I’ve been wanting to blog for so log… or blong for so long… And I’m so out of practice, that’s how I started.
Let’s start with a six or seven-month old connection to a past blog, only in reverse… When I packed up my apartment, my old apartment in Portland, I talked about being like Santa Claus giving away everything I owned, pretty much. Well, that was pretty much a lie now that I see all the stuff that my parents brought me. And I told them, standing in my dining room with one folding chair, a foot locker, two expired Wyoming license plates - I told my parents it was like Christmas. I was opening boxes and genuinely excited. So maybe that’s what I’ll do for my kids - make them box up all kinds of stuff and just open it up on Christmas day. It’s so much better finding all the stuff you had and then had to do without than getting brand new things. Brand new things get boring or forgotten or normal. But old things that were lost… like coins or sheep or sons… those are the best.
In the weeks since I last posted, in the nearly month gone by, my car broke down again. If my car was a person, his pants would’ve fallen down so many times since the belt keeps slipping off. That wasn’t a funny or interesting comparison at all. I know. I can read it, too. But, more accurately, since I’ve had it fixed, now a hubcap fell off, and I was looking at it like a saggy uddered cow that is too old for the milking machine. I told myself that my car looks like it has leprosy - it’s covered in splotches of rust and peeled paint, with its missing hubcap and its saggy rear, and inside it’s not much better with the faux-wood molding pulling away from the dashboard because I refuse to reglue it back in place. I’m pretty sure that was a terrible run-on.
Since the last time I posted, we went to a wedding in Ohio. The wedding was great. Molly got married. Her husband is a funny guy. We like him. It was like a mini-reunion of many folks from Annie’s wedding last year when my darling and I started up for the last-first time. So, as my Goldberry pointed out, we were listening to everybody talk about next May, which is our wedding, and it was somewhat strange. No weddings until OUR wedding.
But I was originally going to complain about toll roads (which will probably be the only kind of roads in the future, until money becomes obsolete [because everybody knows that even when the robots take over, they will force us to pay tolls to move their robot food, hauled on our backs, across the deserts of the future... I think I combined a zombie movie, a dystopian technological reflection, and Roots all at once]). Where I grew up, there are about a million miles of interstate with nothing inbetween except prairie grass and antelope, but nowhere could you find a place that would make you drive on a road. Either you can drive on it for free, or you could get run off somebody’s private property. But the interstate that cuts through my hometown, that same road going through Chicago, Indiana, and Ohio is a toll road that cost us something like $50 to cross back and forth to go to this wedding. And Ohio! Only outdone in depressive unoriginality by the industrial wasteland meets the inner city slum without losing either trait called Gary, Indiana. Finally we saw Friendly’s, and Fifth Third Bank. And neither were any more interesting than they sound to people who have never heard of them.
And maybe Gary, Indiana seems like a robot-ruled zombieland because, in contrast to that dreary world, I am madly in love with an amazing woman that I will marry this spring. Maybe that’s not a sufficient explanation, but I did want to add that in there, so you’re not worried about my overall mood since my car has leprosy and I drove through the hell of the future.
I did notice something that seemed odd to me just a few nights ago. I was spending my dinner at a booth in a White Castle, eating four sliders with cheese and eating my very-much-too-hot fries without enough ketchup because somebody (a White Castle worker *surprised look*) put the ketchup dispenser in wrong and somebody (a White Castle manager aka a teenager) tried to clean it up and fix it, and left the rest of us without any ketchup. I said I was eating, and my fellow patrons were a woman of Medicare age and a couple with a natural affinity for urban outerware and manners. I kept wondering why the elderly woman was there - she seemed candidly out of place at 8 pm on Wednesday night at White Castle. But the trashy couple did not. I know, a long time to get to my social revelation. I believed that, to use generic terms, the rich and the poor alike have little use for things like manners and etiquette, in this case, with their cell phones. Not that phone-rudeness is limited to two demographics. But I was amazed. This kid… who knows if he was 18 or 25, but he looked like nobody told him he was both white and ridiculous with his misaligned hat and saggy pants, this kid walked up to the counter to get some help, and proceeded to dial a number on his cell phone and begin a conversation. I couldn’t figure out what outside a 911 call or a tip to the local health inspector couldn’t wait until after he had spoken with the workers, as competent as they were. I just ate my Turkish delight and betrayed my health for nothing more than a swiped credit card.
I think I’m just going to bed. I’ll try for something more direct, concise, and artistically intelligent later. Tonight, it’s sleeping in my new bed for the second night ever, and letting my body forget those weeks on the couch cushions on the floor, or the air mattress, or the hotel bed which was the best of those three. Good night new Christmas. What can tomorrow bring?