…I hereby close this blog.
It’s been a long time coming.
I’d rather kill it now than continue to watch die a slow, lonely, painful death.
I may pick up a bloggy-type thing again, eventually.
(In fact, I’m sure I will; I can never keep shut up for very long.)
Posted in Personal
I tried to help pay. I always do. He almost never lets me. He let me once in the entire time I’ve known him, and that was one of the first times we’d seen each other since I graduated college. (In fact that one time he not only let me pay for myself but for his beer as well.) Continue reading
Posted in Best of the Missives, Dia-log, Personal
Tonight on my way home from work I was charged by a raccoon.
It was in an unlit walkway between two streets and some shops (King’s Yard for those of you familiar with Yellow Springs, Ohio), and I sat the silouette of two creatures. I paused and took a step toward them, thinking them cats, which I love and always try to seduce. The one in the back I think was a cat. The one closer to me was not a cat. I saw this immediately and before I could do anything it came at me, running full speed toward my feet, making a noise like a small dog wrenching and writhing a small child.
I kind of yelled. Did I mention it was dark, and that it was a narrow footpath so I had nowhere to run and I probably would have tripped and then I would have really been in trouble? I had a baguette in my hand, not for me, I’m gluten intolerant but I was bringing it to this family I know. I swung the baguette and it whacked the raccoon in the face. It was tossed kind of behind me to the edge of the footpath, and I looked back at it assuming it would come at me again. It didn’t, so I walked quickly away.
I brought the bread to the family’s house, left them a note saying they might want to cut off the ends (I didn’t remember which end), and also that I wouldn’t be camping in their yard as I had intended because tonight I was terrified of raccoons (which also frequent their yard), and making a comment about how gluten isn’t all bad for me, it saved my life or at least my ankles.
Posted in Personal
I’ve grown to hate it when people tell me that I think too much. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with thinking a lot, only in that anything in extreme is probably not good for you.
But really. Of all the things ruining our society, I kind of doubt that thinking too much is one of them. On the contrary, I think that most people don’t think enough, which arguably is a lot more dangerous.
X-posted at Facebook.
Many of my ideas and desires and draws are surprisingly traditional. I don’t have a problem with it so much as I wonder why it is. The question of autonomous desire is an interesting one: Can we ever consider our desires outside the societal standards ingrained in us? I have chosen (or it has chosen me, or both) a decidedly unconventional path; many of my desires are unconventional, and I know that this is likely as much a subconscious rebellion of convention as it is my ability and willingness to think/feel/desire outside the box. Therefore, I question a “traditional” desire when I have one: Is this leftover from my conventional upbringing? Or is it natural? Is it because sometimes all this going-against-the-grain makes me tired, and I want to give in? A bit of all of the above?
I keep these “normal” desires to myself just as much as the real “freaky” ones that can scare people away. Many, if they knew of these desires, would think that I am conventional-at-heart, that the “counterculture” in me is just an act, or something. How annoying. As though having a certain set of thoughts—that doesn’t even come close to representing all my thoughts—defines me. Why, because the conventional is more legitimate? Is it more likely that I am faking the unconventional aspects of my character rather than just being incidentally conventional? What does conventional mean anymore, anyway? The age of mass media and globalization has given us so many ways to be, be they “socially acceptable” or not, can we pinpoint any set of thoughts as traditional or unconventional, without context?
If I express conventional desire and achieve it, will I be satisfied and discard my counterculture “phase,” like I’m told by so many I’ll invariably do? If I choose a totally nontraditional path, will I never have a “normal-fantasy” again? Whatever I do, will I feel as though I’ve compromised?
Looks like I’m taking a break from blogging for a while.
Stay tuned.
(Edit: There is a semi-secret blog I use for more personal things, or else random thoughts or test-posts. Contact me if you want to see it.)
Posted in Personal
I don’t like strangers. I just don’t. It’s not the individuals I don’t like, but rather strangers as a class. All these extraverts, or faux-extraverts, or whatever, I watch them together, socializing in large groups, and think about how ridiculous they look. Continue reading
Posted in Best of the Missives, Culture, Personal, Theory
I am currently in my #1 Providence coffeeshop, called White Electric. Called such because it was originally housed in the building which once housed an electric company called the White Electric Company. Instead of revamping the building they kept the outside sign which said “White Electric Co” and called it White Electric Coffee. It has since moved but has maintained its unique alternative hipster flair, and its name. It’s one of the few things that has so far remained untouched by looming gentification.
It is this place that allows me to maintain my accidental identity as a walking stereotype. Last night some of my housemates and I were discussing employment and the difficulty of finding it thereof, and one of them said, “What do all those hipsters that hang out at White Electric and Julian’s—” [a restaurant in the same part of town] “—all day do for work?!” Another housemate immediately looked at me expectedly. When I couldn’t answer he said, “What! You’re not a hipster?! My entire idea of you is that you’re a hipster, since the moment I met you!” His world seemed to crumble a bit.
I explained to him that not only was I a hipster from 2 years from now (long story), I haven’t been back in town long enough to know what they do.
Technorati tags: coffeeshops, hipsters, Providence, White+Electric+Coffee
Providence is “at my fingertips,” at my disposal. It is mine. Again. I am reclaiming it. For who? For me! Just me. I am not enough to cause nor halt gentrification and all the bad/good/change that may go along with it. I prefer to do neither, instead just exist, just live in my no-longer-so-humble hometown. It can be mine again. But not all of it. No—I don’t want those new Starbuck’s.
They are constructing 4 new high-rises in Providence. (Plus the new one that’s not-so-high.) This is especially drastic when you consider that 4 is approximately the number of buildings in the skyline currently, and that is if you are being generous about what height of building is skyline-worthy.
Technorati tags: gentrification, photos, Providence, Rhode+Island, Waterplace+Park
Posted in Culture, Personal, Photos/Visual
In some ways, Yellow Springs, Ohio is all I ever wanted in a place to live.
When I was a kid I dreamt of living in small towns, where everyone knew everyone, friends ran into each other and hung out in small groups in front of stores, friends who never had to call to make plans, only to meet on the street, or yell out the window, because they all lived so close, where said stores were reminiscent of decades, quarter-century, half-century past, where families congregated outdoors, neighbors gossiped over a grill, where kids played in the obligatory adjacent lake or wood or whatever.
When you’re a kid you always want something different, something exotic. I spent much of my youth reading children’s novels from the 40s, 50s, 60s, that took place in California, the South, northern Canada—but I lived in the 80s and early 90s in the most densely populated and unneighborly areas of Rhode Island. Such small-town existences were quite different from the life and environment I knew, and feeling isolated from and alien to my own time and place, I idealized them. The zenith of this fantasy was in 1993, and it was also the beginning of the end, probably because it was the beginning of my adolescence (I turned 12 that year), when I had to put aside such childish thoughts and be miserable in the concrete reality in which I existed. That year, I watched (and then read) Fried Green Tomatoes and was nearly crippled with saudade*. (My connection to and crush on Idgie Threadgoode didn’t help.)
I didn’t make the connection between that desire—which took up most of my childhood—and living in Yellow Springs off-and-on these last four years. It’s probably because of the off-and-on thing: I was still never establishing a real foundation anywhere. It’s probably because I was in school full-time, and spent most of my time on campus. I didn’t become a “regular” in town until halfway through my third year as a student. And then this summer, spent in the town, after graduation, which saw me on my old stomping grounds of campus for about a half a dozen, mostly brief visits.
I think I had imagined a bit of my small-town-dream when I was just beginning to hang out in town—as an outsider. Once I started becoming part, I forgot—I never thought, “I’ve realized the dream.”
Was that because some dreams can never come true, never feel true? That my desire existed only as an outsider, a dream of belonging that was too idealized to happen, so that the closest I get, isn’t even close?
Perhaps. But it’s also because I discovered I was picky about the small-town life of my dream, which I only could have discovered through getting closer. (You don’t know what you have until you lose it, and you don’t know what you want until you nearly, but not quite, have it.)
I wanted an old-fashioned town. Yellow Springs is very contemporary. I did not want a college town. I wanted a town with more than just post-Victorian history. I wanted a humble town. I did not want a pretentious, self-righteous town. I did not want “The Twilight Zone.” Not in my small-town-dream, anyway.
Four miles down the road, past farmland and cornfields, is historic Clifton, Ohio with the historic Clifton Mill. It is nineteenth-century loveliness, with old buildings (many boarded up and waiting for someone—me—to restore them), a touristy area for the mill, single crossroads with a Union School, “antique” shop, all-American food, ancient storefronts and soda signs, the whole lot.
It’s the town of my dreams—or at least, it may have been, at one time. Indeed, it has almost nothing going on: It is tiny, there are so few businesses, and no one’s hanging outside, or in the gift shop. Could be timing.
And again I am an outsider. I even tried, so hard, to dress more conservatively, but I clearly don’t belong. The guy at the antique shop greeted me with, “Is this your first time here?” Could be he knows everyone. Could be I am just clearly an interloper. Whatever.
I walk around more self-conscious than I ever was in Yellow Springs, even when I first got there.
The things about Yellow Springs that make it a town that could never be the town of my dreams are precisely those which make it a town that I can feel comfortable in and part of more than most places. The politics and lifestyles of its inhabitants are as close to my own as any mass’ will ever most likely be, particularly for a small, isolated Midwestern town. But those politics and lifestyles are not a part of my small-town-dream—they are too modern, too complicated, too unromantic and unidealized and real.
This is all part of my normal-fantasy, I’m sure. That lifelong, compulsive, off-and-on pull that says, “You want to be like everyone else (whatever that means), don’t you? You want to just go with the flow, don’t you? You want to stop fighting, stop going against the grain, stop making your own path, don’t you?”
Because that’s all very exhausting, this against-the-current, own-path thing, and often doesn’t feel terribly rewarding. To give in, to let go, may just be akin to a Freudian death-drive, but it is emotionally very tempting. Yellow Springs may be the only place I haven’t felt the constant need to justify my lifestyle (or else hide it), my existence, and any thought I decide to place somewhere outside of my head, but I know it’s too small to never leave, and that eventually, one day, I will have to venture forth into a world that regards me as alien. That awareness is all I need to never really be able to rest.
But if I could just belong in a place like this. How romantic and ideal and dream-like it could be! I wouldn’t even have to totally belong—look at Idgie Threadgoode.
I’m losing it, though. I’m losing my knack for idealizing, for a distinct and specific saudade. It’s being replaced with an unimaginative pragmatism and a tiny, implaceable, implacable nagging.
A result, maybe, of growing older, of knowing too much to think that anything’s possible, to truly want something you can clearly imagine, even if you know it’s not really possible. And I am not old enough to have it replaced with something new and equally exciting and hopeful, only with disappointment and a vague sadness.
* Saudade: Portuguese word for an emotion akin to nostalgia but tinged with hope, also sometimes translated as a longing for something that does not and perhaps cannot exist.
