, how-you-say, rain. So I show up here in Charlotte, a bird with her head freshly plucked from the coastal sand, a gal who’s been living on sunlight and lame metaphors like that for too long.

But tonight I go back to the Homeland. And it feels so right. Pittsburgh, where accents are harsh, and no one is friendly in a false way; they actually mean it. I am looking forward so hard to the green up there, and to the hills and the windy streets and the ugly/beautiful rusted out architecture. And my family, whom I haven’t seen since Christmas. My nieces. My sisters.

Apparently, this flight is one of the only ones running tonight. Around me, the airport is filled with cranky travelers, but not me. There’s one of those phones ringing at a gate-desk nearby. It rings and rings and rings some more. There never seems to be anyone around to answer those phones.

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.

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.

Nuestro propio animal.

Technology, it don't need me.
Apparently.
I came to Atlanta this weekend to visit with old friends. Then I realized, however, that I could also possibly nail down an interview with one person in a story that I’m working on. In two days’ notice, I asked for an interview and graciously, this guy accepted. We met at the coffeeshop where I used to work 'way back when, and I interviewed him for an hour.

Here’s the thing, though. There are dangers to relying on digital recorders while conducting interviews. One of those potential dangers is hitting “Stop” and there being a malfunction and you’ve lost your entire interview for no reason you can fathom. That’s one danger I was reminded of, today. Yessiree, shit.

Some writers, like Susan Orlean, rely completely on physical notetaking for their stories. I respect that; it’s inherently less intrusive. I have yet to grasp, however, how you sit there furiously taking notes while effectively carrying on a conversation. That, and how do you get down what the person has said, word for word? You can capture the tone of the conversation, sure, but how do you guarantee absolute accuracy? Which I’m a stickler for.
Anyhoo. If you are Susan Orlean or if you are anyone else, even, I am now accepting suggestions.

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.