Stopped at an intersection on my way to the beach yesterday, I inched forward by taking my foot off the brake while simultaneously looking left, failing to notice that the mini-van in front of me had not actually disappeared like I thought it had; a moment later I heard the gentle clunk of kissing metal. Before I had a chance to react, the man in the mini-van jumped out of the front seat, hastily glanced at our bumpers, leaned over my open window and said, "I'm-okay-you're-okay-let's-go!" and skipped back to his vehicle.
Back in Raleigh today, riding my bike on a curvy path at Lake Crabtree, I rounded a bend and noticed a squirrel sitting on two legs at the edge of the path, busy with something between its front paws. Just as I got close to the creature, it darted underneath my front tire, scrambled for its life in a cloud of legs and fluff, and then scurried off in the direction it came from. I was afraid that I'd run over at least one of its limbs, but apparently it escaped unharmed. I imagine it meant to say the same words the man in the mini-van had said the day before.
I must say that I don't understand the American public in terms of where it directs its outrage. Why are people so upset when the court upholds the separation of church and state, but are frustratingly quiet over issues such as Enron, the Kyoto Protocol, the erosion of civil liberties, or, um, I don't know, the illegitimacy of our president?
***
Tonight I'm going to watch North by Northwest projected on a big screen on the side of the art museum while sitting on a blanket, next to a cooler, underneath a pregnant gray cloud. Or at least I think I am.
She rarely leaves the house, but when she does, it's usually just before a hurricane or a big thunderstorm. Tonight it was the latter, and she sat squatting underneath the Cougar as the rain fell around her on all sides. Meanwhile, I walked around the house in flip-flops and rain-soaked hair, calling her name and producing my best whistle while I gripped a fickle flashlight, the shadows around me perpetually shifting and disappearing.
Searching underneath the house always makes me nervous for both rational reasons and horror movie reasons. One of the rooms, I've locked, to discourage the homeless from camping out there, but the other room is still open. It's fairly spacious, with a dirt floor and stairs that stop dead at the ceiling, an old washer and dryer parked in the corner. As I exposed the dark corners with weak light and walked past wet plants that slapped me in the face, three of the wrong cats rubbed up against my ankles, asking the neighborhood sucker to give them more expensive cat food. Finally, with no help from her, I spotted her and chased her inside, and we both toweled off using our respective methods.
Last night she threw up her dinner in the shape of a cross.
The girl who sits next to me behind a cloth collapsible wall has a perfectly round stomach. I'm told there's a baby inside of it, but that's difficult for me to imagine. She drives to work, sits quietly in her cubicle marking up documents with her special green pen, goes to lunch, and comes back again, all the while with a little human leech tagging along. I forget sometimes, but then she'll come whisper some details in my ear and run away laughing, or she'll jokingly do jumping jacks in our boss's office, making him cringe and plead with her not to let go of her package. Once there was free ice cream on offer in the kitchen, and it occurred to me that people with small humans in their bellies reportedly like to eat that sort of thing, so I immediately gave her the news and she seemed excited.
The past few days she's been straightening up her office as if she's preparing to leave the company forever, though I know otherwise. There must be some sort of internal alarm that lets her know it's time to prepare, something like the alarm that lets an animal know when a storm is approaching. And then one day, rather suddenly, she will be absent, her belly will vanish, and there will be another human and another parent.
Yesterday morning I caught the end of yard sale, a sidewalk lined with boxes of old-new t-shirts from a local screen printing company. Concert t-shirts mostly, lots of Sonic Youth and Beck and Tenacious D. An old lady walked away with a few unusual items bunched in her arms—an old guitar strap, a red tie, a novelty wig, a knit hat, a suede jacket. A mailman spun his white truck around and excitedly sifted through the remains of what was left. "I like t-shirts! See? I'm wearing three right now," he reportedly said. I came home with a handful of cheap t-shirts myself, most of which I have yet to try on.
Later I drove to a belated wedding shower to see two old friends whom I hadn't seen in years. It's only at these sort of events that I really notice that my fingernails are inconsistent lengths or that I have cat fur on my shirt. It was really nice being there, though, and I experienced that phenomenon that comes with seeing old friends, how all of us simultaneously seem different and exactly the same.
The rest of the day was bloated with one social event after another: I took pictures at a bizarre party where there were clowns dancing to live bluegrass (prior to the band there was an unconventional parade, but I missed that), met some acquaintances/friends for drinks, stories, and bad jokes, and ended up at a tiki party on the southern edge of Raleigh. All of it was fun, but there was too much of it. I probably should've skipped the last event.
Today I caught up with how the rest of the world spent their weekend (dying in earthquakes, being confined to their homes, fighting fires), took a nap, watched a movie, and left the house as little as possible.
There was a time I had the luxury of keeping all email that was sent to me, including obese attachments and bad forwards, terse replies and timely invitations. Whenever my account would creep toward its capacity, I could simply delete the superfluous messages and stave off the inevitable a little while longer.
I no longer have any superfluous messages. As far as I can tell, every little minion that can be sacrificed already has been. I've sent myself old emails that I wanted to keep after ridding them of their attachments or their HTML. I've saved a modest amount to disk, and I've sent messages to other, roomier accounts. But of course every new day brings more kilobytes to manage, and I feel like I'm trying to stuff my feet into shoes that are too small.
Today I even looked through the folder that I had, until this point, refused to open, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in deleting any of the messages inside of it, no matter how hefty they were. I discovered I am not yet that desperate; I couldn't bring myself to delete any of it, or even resend it to myself in a smaller version, because I don't want to change anything about it, even though much of it I am not ready to re-read.
At A/V Geeksmovie night tonight I saw a film that I hadn't seen since I was 6? 7? about a shiny red balloon that follows a little French boy around Paris until the balloon gets popped by some little French bullies. When it dies, exhaling its insides slowly until a little brown shoe hurries it along, all of the other balloons in town escape from their owners, come find the little boy, and together they carry him away over the city.
I'm not sure what the message of the film was supposed to be, and I'm not sure why I was so pleased to have those grainy images come to life again in my brain. Certainly good memories are worth keeping, but why do I enjoy filling in the blanks of neutral childhood memories? I could almost hear a bell of recognition every time my brain saw a segment it knew.
Tonight all of the films had the theme: "Baffling educational films that warped a whole generation of little kiddies' minds." The other films were less coherent and not as well done, and none of those I had seen. One had the moral that if you're not loved, you might die. For the intro to the film, a morose little boy climbs off the school bus alone and falls dead into the snow. In another, a mime plays hide-and-seek with a string of children who hide in badly chosen places—trunks of cars, old refrigerators, sewage pipes—and they're never seen again. It seems we're lucky that we've made it this far.
If I could be disappointed after I'm dead, it would really bother me if I hadn't saved all of my email to disk, if I hadn't sleeved all of my negatives, put all of my pictures in albums, and burned all of the mixed tapes given to me over the years onto CDs. Doing those things is not exactly how I want to spend my time, but since I am the only one who needs these tasks done, I am the one to do them. Nevermind that after I'm dead it won't matter that I saved some ridiculous forward in an obsolete version of Word on some out-dated piece of plastic called a "zip disk." Nevermind about that.
We were both unhappy there before she arrived, in that three-street town with no stoplight, no grocery store, no mayor even. Together, we would reminisce about our old towns and old friends, people and places we had transformed in our minds to be impossibly cool, always superior to our surroundings, yet always so remote. That was the secret to making it through.
But when she came, we latched on, and we complacently let our discontent inflate. She was from Boston, went to an all-girls private school up there, wore low-cut shirts and curved silver nails and hoop earrings. Naturally very pretty and irresistibly experienced, and we hung on her every word. Stephanie became better friends with her than I did, perhaps because the father that she would visit lived across the street from Stephanie and not from me, or perhaps because I was shy. Sometimes I would only hear of her second-hand, which only served to further dehumanize her. Occasionally I wouldn't know about her visit until she was standing in front of me, making me feel unprepared as I glanced down at the clothes I was wearing, which would suddenly seem remarkably un-hip.
She gave us a lesson on how to properly say the letter O, to not drag it out or flatten it or sharpen it, not to pronounce it like a southerner. I didn't think I sounded like a southerner, but I wanted to be certain, so Stephanie and I would practice tirelessly. We'd talk like choppy robots, make staccato bursts of sound that refused to slide but which were horribly obnoxious. We knew it, but we didn't care. It was our way of saying what we thought of our town and that we rejected any hue it began to color us with. We never really learned to appreciate it, and both of us moved away as soon as we graduated from high school; in fact, Stephanie left town the same night, still wearing her gown.
Yesterday I rode my bike around that town, my dad in front of me on his bike, and my mom trailing behind. We rode over the brick pathways of the university, past the old tennis courts where I spent my last summer there, down the sidewalk of the squat brick school toward the deli where I'd feed Ms. Pac-Man quarters, past the building where I had my first few sips of alcohol. Now, years later, I am stuck somewhere between a pleasant nostalgia for my hometown and the frustration I remember feeling from always wanting to be somewhere else.
I did everything at the wrong time today: ate breakfast at 4:00 p.m., went out for the evening at 6:30 p.m., and came home at 11:30 p.m. and started working. Now it's almost 5:00 a.m., and I'm just going to bed.
I put up some pictures today. To make sense of the seemingly erratic theme, go here and read the explanation.
I. Generally I don't eat until I'm stuffed, candy bars don't appeal to me much anymore, and if I have a snack, usually it's a piece of fruit. But yellow sheet cake, the kind covered in a blanket of the thick white sugar and obligatory flowers? I want all four corners, please, along with that abandoned icing around the rim, and, yeah, go ahead and wipe the knife off on the edge of my plate. Today, at a coworker's baby shower, I ate too much of it, got a sugar high, got a sugar low, and had trouble drinking water, which was suddenly unusually bland.
II. All week I've been trying to cross things off of an impossibly long list. Though I got a lot done, it stopped being fun somewhere around Monday, because I noticed immediately that despite my progress, the list wasn't getting any shorter. So last night I took the night off and went to the movies to see Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about skating. It was a little self-congratulatory, but I enjoyed it, I think because of the way it made me feel more than the way it made me think.
I've just spent the majority of my evening restarting my computer and backing up all of my files, thanks to the external CD writer I have connected to my computer. If I had to guess, I would say that I've burned about five CDs successfully and thrown away about 100 since I bought it a year ago. Tonight, it tricked me into thinking that all of my website files had vanished from my computer. That turned out not to be the case, but some of my software is still under that impression.
By now the veins that once connected that diseased little creature to my computer have been ripped out, and the machine itself is sitting ten feet away where it can do no more harm. If I didn't know that my brief period of satisfaction would be followed by regret, I would turn the single unit into a thousand smaller ones, jagged purple shards of plastic, a mess of regurgitated insides that I have never seen.
The last semester of my senior year in college, I was required to write a 20+ page investigative research paper that covered a specific aspect of journalism. Of course I wanted to cover an issue that would hold my attention for the entire semester, but I chose rather haphazardly; since I'd been watching a lot of Mafia movies, I decided to write about the media's treatment of John Gotti, whom I knew little about.
As part of my research I'd written Gotti a letter, asking for his opinion of his image in the media. I'd found his penitentiary address online, along with an unusual list of items that I was forbidden to send him, including plant shavings, body hair, nude pictures, and stamps. Right. So I followed those instructions, but I didn't really expect anything back.
A month after I'd turned in my project, Gotti responded. Flowery handwriting on two sheets of notebook paper, a polite grammatically correct letter about his disgust for the media and its unfair portrayal of him, wishes of luck for my career, praise for the fact I wasn't pursuing a career in law.
I always meant to write him back to thank him for his response, but I never did. Yes, I know all of the reasons I shouldn't be sad to hear of his death, but I am a little sad anyway.
Two girls accosted me, offering me $10 cash for my black ink on their 6-page form. Always too sympathetic. For the next fifteen minutes I sat on a bench and honestly (politely, incredulously) responded to each ridiculous question that had been formulated to predict marketing trends. "What will be the next big thing?" "What's your favorite brand of clothing?" "Rank the following (1 to 5) in terms of coolness." "What's your favorite commercial?" "Are these stars 'getting hotter' or 'cooling down'?" "Which [of these identical stores] do you prefer: The Gap or Old Navy? Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle?"
More than half of the questions I had no answer for at all, but I responded anyway, since that was the requirement for the reward. I felt uneasy about giving out my personal information; I'm not sure why I chose not to lie about that. Always too forthcoming. It made me think of this guy I dated in college who was so paranoid about people knowing his name that he would make up names to give hostesses at restaurants, often forgetting who he was when "his" name was called.
When I handed in my survey, they even took a Polaroid picture, which really creeped me out. As soon as I walked away, I regretted agreeing to participate, and I felt kind of dirty, like I'd somehow sold out. Those two fives stayed in my bag all of one hour before disappearing into my gas tank.
***
Two minutes after cursing the predatory nature of cats, I was praising my own cat for being a predator. I'd walked down to rabbit field to distribute an old potato when I spotted an unknown fluffy white cat weaving through the tires of a nearby car. I squatted and held out my hand and made some silly noises that are supposed to attract cats, and it approached until it was just out of my reach, turned suddenly, and took off after a rabbit.
Moments later, standing in the door of my room, I watched my cat Leeches fly off the bed and tackle one of those huge outdoor-bred roaches. She saw the shoe come down but must have not made the connection, because she's still sitting beside my desk, striking out at nothing, in hopes that the interesting creature will again come out and play.
It's Saturday afternoon and the sun's still shining, but the shadows are getting longer. There are lots of things for me to do between the outdoors hours and the going out hours, personal projects mainly, but it's difficult to narrow it down to one or two; usually I end up starting on one but getting side-tracked, and ultimately I work on parts of ten different offspring. I really like this time of day because it fully belongs to me, and I don't feel guilty about not enjoying the weather or reclusive because I'm alone in my room.
It's somewhat cooler today, which is appreciated, since I've spent most of the afternoon outside, photographing a Native American pow-wow. I suppose it was about like I expected, except for maybe the fair aspect of it—funnel cakes, collapsible stands filled with merchandise, and a loud man with a microphone.
Most of the merchandise stands were lined with a curtain of feathered dream catchers, and from behind the stands came puffs of the sweet-smelling smoke of burning sage. There were baskets of rabbit skins and cases of handmade jewelry, dark-haired plastic dolls wearing fringed outfits, life-size canvas tee-pees, and live music produced by drummers and wailers.
The costumes were elaborate: war paint, feathers, animal skins, bells, dresses, chaps, braids. A few people draped animal skins over their heads and necks, with little fox faces sitting just above their own faces; those who had "earned" lots of feathers had bulls eye-like tails made from them. Somehow, even though many of the costumes were composed of similar parts, each outfit was distinct, and I could tell there was more than one tribe being represented.
I circulated and shot pictures, unsure whether I should request permission (risking getting a posed shot) or simply take pictures without asking (risking being impolite). At some point today: one of my lenses broke, my camera stopped working for a couple minutes, and I accidentally took two shots of my own shoulder while changing lenses (which made me the maddest of the three). You can find a few of the non-shoulder shots here.
There is a group of people who aren't originally from here. They live here now, because we pay them to live here. We dress them up in strange costumes with little bulls eyes on their chests and watch as they fight with sticks and little cakes of rubber. We claim to be part of them, and we claim that they are part of us. We watch them closely, very emotionally attached to what they do. We talk about them a lot, our words full of curses and praises and predictions.
Walked down to Moonlight Pizza tonight and got stuck behind a curtain of rain, stayed and watched people watch the hockey finals in which "we" are the underdogs. Listened to the synchronized chorus of groans, gasps, sighs, and yells. Got sucked in for a moment myself, but pulled away when the rain let up.
The amount of water in my atmosphere seems to be a constant. It gets released from the dank air as if a giant sponge is being rung out. And then, slowly, the water seeps back into the sponge again, filling the air with an invisible density that makes it hard to move or breathe.
Mom offered to go with me. My parents live between me and the court house, and apparently today it was particularly easy for her to take the morning off. It's not a pleasant thing to do alone, she'd said. She was standing out in the yard when I got there, collecting litter that had been thrown from a passing car.
Our first stop was a service station in a town called Coats where they calibrate your speedometer for $34.95. I'd assumed that my speedometer was accurate, but I wanted some basis for the "guilty of faulty equipment" plea I'd been advised to give. We only had to wait five minutes, the two of us seated in a dingy room with a noisy A/C unit, some baseball trophies, a Bible, and an old hymnal.
As it turns out, my speedometer was off by about 5 miles per hour. Unfortunately, it was off in the wrong direction. I was driving slower than I'd thought I was. I mentioned my concern to the man behind the glass, and he reassured me, "It was off. That's all they care about."
Second stop, the court house in Dunn, a line snaking down and back up a narrow hallway, sweaty people leaning against the concrete, holding pink slips in their hands, staring ahead at nothing. A young girl with cornrows in her hair bounced against the wall and watched as the beads swept by her face. A guy had on a shirt that said, "Real men don't need directions." A large woman gripped a newspaper in one hand, fanning herself between paragraphs, gripped a bottle of water in the other hand.
The courtroom itself was cold and full of brown wood and pews and reminded me of a church. When I walked in, I wasn't quite sure what the procedure was, but almost as an answer to my insecurity, I got to watch about 40 people go through the ritual: whisper to the DA, show her your ticket, walk up to the bench, answer "yes" when asked, "Do you plead responsible?" and pay $90 in court costs. It seemed to me that it would be much more efficient if we would just line up in front of the cashier, but I didn't mention that to the judge.
So, that's it, I think. The insurance god is pleased.
Stop number three, my mother had to pick up a few wedding gifts. We printed out lists of somebody else's wants and shopped for them, as the custom goes. I didn't see anything at all that I'd want for myself, and I wondered how the lists were so long. ...a gravy boat for $100?
Stop four, standing in the kitchen at my parents' house, both my mom and I eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was then I realized the morning I dreaded was over.
A Filipino Elvis impersonator performed Saturday night in downtown Raleigh, decked out in a yellow beaded pantsuit, white leather shoes, flashy jewelry, purple-tinted shades, and a headset. Between each song he would retreat to the back of the stage, fumble with his mp3 player, turn back around with a big smile on his face, and begin to croon. Beads of sweat formed on his brow as he jerked back and forth, tassels swaying this way and that, and he'd point his index finger at the end of his outstretched arm as he hit a lasting high note. He looked like he was enjoying himself.
The word is that his daughter is disabled, and he performs in order to help pay the bills. In any case, he is not the only Elvis impersonator in the family; on Saturday, he sang a duet with his similarly employed cousin via speakerphone, via the Philippines. I took some pictures.
On Thursday I spent my last evening alone with Jay before he moves to Portland. We had talked about getting together for years, but for years we just ran into each other and talked about getting together. We would try to catch up, but Jay's a popular boy with a short attention span, and often I would have to struggle to finish a conversation we'd started. It used to be much different, but so did everything. I know I'm going to miss him, but right now they're still just words: Jay's.moving.to.Portland. Right now he's still in town.
So on Thursday we went to the bar where we used to hang out, which has recently been remodeled and reowned and looks nothing like it used to, including the regulars. We sat in the empty back room on plush chairs and talked about a hundred things, then we retreated to his car where he excitedly introduced me to new music, and then I turned him over to the bar where those regulars had relocated, where his other friends were waiting, and where his attention span would quickly recede.
***
Tonight I finally gave in and installed my window unit air conditioner. But not before enduring 89+ degree muggy, windless air all day. It's only been running for an hour, and it's already time to give the beast a break from exhaling.
