I had great plans for Monday, none of which involved a debilitating migraine. I’m not sure what happened but i was throughly destroyed last night, so there was no comprehensive and well thought out site update as was planned in the former post. And before you question “is there anything that is well-thought-out on this site?” I say to you, “well, yes you have a very good point.”

But I digress. I think the cranial onslaught was brought on by a lack of sleep, champagne, Redbull, pickled salmon, driving in the D/FW area, the D/FW area in general and making a midnight run down I-35 to attend to our wee, defenseless dog. I’m not sure which is worse for your health, The Redbull or I-35 on memorial day weekend at 1 am.

Of course, I should have taken Mildred’s advice.

Mildred was seated across from Ali, Patti and I at the reception for the wedding we were attending in Arlington. She is silver-haired, 95 years young, the classic midwestern grandmother.

I drove in from Central Kansas,” she said picking at the fish course, a little unsure of the method of preparation that would leave salmon that particular color and consistency. “I drove in and met my daughter in Oklahoma city…it’s a long ways through Kansas, I just get sleepy so fast.”
“I had the problem on my last run through Kansas, too,” I said, trying to prop up the conversation a little longer. “Not a lot to see, you just kind of have to power through.”

“Well, now, one of my friends at the coffee shop gave me a tip for that,” she said. “Whenever i get tired now, I just pull over at a truck stop and get me some of that no-doze. Not only do i make into Oklahoma City alright, but I’m ready to go honky-tonk dancing when i get there.”

Clearly, i’ve got the wrong strategy. If Mildred can take half-a-lethal dose of caffeine at 95, I can as well. I bet she cuts a mean rug too.

I’m not sure I understand this yard thing. Before we bought the house i was fine with grass. We could co-exist in peace but overall really saw no need for it. I even claimed, on several occasions, that if i ever had a house I’d probably xerascape the entire yard to get rid of all that water sucking St. Augustine and return my section of Texas to it’s natural splendor.

Then I got a mower. And a trimmer. And I got entirely obsessed.

To be fair, we’re still a bit hippie about it. We don’t put a lot of crap chemicals on the lawn. We let it grow a little taller than most folks in the ‘hood. We spray beneficial nematodes on it every spring.

But when it gets tall enough and dry enough, I love firing up the equipment and crafting a perfectly trimmed grass plane. I’d like to say it has something to do with pride in where you live, but for me it’s actually the act of yard care itself that i seem to enjoy. Wielding the destructive power of the weed-eater (also know as the-mighty-sword-of-foliage-repression). Mom, Dad ? You’re weekend-work-camps have successfully brainwashed me. I have become Hank Hill.

Here’s some numbers. At last mowing/trimming and clean up I burned off about 460 calories, in about an hour, with a peak-heart-rate of 129 (yup I’m a big old dork, who wore a hear rate monitor while mowing). That’s not huge but it’s something. That’s about what I do in half an hour on the stationary bikes at the “we want you to hate your body” Golds Gym that we pay to go to.

If I ever decide to get out this graphic design gig, I can start a personal-trainer/manual-labor service. Get all the folks normally at Golds on the tread mills and have them push mowers. I’d be rich in no time. No, seriously. That, or Gold’s should hook up all those treadmills and elliptical machines to generators, and we could power entire cities with fitness buffs with poor self image. They already have the “Don’t you feel ugly ?” propaganda campaign going, they just need a little bit of hardware. But I digress…

Faulty business plans aside, I really don’t think we’re made to sit and stare at computer screens as much as we do. Maybe we need to get out and walk around more, thus the obsession with my grass. There’s something very deeply satisfying about taking care of your land too. Maybe it goes back to my families farming roots. Or more likely I’ve just become fully and utterly suburbanized. Next thing you know I’ll be drinking Michelob Ultra and watching NASCAR, shouting “Go Fast, Turn left !!!!!”

*shudder*

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.

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.