12 March 2010 with no comments
A fragment of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” has been circling in my head, the same three lines, over and over:
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
I have a headache and can’t sleep. Tomorrow Austin, my own four walls and my own pillow. The daily grind, swaddled in creature comforts.
I cannot quite understand how I am returning to a place that has never felt completely solid beneath my feet. There’s a lot of writing to be done, and a suitcase stand to purchase. Beyond that I am at a loss. When I moved from Brooklyn to Austin for graduate school, I didn’t expect to stay long — two years and then shuffle off someplace else. Yet here I am, coming back after roaming 3000 miles. Typically when I travel that far, coming back isn’t part of the plan. But I do, again and again. Three times, actually. Moving (in the relocation sense) is a tiring sport; I’m a bit sick of playing.
So what now? Clearly rhetorical.
Another poem springs to mind: Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A favorite of mine in high school. I tried to memorize the entire thing just for kicks but I either gave up or got distracted, because I only know bits and pieces by heart now. I think it’s unfortunate that children are no longer made to memorize classic works. My father knows a whole battery of verses, he can zip them off on command. I think poetry makes for a better man — “man” here used in the inclusive human sense. Perhaps on my to-do list, underneath the suitcase stand, goes “re-learn Love Song.”
Here are the lines that just replaced Tennyson:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
I know right? Such a downer.
Hopefully breakfast at Waffle House and those last 200 miles will clear out the headache.
9 March 2010 with no comments
…deal with crappy, seedy, potentially toxic motels.
(1) Dress for minimum nakedness at the end of the day. As in: tights or longjohns under jeans, undershirt under your shirt (so aptly named!), etc.
(2) Don’t unpack. Simply reapply same clothes in the morning. Thus the above. If you’re really concerned about it, you can microwave your underwear. I only just thought of this; I’ve never actually done it. Possibly brilliant?
(3) Two beers at dinner and 1mg or more Klonipin, Xanax, or similar at bedtime. Generic highly recommended unless you have bitchin’ health insurance. Which I do not. And no, I don’t care to hear your opinion about the condition of my liver.
(4) Don’t shower. Greasers are cool again, remember? Bring a comb. Dip in water. Style accordingly. Chaps and blue jeans complete this fashion-forward look.
(5) GTFO as early as possible. Free coffee and pastries in the lobby, if provided, allow for a 15 minute departure delay. Otherwise hit the Waffle House once you’re at a safe distance.
(6) Pay in cash.
(7) Oh, and tempting though it may be (especially after those beers and the etcetera else), don’t bring anyone back to the motel with you.* You’re trying to avoid sheet-to-skin contact, remember?
This free advice sponsored by the Fuck I Can’t Believe I Slept There Society (FIBSS).
*unless they are truly fantastically hot. In which case you have my blessing, but I personally have yet to meet such a captivating specimin during my own travels. There was that one gal in Savannah, but I lost interest after she started telling me about her undergraduate classes. (Apologies if you are that girl and are reading this. In all other aspects I thought you were pretty awesome.)
8 March 2010 with no comments
There are times when your mind goes in wonderful directions; other times, less so.
I awoke in the wee hours of morning gripped by an awful sense of dread and the image of a dead deer flickering through my head like an old film reel. The deer I had actually seen earlier in the day on the way back from Tybee Island — it had been struck by a car, and the sheriff and a fireman had dragged it off the highway, leaving a pink-brown smudge across the road. At first I couldn’t figure out what the smudge was. Then I noticed the deer. I cringed bodily and swerved for just a fraction of a second. It was terrifying.
I tried to shake off the image by thinking about other, more mundane anxieties. For instance, had I developed a fixation on the word “ostensibly”? Did I use it too often? Did people notice? I tried to recall my conversations at dinner earlier — yes, I’d said it to that publisher: “I’m ostensibly writing a book for my master’s thesis.” And to the waitress, too? Yes, the waitress too. Oh god. I said it aloud to the dark a few times: Ostensibly. Ostensibly. What does it even mean? It sounds so arrogant.
I felt wretched. I tried to think of something pleasant. Symmetry. Motel rooms have wonderful symmetry; I’ve always appreciated that. When I first moved back to Austin, before the second move to New York and the second move back, I spent a day driving around with an real estate agent looking for an apartment. He showed me all sorts of glamorous properties featuring balconies overlooking clear blue pools, or apartments with chrome Sub-Zero refrigerators and dishwashers. I dismissed all of them as either too expensive, or too “blah” — which I actually said to him, and which he responded to by rolling his eyes. I tried to explain that I had previously been living in a disintegrating loft in Brooklyn, near the elevated subway line, and therefore had certain expectations about what my next living arrangement should look like. Another eye roll.
But no matter, he had just the place for me. A little complex off West 6th Street that looked almost exactly like a cheap motor inn.* A studio with a three-quarter height wall between the bedroom and the living room/kitchen. No interior doors. An unbearably small bathroom. Two windows only. And exposed brick on one wall in the living room. In the leasing office, I gleefully wrote out a check and put my name on the dotted line.
I didn’t own any furniture — I’d divested myself of most of my possessions in a spontaneous fire sale the day before that initial move to New York — but I decided that the primary factor in the acquisition of any item was that it must be in keeping with the motor inn aesthetic. My girlfriend at the time eagerly agreed to help me in this decorating process. I realize now her enthusiasm probably stemmed from the fact that she wouldn’t actually have to live with me in the apartment. She’d found a cute house on South Congress with two roommates. After living with six strangers (like the Real World, only with less sponsorship and more drama) in Brooklyn, however, I was ready to go solo.
Laying awake in my little motel room in Savannah, I mulled over the concept of “motel life.” This particular room had all the proper amenities: permanently affixed hangers, built-in ironing board, bolted down lamps, suitcase stand. Whatever happened to my suitcase stand? I’d had one, I felt certain about that. It was old, made of wood with fabric straps. And I’d actually put my suitcase on it, the one filled with old journals. But I didn’t have it anymore. The stand was such a rare find, why would I have left it behind when we moved back to New York? Unless…
I abruptly rolled over and fumed into my pillow. She’d MADE me leave it behind. Along with so many other things. “Kat, we’re going to be living together in a tiny hovel somewhere. Probably on the upper west side. We don’t have room for all your crap.” Goodbye wine fridge. Goodbye beautiful vintage redwood writing desk. Goodbye suitcase stand.
Then, during a week-long NY apartment hunting expedition, we signed a lease on a 1000 square-foot loft in Bushwick. It’d formerly been a doll factory; you could see the outlines of sewing machine tables on the wood floors. The loft was modern and clean. Huge 10′ by 10′ windows. And plenty of room for a wine fridge, a suitcase stand, and at least four or five vintage writing desks. All of which I’d already sold.
Dead deer. Ostensibly. Suitcase stand. I stretched out on the bed and put a pillow over my face to block the sunlight creeping into the room. A few more hours of sleep and then back on the road, toward Austin. I chanted a little mantra in my head: No deer will jump in front of my bike. I will buy another suitcase stand. I will never again use the word “ostensibly.”
*Sadly this apartment complex no longer preserves the historic “motor inn” look. They realized their proximity to downtown, put in stainless steel sinks, and raised the rent.
28 February 2010 with no comments
In the New Moon Cafe, which was voted “Best of the Best” way back in 1995. A map of the United States hangs on the wall behind the sweet tea dispenser. It’s faded and stained, but decorated with hundreds of pins. New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, San Fransisco, Charleston, Miami and every small town in between. The eastern seaboard is so crowded with push-pins that the city names have been obliterated by the perforations. Austin doesn’t have a pin, but there don’t seem to be any extra, and I don’t know if the map is still in use, or merely decorative now. Maybe if I asked for a pin they’d say “Oh we don’t do that thing anymore.” Or maybe they’d smile and hand me a pin and ask me where it is I’m from.
The cafe is on the main street, which everyone calls Main Street but is actually Richmond Avenue, aka Highway 1. Storefronts and signage like Plum Pickins, “Prompt Loans,” “Customized Bra Fittings” at A Soft Touch Lingerie & Gifts, which my sister says is a scam because it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in there before, you’re not even allowed to buy a bra if you don’t get the fitting. “Imagine! Cash in hand and they won’t even let you GIVE THEM MONEY unless you get a fitting. What a scam.” I can’t think of why any store would operate in that way, that’s what I tell her.
Then Elliot’s Office Supply & Gifts N’ Things, Birds & Butterflies “nature store,” the Stoplight Deli, Pitter Patter Children’s Boutique, What’s Cookin’… That’s all I can see from my vantage point, but I know the street extends several blocks in either direction, and there are many more store fronts, some empty like the old dry-cleaners and some hanging on, like the wig store, with all the mannequin heads in the window modeling various hair fashions. The fact that the mannequins aren’t white seems like an act of defiance to me, because this downtown is very much a white downtown. I haven’t seen but one person of color walking around, and it’s the town’s 175th anniversary celebration weekend so anyone who would be out walking around this downtown would be doing it today. Maybe I missed the crowds. Maybe the crowds missed downtown.
The other night my nephew’s friends came by the house. One of the girls was very small but had a rowdy personality, very funny and spicy. My nephew towers above her and had to lean down to give her a hug, but he joked that she was too intimidating and so sat back down. Then she showed us her knives. “Knives plural?” I said. “Yeah, one for each pocket” and she pulled out a flip-open razor blade from her left rear jeans pocket and a flip-open Gerber pocket knife from the right rear pocket. “Got to have these in my neighborhood. Where I live is rough.” She didn’t say it with anger or anxiety. Simply stated it as a fact, rough. I tried to imagine what her neighborhood looks like and envisioned rows of walk-up apartments and puny trees and busted street lamps and then realized I was thinking of someplace I’d been before. Her world I can’t picture at all.
The group of men sitting in this cafe are talking about death and tattoos and the 21st century. “Gotta have one, that’s the thing these days.” “Yeah, MOTHER, hahaha.” “Mel Gibson or Sean Connery has a little dagger right here.” “You don’t know anything about that.”
They have raspy, gasping laughs. Earlier one said “When I go, I want to go in my sleep.” And then they talked about overweight kids and diabetes and McDonald’s and everyone they know who’s died in the past year. One old woman rode a bicycle every day, the same one she’d had since she was young. They can’t fathom riding a bicycle because they can’t remember how.
I’ve been stationary for too long. I can feel stress building up despite the warm bed and hot breakfasts. My body is soft. I try to remember being “on the road” and how good that feels. The short bike trip to the cafe helped, but then I think about how all my stuff is strewn about the guest room and I’ve got to pack it all down again and that task looms impossible. How did I get all that crap here in the first place? Socks shirts jeans vest books pens paper cords cables laptop jacket sleeping bag boots shoes underwear helmet gloves visor hat scarf belt raingear toothpaste toothbrush comb camera film envelopes checks wallet knife flashlight pills loose change… and more. (There must be more.)
It’s just me and the men left in the cafe now. The staff is cleaning up, scooting chairs into place, scooping up coffee grounds, wiping down tables. The awning outside flaps in the wind and when it does the sun strikes me square in the eyes. Down the street is the brewery. I promised my brother I’d go there and drink a beer before I left. He said, “Call me after two beers so you’ll have something to say.” I’m not too good on the phone but he loves to gossip so I said alright, I will. We’re half-Irish and we get rambunctious when we drink. But there are others in the family who you can’t talk to after two drinks, and everyone knows not to call those particular characters after 7pm. If you happen to live with them, well, I guess you’re screwed.
Tomorrow Charleston. An oyster bake at 4pm for four people I don’t know who are sailing across the Atlantic. That’s always been a dream of mine, actually. That tattoo on my arm, the one of a sailboat, means folks constantly ask me if I know how to sail. I don’t. I don’t know how to much of anything really. It’s just that I keep trying.
*”What life adds up to is still a problem” is quoted from Kathleen Stewart’s book Ordinary Affects.
26 February 2010 with no comments
Austin. Winnie. New Orleans. Mobile. Dauphin Island. Pensacola. Santa Rosa Island. Panama City. Tallahassee. Waycross. Aiken.
It’s a small, arbitrary list. Some of the places I stayed a night or two (or five) in, others I simply passed through, or stopped long enough to get off the bike to take a picture and fill up the tank. The journey thus far has taken me through suburban sprawl, marshland and swampland, abandoned homes, overturned boats, national parks, glittering beach fronts, gated communities, roads lined with tall pines and great oaks suffocating in Spanish moss.
In Georgia I saw my first cotton field and first rebel flag of the trip. I ate catfish in Tallahassee. Met a woman obsessed with her family tombs in Mobile. Eavesdropped on diner gossip about a girl whose boyfriend had just sped off in a rage after a fight at breakfast, and who was now making the long trip home on foot. I’ve seen too many dead dogs to count. Slept in four different motels. Drank my weight in cheap beer. Stood on a beach with sand so white I kept thinking I was surrounded by snow. And now am sitting in comfort in my sister’s home here in Aiken, South Carolina, waiting for the hour to roll around when we stop thinking about lunch and start thinking about dinner.
Folks keep asking me, “What are you looking for? What are you writing about?” Everything I thought I had an answer to previous to embarking seems wrong now. The truth is that I no longer know what I am doing, exactly, except collecting. Stories, pictures, calories, receipts. I’ve picked up a few more tangible items — a pair of shoes, a sweater, two books — and left a few other things behind. I’ve also knocked over my motorcycle (twice) and broken my cell phone.
So now what? Well, this Sunday I head to Charleston. Then to Savannah. Then I make some hard decisions about my path back to Texas. I keep staring at my map but I’m not finding any answers there — two flimsy dimensions when I need three. In spite of the uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, this trip has turned into deeply satisfying personal and geographical adventure. I just hope when I sit down at the end of it, I have something more to share than a clumsily sketched map.
That’s the (very short) story so far.
19 February 2010 with 1 comment
When the mind starts to wander, and doubt, and dredge up old bad things and convince you that it is a good idea to drunkenly stare down old homes that hardly matter, it is time to take the cure: literature. Read something someone else wrote about what you’re trying to write about. Relieve yourself of the pressure of being witty or poetic or engaging. Tomorrow I am going to Mobile, Alabama. Who has written about Mobile, Alabama? Henry Miller!
“Mobile is a deceptive word. It sounds quick and yet it suggests immobility — glassiness. It is a fluid mirror which reflects sheet lightning as well as somnolent trees and drugged serpents. It is a name which suggests water, music, light and torpor. It also sounds remote, securely pocketed, faintly exotic and, if it has any color, it is definitely white. Musically I would designate it as guitarish.” Excerpted from My Dream of Mobile, an essay in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a collection of Miller’s travel writing. His experiences were apparently less positive than I hope mine will be.
Ah, Mobile! Ah, Henry Miller! Why did I bring a tent, a sleeping bag, this wool shirt, this pair of socks? I should have packed books — novels and essays about all kinds of things worth reading. When I am not out on the bike, craning my neck around to look down side streets and gape at mansions and burned-out homes with equal enthusiasm, I should have my nose in a book. Being out of graduate school — though technically I am not, I am merely out of classes — has softened me, and also taken me out of my world of books.
Sure I’ve read a lot in preparation for this trip: mapmaking books, travel books, books about writing, books about motorcycling, essays on anthropology and architecture and cities and etcetera else. But I have neglected so many other works. Henry Miller, for one. He is funny, isn’t he? “Musically I would designate it as guitarish.” I wonder now if I’ll think about that when the city skyline (what can be called a “skyline” at a mere 10 feet above sea level) emerges in the distance. Will I, too, decide that Mobile seems faintly guitarish?
Of course, Miller wrote his essay while laying on a cot in France, dreaming about Mobile. He wasn’t there. He pictured it all in his head, a fantasy about Southern life, especially life on the Gulf. When I get to Mobile I doubt I will spend my nights dreaming about it — I’ll probably dream about other places instead, or fall asleep watching cable television, as I like to do when I stay in motels. And I love staying in motels.
Tomorrow I promise to do these two things: send the tent off, or leave it here. And go buy a book. Probably Henry Miller. Until then I am snug in my sleeping bag on the floor of a house in New Orleans. The house is painted purple. My sleeping bag is purple. The cold air seeps up through the floorboards but my sleeping bag is warm as well as being purple, and resting on top of a yoga mat, which I now realize is also purple. There’s a lot of purple going on here. Sure, this is camping. Tomorrow coffee and books. A few hundred miles on a motorcycle. Lunch in a cheap diner, dinner in a cheap motel room. Mobile, sounding faintly guitarish in the distance.
17 February 2010 with no comments
I’ve been in New Orleans since Sunday afternoon, and though I’ve spent my days bicycling up and down familiar avenues, I’ve firmly kept my mind on the present.
But on my way home last night I couldn’t help myself, and I went many streets out of my way to pedal past a house at 1217 Magazine Street. I know this space well. The tilted front porch, the moldering bathroom, the sagging ceiling. I stood outside it, trying to figure out how to best photograph it in the dead of night, with no flash handy, when a man walked briskly past me and went through the gate. I meekly justified my presence: “I used to know someone who lived here.” He shrugged, and went inside.
The house on Magazine Street. I’ve sent countless letters there. Postcards. Packages — a few. Taken cabs to and from it. Drunkenly bicycled home to it. Flown a few hundred miles to get to it. It’s just an old falling down New Orleans house, not much different from its neighbors. In this house I felt safe, I felt welcome, and I felt certain. That I experience the remnants of those feelings now is a perfect example of the creeping vine we call memory, nostalgia, or wishful thinking.
I didn’t come to this city expecting to be overwhelmed by memory, and I haven’t been. But there’s something special to this little facade, the four columns and the dormer windows, that permits access to a past I’ve largely avoided thinking about.
It’s a strange thing to hinge emotion on place, especially in my case, where places — cities, states, homes — come and go at a rate of about one every two years. In 2004 I drove a rental truck through Louisville, Kentucky, on my way to New York and decided to stop by a childhood home. It is a dark grey two-story stone house, with a large backyard that abuts railroad tracks on the left side, a convenience store at the back, and the main road on the right. While I’d only lived in this particular house for a year or so, I remembered exactly how to get to it without knowing the street names or even glancing at a map.
A new family lives there now. There was probably a different family before them. I have no idea how many times this property has been bought and sold or rented. But I do know that at some point in the mid-1980s I sat on the back porch with my BB gun and shot at milk jugs suspended from trees. My brother and I found a hole under fence that we could squeeze through to get to the railroad tracks. We’d pretend we were train hoppers, or put pennies on the tracks and wait for the train to come through and spit them out as thin brass curls. I have a moon-shaped scar on my wrist from the time I fell from the stone wall at the entrance to the subdivision. Because the cut was on my wrist, I was convinced I was going to bleed to death and everyone would think it was a suicide. I bought baseball cards and Lemonheads at the mini-mart. There used to be a liquor store next to it, but it burned down and I told everyone I suspected arson. Then there was the time I found a dead squirrel in the drainage ditch and decided to bury it. I made a school friend dig a hole while I lifted and pushed the tiny corpse to the grave site with a stick. All the while a local teenager looked on and spat insults at us.
I sat in the rental truck mulling over these memories until a suspicious look from a neighbor made me feel guilty, as if I were casing the house for a robbery. Whatever sense of ownership or belonging I felt about the property had long before been usurped. I put the truck in gear and went on my way.
I wish there were a better way to deal with memories. A scientific wave of the hand that made them inert, ineffectual. Memory has a wildly hallucinogenic power over me that I consider unfair. Just as the grey stone house in Louisville turned a snapshot of a year of my childhood into a vivid moving picture, standing outside the house on Magazine Street activated another slide show. I could see myself standing on the porch, waving to a girl pedaling away on a bicycle. I was terrified she would be hit by the city bus roaring past her. I remembered that in the winter I could see my breath inside just as well as outside. And how the red walls in the bedroom absorbed candlelight, causing the high ceiling to appear as an ever-diminishing dark horizon.
Strangely, these recollections now make me feel as if I have intruded on something profoundly private or forbidden.
How can that be? They’re my memories; those scenes belong to me. Or do they? In Louisville I cased a property for remnants of the past; in New Orleans I take poorly-lit photographs of a home I only ever visited. These places are packing crates for memory. Convenient placeholders. Perhaps that’s why I feel so guilty for remembering — I am claiming tenant’s rights on spaces that cannot be claimed. Trying to raise something real and graspable out of muddy nostalgia. My cheeks are suddenly hot. I am embarrassed by this — my affection for the past, and the way it takes hold of me.
Finannly, though, it occurs to me that this deep conflict over memory, place, and identity is exactly what my trip (and my graduate thesis) is about. Possession, past and present, the familiar and the foreign. All the ways we know and think we know ourselves.
10 February 2010 with no comments
One potential path for my journey, as of 6am on Wednesday, after fiddling with Google Maps for a few minutes during a spell of not-sleeping. The southern route comes first, swoop up through Montgomery to Atlanta, then on to South Carolina. Hit Savannah on the way back (Google here wants to send me back through Atlanta on the way west, which I don’t really want to do), then Birmingham, Natchitoches, Shreveport, Dallas (Hi Mom!), and finally home to Austin.
I have a feeling this will be changing quite a bit once I’m actually on the road. But regardless of my route, it’s a lot of territory to cover — nearly 3,000 miles. The cities that absolutely will not be crossed of the list, no matter what*, are New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, Charleston. I’ll hit smaller towns as I weave my way through the states.
Again I ask: What the hell have I gotten myself into?
And then I ask: Any suggestions?
*as with any solo travel or graduate project, the terms “absolutely” and “no matter what” should be taken with a copious dose of salt.
8 February 2010 with no comments
My brain likes to play at night. In bed, lights off, it races through memories and possible futures and experiments and a hundred ways to rearrange the living room. I make tea and read a book in an attempt to narrow the focus and perhaps lull myself to sleep. This week’s book is Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart, loaned to me by a friend who promised it would be the perfect thing to read before my trip. And it is.
There’s a problem though. Reading Stewart’s observational snippets, my brain decides this is also the perfect game to play instead of sleeping. I am assaulted by memory, which comes in doses just about the size of the ones in the book. I don’t know what to do with all of this information; I can only write it down, emulating the format of what I’ve just read. As an aside, it has started to rain.
A fellow I met 10 years ago told me a story about how he had just gotten out of the shower when he heard tires squealing, and then a thud. Instinct made him run outside. A car had hit a little boy. He sprinted to the boy and knelt down next to him. He said over and over, “You’re going to be okay.” Neighbors poured out of their homes; someone called 911. It was only once the ambulance arrived and carted the boy off that the guy realized he was completely naked and dripping wet. He said to me “I just didn’t care at all. I suppose I was in shock. I went back inside and put on some clothes and then just sat down for a long time.” I haven’t thought about that story in years, but it hasn’t lost its impact, because I find the image of this naked guy crouched down over a bleeding kid so incredibly touching and ridiculous. I also wonder if he was lying.
Then there’s the grocery store in Brooklyn that kept all of its toiletry items behind a counter. Toothpaste and tampons and deodorant and such. I was too embarrassed to ever step up to the counter and ask for anything from the man who sat on a stool behind it, reading magazines. I can’t for the life of me now make sense of my aversion to asking for toothpaste. And I can’t fathom why the store would make customers specifically ask for it anyway. I also remember they only carried malt liquor, no beer.
Then what? I get up to look at my hair in the mirror and wonder if I should get it cut before I leave. I look at my various cameras, weighing them in my hands, trying to figure out which one I should bring. This one is small and quiet, but hard to focus. This one is heavy, but makes every photograph look amazing. This one is 60 years old, complicated to operate, and would force me to take several minutes to compose, meter, and finally take each shot. But it might be worth it.
I’m yawning now but my brain doesn’t stop. My cat comes and sits next to me and watches the computer screen and the little black forms that appear on it when I type. He does this every night, and I’m starting to wonder if he can read. He rests his head on my arm and purrs and purrs. It’s so sweet that I don’t want to move my arm, so I type one-handed.
Tomorrow I’ll go to the cafe. I could make coffee at home, but I have writing and reading to do and my office is useless. It’s the most useless room in my apartment. I’d rather like to turn it into a library. I could sit in a classy wingback chair, reading poems. And I’d finally read all the classic works I should have already read. I’d organize my books according to the Library of Congress system, not Dewey. I’d use an old-fashioned card catalog like the one in my living room. But not that actual one — that I’m saving for an art project I’ll never finish.
Maybe if I did that I’d finally be able to sleep at night. What a ridiculous thought.