You don’t have to go home but you can’t…stay…here…
Ten years ago this summer. We drove around in the warm and the sun with our hair up and our windows down and sang the words and thought “This is it. This is us.”
It was our anthem. Our summer song. To dream to and believe in. Real. Absolute.
We saw beyond the fear we didn’t know was there and saw ourselves. Somehow.
Just like Madagascar and Jasmine always reminds me of him. The places I’ll be from…always reminds me of you.
There’s no getting around the insanity that has been my week. I still haven’t got that organizational thing down. It’s a work in progress. If it were up to me, I’d hire my chica to do it for me. She’s saved my bacon more than once, always with a smile, and she’s doing it again tonight.
Speaking of bacon, we once had ‘matching’ email handles: bigporkchop and littleporkchop. I can’t remember where the inspiration came from. I think it was a stuffed monkey. Either that or the British and their love of sausages.
The Euro’s dad was talking about boundaries the other day. How Cumbria isn’t really Cumbria, but something all together new and not right-sounding. How some of Cheshire use to be some of Lancashire and how politicians like to redraw the map as it suits them. “You don’t really do that in America, do you?”
I said “I don’t know” and got to thinking about McDowell County, West Virginia. I remember hearing, or reading, or somehow being aware of, a movement to eliminate the county by absorbing it into the neighbouring two.
Iaeger will still be Iaeger, I suppose, but it will be somewhere else. Even though it hasn’t moved an inch. And all the money that should have been spent, but wasn’t, on repairing the county after the floods (the building materials still sit, covered in dust, in the flood condemned post office) would disappear into the redrawn boundary. All the mistakes that were made, all the city-centre roads that haven’t been paved since 1976 and all the scandals that made their way onto the Today Show would be erased by many of the same people who made them in the first place.
I don’t know that there’s any legitimacy to the rumour. It may be one of those urban myths. Either way, I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I heard about the Iaeger Dairy Bar shutting down.
When the last horse in a one horse town drops dead, where do you go from there?
I may as well begin with the latest bit of drama. Cousin Bedford tried to kill himself today.
It’s no surprise really. That he tried it, or that no one in the family took notice. Because that’s the thing about Cousin Bedford. No one really cares.
It’s his fault. He’s been stoned for eighteen years and doesn’t open his eyes when he talks. The family have a habit of forgetting about him until his mother, my father’s sister, points out that she does, in fact, still have a son. That he’s a bit of a loser but that he wont be any more because she had a prayer session at church and “God’s gonna deliver him from his idleness”.
There are worse things to be than idle and I’ve got other cousins who prove it, but Bedford does it in such a way that makes everyone around him think there isn’t. Anything worse.
“I don’t think that work ever really destroyed anybody. I think that lack of work destroys them a hell of a lot more.”
- Katherine Hepburn
“…you have to live for the present. You have to be in the moment. Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.”
– Oprah Winfrey
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This morning I read the transcript of Oprah’s commencement address given at Stanford over the weekend. Jaw dropping in inspiration. And not just because it’s coming from Miss Harpo herself. Go read it. Or just read a few excerpts here.
“If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Even doubt means don’t. This is what I’ve learned. There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.”
Maybe not in everyone’s ‘Things That Inspire Me’ arsenal…but for me, being a Buffy, as I am, and having been on the receiving end of certain unpleasantries because of it, this made me happy-sigh.
“I grew up not loving [my] name, but once I was asked to change it, I thought, well, it is my name and do I look like a Suzie to you? So, I thought, no, it doesn’t feel right. I’m not going to change my name. And if people remember it or not, that’s OK.”
And lastly,
“Don’t live for yourself alone. This is what I know for sure: In order to be truly happy, you must live along with and you have to stand for something larger than yourself. Because life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward you have to give back.”
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
- Joan Didion
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If you had to have one job, for the rest of your life, and you had to do it for free…what would it be?
It’s a basic enough question. One The Euro is always putting to people who complain to him about their work, who hate their jobs, who stress and second guess their chosen profession. And whenever they give him an answer his reply is always the same. “So, do it.”
Just like Joan, I adapted Orwell’s essay a few years ago. Looking back, my reasons sound pretty superficial. I should rewrite it; but I won’t. I’ll just do a giant strikethrough and add this instead:
I write because it comforts me to do so. It’s as simple and as complex as that. What about you?
Why do you write?
I don’t know about you, but if I had a daughter with an auto immune disorder that attacked her skin cells and prevented them from making pigment, I wouldn’t look at her and say “Wow. You’re really pale.” This is what my mother said to me last week. I felt like Ricky Gervais in the Extra’s episode where he drowns his face in soup.
I called my sister to tell her about it and heard her get that Cary Grant look (Not unlike the Gervais look) before she broke out in wicked giggles. Then I felt bad because I know my mother hates when I make my sister break out in wicked giggles and because her comment really didn’t bother me. At all.
The thing is, I’m not that sensitive about it, but I feel like people should expect me to be and they should act accordingly. (Yes. Horrible, I know.)
I mentioned it to Flynn who shot back and urgent one-liner: “Are you an Albino???”
No. But if I didn’t take care you’d never know it. I’ve spent the last ten years out of the sun - no pigment to protect against skin cancer - and wearing Jackie O shades and Factor 85, even in the winter. I started dyeing my lashes and brows about 5 years ago, when they all turned white (Pigmentless skin means pigmentless hair. Apparently.) As for my head of hair, I’ve never let myself find out what’s going on there. I’ve been visiting the colourist since age 19 when the above mentioned Flynn told me, in no uncertain terms, that “Dishwater Blond” was not my look.
It’s 98degrees on this new street of mine. My neighbours are enjoying their patios and pools. I’m wearing cotton gloves and wide brimmed hats and wondering if I’ll ever learn how to work this pale but interesting look. My grandmother promises it will all be worth it when I’m 65 with fabulous skin. I’m gonna hold her to it.
Last week the winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was announced - British author Rose Tremain’s novel The Road Home. Other shortlisted nominees: Nancy Huston, Fault Lines; Sadie Jones, The Outcast; Charlotte Mendelson, When We Were Bad; Heather O’Neill, Lullibies for Little Criminals; and Patricia Wood, Lottery.
The Bridgeport Prize International Creative Writing Competition closes at the end of the month.
Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel is out on 24th June. My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skylar Rampike, is a satirical, fictionalised re-telling of the Jon Benet Ramsey case.
Vote for the Best of the Booker Prize. But do it before 8th July. On the shortlist: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road; Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda; JM Coetzee’s Disgrace; J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur; Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist; and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
It was ’round about this time, in 1867, that Mark Twain set out on his grand tour of Europe and the Middle East. The letters he wrote, to be published in papers back home, became the basis for a book.
Hemingway, whom I’m slowly falling in love with again, once said that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn - but I’ve always maintained you haven’t read Twain until you’ve read his essays and letters. The Innocents Abroad is as good a place to start as any…
“Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance. However, I do not count the Oracle in that list. I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place……We don’t mind the Oracle. We rather like him. We can tolerate the Oracle very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot on board, and they do distress the company.” - Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad