Saturday, August 29, 2015

you put your girl up on a pedestal, then you wait for her to fall

Today I ignored the increasingly-insistent murmurings of Rafe and Octavia in my brain...those fuckers have left me high and dry for this long, so they can wait another day before I start pouring them out onto the page. However, I'm taking the fact that I'm beginning to daydream about them (real daydreams, not the sort of joyless forced-daydreams I engaged in during brief moments when I thought I should be thinking of them) as a very good sign of productivity for the weeks to come. Or, if nothing else, I'm taking it as hope that finishing this book is possible (and yes, I know it's possible, but I'm indulging my 'artiste' moodiness about it for the sake of a more dramatic blog post).

sssanyway, I instead spent the day focused on what was around me, which meant less screen time and more people time. Granted, all the people shared my last name (or should have shared my last name...more on that in a moment), but this was still a good thing. I woke up too late to have breakfast, but early enough to try to hook [censored] on my Starbucks iced coffees, which he was pretty [censored] about until he discovered they [censored].

At some point, Aunt Becky showed up. She was here to visit my grandmother, whom I shamefully haven't gone to visit yet, but it's all rather depressing and upsetting to visit someone who won't remember that you saw them. Aunt B's scandalous pirate husband is in Brazil, so she was able to spend some quality time sitting in our kitchen so that I could catch up with her - I hadn't seen her since Christmas, which is unusual, but I haven't been home since then, which is the longest I've gone without a visit home in...maybe ever? Or maybe ten years -- in 2005 I was in India, and if memory serves I probably wasn't home between February and November that year.

So ten years ago, I was sitting in my office in Hyderabad, planning an epic train trip to Hampi (the Hampi dance is your chance to do the Hamp), and wondering whether Katie had survived Hurricane Katrina. I never look at my India blog anymore, but I randomly checked to see what I wrote ten years ago, and it turns out I wrote a postcard to Katie which is, as usual for us, tapping into a vein of sheer ridiculousness. Happily, she survived Katrina...and she called me this afternoon, which was a lovely interlude. She does not share my family name (although she should - I'm sure [censored] would [censored]), but we caught up on family-type stuff, and it was great to talk even if she could only spare a few minutes from her demon children.

sssanyway again, the rest of my afternoon was mostly spent on the back porch, drinking iced coffee and telling my mother the truth about the things I lie about on the blog (jhokes). Eventually I ran out of truths, and so we all ended up going out for supper; there were more deer heads on the walls than I'm used to, but it was otherwise quite enjoyable.

Then we came back to our town for dessert - the community has restored the old drugstore/soda fountain and it's open as a non-profit every Saturday night, run by volunteers who make the old-style sodas, malts, etc. that used to be sold there. It's been open for awhile, but this was the first time I'd gone to it since it's been restored. When I was little, it was run by a man named Milford, who seemed to keep the store open partially for something to do. The back of the store seemed to stretch on forever then, filled with dusty shelves covered with expired products that should have been sold or destroyed years earlier. Milford would often sleep in his chair in the store window, but when my grandparents sent me and [censored] over with a couple of dollars (their store was on the next block, and we could take money out of the cash register for malts), he would wake up and make us whatever we wanted.

Now, it's been restored with the same soda fountain, but the merchandize has been cleared out and they've put in some games and tables so that people can hang out. I got a cherry coke, which was the first real cherry coke I've had in forever (by 'real' I mean they add the cherry syrup there rather than buying premade cherry coke). I don't think they had ice cream cones, and if they did, the cones probably weren't as stale as Milford's. But overall they've done a good job with it, and it's cool that it's still there, even if it's not quite the same (but nothing's ever quite the same).

Then we came home, I messed around on zee internet for awhile, and then I came downstairs and read a couple of essays from Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", many of which are about California in the 1960s. The first two were super interesting and v. well-written, which is either going to inspire me or cast me into despair. But either way, they're good. And now I need to sleep because I have grand plans to pour mimosas down my dad's throat tomorrow - goodnight!

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