Kanye West and I kick it in my grandmother’s kitchen, for real…

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So it becomes very apparent to a person that you’re knee deep in what my dad likes to call ‘real-life shit,’ when Kanye West is ‘testifying’ in your grandmother’s kitchen as your taking apart her breakfast nook to be packaged up and fed-exed off to Texas. Taking pictures off the wall that have hung in the same spot for at least 20 years. Disturbing nails that penetrated plaster before I was conceived. All to be sent to the new nursing home.

Yeah, that was something.

That morning, I put on a pot of coffee, set the ibook on shuffle, and went to work. Newspaper around the pictures, bubble-wrap around the paper, cardboard around the bubble wrap. Pieces of the yellow pages wadded up and stuffed around pointy places that could impare or impale shipping. Like some weird lifestyle-surgeon, I spent a morning taking down the spot that I always pictured her sitting, reading the entire newspaper, every morning. You can lear more about my work just by clicking on here. All the while various songs, that you’d never hear in your grandmothers kitchen are randomly spiting out of two wee speakers.

I take down the drafting ruler that I always thought was a sword when I was little, to a Spoon song. Pavement plays as I tape newspaper around needlepoint samplers. American Analog Set actually seems apt as I bubble-wrap knick-knacks.

One does not seem to go with the other. The music with the tasks or the location. But that’s the point. There’s nothing appropriate about the music, because that’s just not possible. This is that real life thing again. There is no sound track. There is no perfect fade-in and out.

And lets be honest, for the grandkids, it’s easier. My Dad and my Uncles are the one who have it tough. It was hard, but I feel lucky for having gone to help close up her house. Living in Texas we were always a little out of range of this side of the family, way up on the east coast. So I got to learn incredible things about my grandparents, from their paper trail.

I read my grandfathers letters from the war. I thumbed through my grandmothers term papers from Rice, circa 1943 (she was one of the first women to go, I think). The original floor plans to their house, photos of Hurricane Carla (that they got to experience first hand). Disrupting interior designs formulated in the late 60’s is a small price to pay for being able to read those things and take the knowledge with you.

My Grandmother is the most well-read person I’ve ever met. There’s something in the realm of 6000 books in her house in Virginia. I think she’d approve of us learning so much about the way they lived through a little light reading. Even if the music isn’t quite appropriate.

Thirty-two thousand feet

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Ok, so Flying. The human being is not designed to comfortably deal with sitting in a pressurized metal tube 32K of above blessed solid ground. We humans of the 6’ tall variety are further not designed to sit in a window seat, with business man in front doing the full recline thing. The thing about coach, one person leans back the rest of us are kind of compelled to as well.

Most folks are quiet commuters, immersed in their paper or what not. nobody likes being in here so we dive in to a book, music a website post to keep our minds off the absurdity of where we’ve placed ourselves for $300. A rare few cover it up with an excess of conversation with the first person that will listen, another effort at immortality by imposing your information on someone else.You’re remembered, you’re passed on lodged forcibly in consciousness of someone you’ve never met. The guy next to me is apparently comfortable with the status of his existence and thus nice and quiet (although he is taking up a lot of the arm-rest).

The view from up here. I love flying the planes with the route mapped on the little screen on the seat back in front of you. You can look down at nowhere, Ohio and wonder whose doing what, our existences mutually exclusive even though we occupy the same point on the 2-D screen.

I wonder if when my grandparents were born, they thought they’d see the tops of clouds on a regular basis. They lived in as much of an Accelerando as we do, maybe more so. (It’s a Kim Stanley-Robinson term, i won’t explain it because everyone should read him more). This week I saw the paper trial of a 20th century life. Tax returns from the 40’s, report cards from the 60’s. We wont have that. We’ll have a digital ghost maybe, magnetic memores of our 1040s that our kids will get on a disk, or it’s future-analog. Is that a loss ? i think I learned more about my grandparents this after a fit of cleaning in the Virginia house than I have in the past 10 years of brief visits.

Maybe that’s the story behind my loud-talking commuter three rows up. We haven’t left a physical mark as the previous generation did. Our correspondences disappear into the electronic aether. Our records, hell even our music and books, are all 0’s and 1’s. So we talk to the stranger across the aisle loud enough for the whole coach cabin to hear. We self importantly shout at our phones in the terminal, hoping to the deity of your choice that we’ve impacted someone, somewhere, as the proof of our existence is so terribly insubstantial. We tap out text messages to people we could just as easily call, etching ‘I love you, I miss you’ onto the electronic nothingness in the hopes that our children’s children might know us.

The right-side of the country

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I’m traveling this week, so I’m going to inflict observations about where I am upon the unexpectant and imaginary readers of this site.

DFW
If Austin is a slightly-too-hairy, likable, well intentioned hippy with a cowboy hat, then Dallas is a corporate executive in boots, with a sushi menu under one arm, and dual republican party/NRA membership card in the back-pocket of his Armani pants. I hate this town. Even A brief visit to the airport in enough send me into fits. A Starbucks on every corner, even in the airport, that sheen of false glitz every where you look. Even in the older parts of the airport it’s like they took the brown-crappy-70’s style, rolled high-gloss-shellack over the whole thing, and then applied the same strategy to the city as a whole.

It trys to be cosmopolitan and succeeds only in disappointing us with the way it strains to be more than it is. A city without soul, lacking lay-line and epicenter. There’s no draw for us, no cultural, instinctual reason to be here and the faster we put the oh-so-forced skyline in the rearview mirror (both physically and metaphorically), the better off we’ll all be for it.
Ft. Worth’s a nice place though.

Williamsburg, VA

The trees here are tall. The rivers are wider and yet there’s less sky. It’s bigger and smaller. Give and take, I guess. At home you drive through the hill-country and at times you fell like you’re flying. Here you feel small, in your place. It’s interesting the first folks (the first white guys anyway) to come here made their way up these tidewater peninsulas. You can kind of see how intimidating it must have been, (and they didn’t know the damn forest went all the way from Maine to Florida. ) I wonder how or if that experience affected the end-product that ended up out country.

It is beautiful though. There’s dogwoods in bloom and ornamental plums and all sorts of other flowery bits i have no damn clue about. Here you drive through tunnels of trees past really cool costal marshes on one side and picturesque brick colonials on the other. I saw the Yorktown battlefield, where the British surrendered in 1781 and where my dad hung out while cutting class in 1968. I wonder which event had more relevance to me.

It feels older here and younger at the same time. I feel like I’ve come back to the ‘old country’ or the civilized capitol after a stint in the hinterlands. At the same time it’s forced: that rushed youth of our country trying to be just as much of a player as all the other kids in the playground, without really knowing how.

I would say this part of the country is trying harder to be american (maybe the proximity to D.C.) where as the west, it just is. We’re not there because its where the ships landed and we have to shout ‘we’re here and we’re just as good as you are.’ We’re there because the ships landed and we started walking. We needed some more sky, I think.

Yeah, this is a bit much, but I’ve been reading M. John Harrison lately and apparently it’s rubbing off.