No Town for Fixies.

I have already burned through my pie and fried chicken reserves, and it isn't even August. Oh, the lovely mountains, wreathed in mist and viny things and blackberry brambles, zigzagged with bike lane-less hairpin-ridden roads that defy my bike's lowest gears. My ass grows firmer than I ever wanted it to be. No, wait... that's just a solid lump of cramp.

It rains almost daily. Every locale seems to have its own shocks to adjust to. In south Texas, it's the heat. In Denver, the cold and general desiccation. In Prague, the Czechs. Here, it is decidedly rain. I have never seen so much rain. I have never seen a lamb's-quarter, the tiny, ankle-high sprouts we picked in Denver for salad, twice my height, nor daisies as big around as my hand with the fingers stretched out, nor a whole field of blackberries growing wild without any encouragement at all, and so densely that no one will ever get to the berries in the middle but the birds. I like it. I am awe-struck. Still, it took me two Denver winters to internalize the relatively simple concept of LAYERING. Who knows what the equivalent to that is here. Rubber boots? Ponchos?

Today I started at the letterpress shop, first packing orders, which was more entertaining than might be imagined since I got to read all the cards for the first time. Later my job was to assemble these very interesting tripartite folding book covers from a single large, letterpressed sheet of heavy cardstock. BBH is in charge of publishing this interactive literary text, and my own hands made the covers! Which was extremely novel the first, oh, two hours, and still fun the next two, but a tad exhausting beyond that. The big machines were clanking and whizzing behind me, and I couldn't resist the occasional open-mouthed observation; soon I'll get to do that.

I guess it is necessary to say that I will not be doing the permaculture internship after all. Common sense does indeed catch up with even the silliest of us. I was getting pretty frantic about the situation, and something had to give. I decided I wanted to put my energy into what I came here for, to learn letterpressing. The perma-boss was pissed at me, reasonably so, but she was almost laughably passive-aggressive about it, accusing me of deceiving her in the most cryptic, roundabout way imaginable. I had not deceived her. I had merely neglected to create an honest budget for myself until that time. I felt bad, because she genuinely wanted me to work with them, and offered a half-time internship, but I had to tell her like my granddad told it: "That's quite an offer. But lack of money knocks a lot of good deals in the head." So she tersely wished me a good day and we parted ways.

My old Betsies will be glad to hear that I have come to live with a collective in an old, quiet, stone house with a big, jungle yard (surely the opposite of our doomed Betsy yard), and peopled with the kindest folks. The uniqueness of people is always so surprising. One could never have guessed them, dreamed them up, or prepared for them. In this new house, I'm wishing I had the talent of making friends in a flash. But, alas, I am a social tortoise, so I will continue as best I can, hope for the forbearance of my new housemates, and remember the good times with the old ones.

Thought of the Day: The Penis and... that other thing

So you know how Freud (and consequently everyone else) talks about this penis envy, how women are messed up because they feel a "lack," and they'd better admit it or else it's a repressed lack, which is like keeping a crocodile in your bathtub. And you know how every feminist worth her salt has chafed and howled and mauled that poor sap to pieces ever since. Well, I was thinking. Everyone spends twelve years getting ideas put into their heads; if we're lucky we get another four to pull them out, and then the rest of our lives to put new ones together, but throughout it a creative mind can look at any situation or idea and tug from it the phenomenological experience. If there's anything that's been hemmed in by external forces and demands, it's human genitalia. But they're right there, part of us, and so anytime we feel like trying to think of them in a new way, as we experience it, we can.

Anyway, I was thinking in this particular, phenomenological way. And I recalled the first time it really struck me (though I knew it as "fact" long before) that men do not have an interior. Which is to say, they don't have an interior experientially because they can't get to it. No one can. They are sealed off. And I thought, "How sad!" and I had felt a twinge of envy, because it seemed safer, as well as a little disgust, because it seemed like a primitive thing to be just a one-way conduit from beginning to end, like a roundworm, and also a trifle unhealthy to be so closed that no one could get inside but with a knife (anus aside; but someone else would have to discuss that possibility).

I didn't grow up with brothers. I peed outdoors. I sometimes wished I were a boy because then people would not tell me how little blonde girls are sold as sex slaves across the border, and that I had better stay away from highways, roads, and public places in general. But it never occurred to me to want an extra, external little homunculus, the aspect of maleness with the least benefits. It seemed like it would get caught in things.

So from that perspective, preceding Freud or anyone else, the penis seemed like a front porch, a fine thing to have in many situations, probably. But my own construction was the natural thing, the normative as they say in theory. I had the door to the house itself. Female anatomy goes somewhere. And even though it isn't as ostentatious as a front porch, it is tremendously useful, and has its own architecture, the door knob, little windows, trim and such. We don't say of our doors, "I am so fucked up because I have this, this -- what? A NOT-PORCH! That's what it is. A complete lack of porch." The door's point of reference is the interior. We go through doors, and we sit on porches, and they aren't really comparable. So this comparison thing should probably stop, because even though the parts do indeed work together, they are not two sides of the same thing, not a simple + and -. Men have a lack. They lack an accessible interior. Women have a lack. We lack a... whatever that thing is.

Revised Road Trip

We are still going. The google map kept messing up, so I had to take the post down, but in cities, this is the route:

San Antonio --> Houston --> Baton Rouge --> New Orleans (!) --> Biloxi --> Mobile --> Montgomery --> Atlanta (MONICA!!!) --> Asheville.

If you've got any must-sees, please do tell.

We took Kendra to Austin on Friday, for good. Austin is so cool it never fails to make me choke a little. She had a gift card to Whole Foods, so we went to the original on Lamar St. I remembered it from our state UIL trips, when it used to be across from the Waterloo music shop, but I'd never been inside. It was hopping. $36/lb. smoked chardonnay salt, Venus fly traps, marzipan in the shape of pregnant women, blueberry-sage breakfast sausages. It was all so absurd, and irresistible (just think of the dumpster!). And - oh! - the lovely people. I stared covetously at a slab of Indonesian ginger encrusted Norwegian salmon when a voice, velvety and deep, said, "Excuse me." I turned and stared covetously at this exceptionally fine human from his curly black hair to his sweet sunburnt feet, and shuffled out of the way as he eased his cart past. Then another caught my eye, fingering organic peaches, and a third beside the hummus cooler, glowing with what must be ahimsa, and my stomach contracted smaller and smaller, closing on its little love of strangers like an empty fist. God, what strangers. Devastatingly beautiful, shiny teeth and shinier intentions. Somehow Austin is just bursting with them, as though it's some designated youth&beauty zone. Pure-souled creatures, unblotted, besotted with hope, and I would jeer but somehow, miraculously, their futures are told secure in their middle-aged counterparts, the fit couples with a smile for all and sundry, doing what they love and loving what they do, shopping for organic pap with a planned, post-30 baby in a sling from their prenatal to India. I wanted to squeeze into the middle, be their beloved treat-stuffed pooch. I wanted to kiss those charming girls in their shabby summer dresses, with their hair cropped, field thistles in July heat, haven for thorn-bugs and hung with cocoons.
Everyone striving, believing, and it works...
I was a cicada creeping in its mud shell, Gregor Samsa loosed in the vegan pastries, something bent, mean, and cynical to the marrow, fiendish large capacity for happiness, but so blank, so furious and wondering and blasted, hideous like something deformed, and starving claws like crab's for power, power of determination, certainty, gladness, choice, justice, fortune.
Austin has always made me... wistful. I didn't go to school there, like I could have, because I was off chasing truth, love, and God in the frigid mountains. Now I couldn't polish myself to that special Austin gleam any more than I could become Japanese by wearing a kimono.
We left my sister there in that apartment building, buried like a seed. She'll grow into that town. She barely shed a tear. "No one stares at me here," she joked. Yeah, beauty loves company, don't it?

Fruitworks

It's so goddamned hot that a watermelon blew up in the garden.
Happy Fourth.

Hey There, Stranger: Us and the Machines

My cell phone is five years old this summer, and succumbing to senility. I resisted having it until my aunt bought it for me my senior year, and my sense of thrift won out over my entrenched backwardness. It was for safety reasons, the fam chorused. Leave it off if you like. But when I left it off, or forgot it somewhere, I payed double for the silence with a fiery torrent of familial hysteria: Where were you?! Why don't you answer our calls?! You could have been killed! So I started keeping it around. It became an accomplice to romance. I got used to it.

I can't say I saw it coming. Last Christmas I arrived home to find that my mother had developed an ingrown cell phone: the keypad and her thumbs were fixed together. If I wanted to have a conversation with her, I had to covertly turn it off or hide it so the infernal chime would not interrupt. My sister had it, too. It was like talking to someone with a severe video game addiction. I lost my temper a few times, and found myself parroting any parent of a fourteen-year-old social butterfly. Sometimes I lost my cool and simply slapped the damned machine out of their hands.

My own phone predates texting. The last classes in my History of the English Language course this spring were on the effect of texting on English. Previously unresponsive students sprang out of their zombie-like stupor to expound excitedly upon this revolution. Debates occurred on the finer points of the movement. I looked around at these spirited, rosy-cheeked prognosticators, and then down at my bag, wherein lay my tiny, bullet-shaped phone ("From back when smaller was cool," snickers my sister) which, like a DOS computer, has one passably-executed function. And I knew. The revolution had passed me by, and my obstinate stinginess kept me pinned in 2004.

Now my grandparents text, and my aunts and uncles; my little cousins pound away with their nubby half-grown thumbs. My mother's entire relationship with a beefy Polish firefighter a few towns over has occured via text (what's the point of having a beefy firefighter boyfriend when you only text, I wonder?). That chime sounds everywhere, like a doorbell signalling more and more people trying to get inside, demanding a hearing. I don't want to listen. My phone is crapping out and burns my ear when I talk longer than fifteen minutes. Plus I'm paranoid and suspicious of technological miracles and therefore afraid of brain cancer. I don't have a purse to put it in and I don't want to irradiate my ovaries by keeping it in my pocket. So I don't carry it much anymore.

The other day, I went on a hunting expedition to a field which I mistakenly thought my grandpa leased. I drove about two hundred yards into the surprisingly lush, verdant grass, and then lost traction. The vehicle drifted across the mud for a moment, and stopped. Permanently. I spun the wheels to no avail. It was then I noticed the colossol fountain of irrigation water. Ahhh... And the voice of grandma came to me: "Just take your phone along to be safe. You never know what might happen."

You never know what might happen. I got out, surveyed the deserted field under a sweltering sun, mosquitoes already fixing themselves to my limbs, and squished through the marsh to a little clapboard house up the hill. A lady was sitting outside with a young boy, reading. I introduced myself and asked to use a phone. She gave me her cell. Then she pulled up a chair for me in the shade, poured me some ice water, and we talked. She had been a technician at the Toyota plant nearby, but was laid off two years ago, so she and her husband picked up and traveled the country, working here and there. One day they got tired. They wanted to go home. Toyota hired her back on in production, mostly a welding job. I told her about Denver; she told me about growing up in Detroit; we commiserated over the lack of work. She offered to help me find something at Toyota, and gave me her contact information. I was extremely touched by this.

Later my grandpa arrived and pulled me out. Back at the house, my grandma crowed triumphantly and no one believed me when I said I was glad I hadn't brought the phone.

I am social mainly in the sense in which one might say, "The human is a social animal, banding together for food and shelter." I'm not always very good at connecting to my fellow human. I might even be reclusive. I don't think of myself as a composite of the people who see my picture online or "text" me. This is the very reason why I leave the cell phone. I need to be surprised, forced to be resourceful, and compelled to trust. I have to forgo the easy way out, the speed dial that gets me who I need and cushions me from unlooked-for interaction. And despite all the inconvenience, I like people, real ones, and not their fine-tuned technological masks. I like strangers who offer me a glass of water, a seat in the shade, and an hour of conversation.