Subterranean homesick blues
Detail from "Untitled (Big Man)," 2000, a
sculpture by artist Ron Mueck, in the
Hirschhorn
Museum's permanent collection. Photo
by Jennifer Trinkle.
I'm still here, still
in DC, the blog and my blogging friends
neglected. I'll be catching up over the next
week, but in the meantime ...
When we flew into Dulles twelve days ago, I
thought I was over it. We’ve been gone from
DC for exactly two years and I’ve adjusted to
life in Northern California. I prefer the
open, laid-back vibe of Berkeley and San
Francisco and the first thing I recoiled from
when I walked the familiar avenues of DC was
the attitude. Lots of self-important people
with important tasks. This town is crammed
with policy wonks, the young ones fresh from
graduate school, green with enthusiasm, the
old ones graying in their suits, cynical but
perhaps even more full of it, the seriousness
of their jobs, the weight of the decisions
they make, a heavy surety of purpose.
But it’s beautiful here. I’ve always loved
the brick rowhouses with their curving lines,
the public buildings full of grace. Late
April is too early for wilting humidity, too
late for wintry mix. Rock Creek park is
punctuated by the delicate whites and pinks
of dogwoods, with twisted redbuds adding
their outlines against the pale green of new
leaves. Everything growing is green or white
or pink, though we’re missing the explosion
of azaleas that happens in late spring.
I was cocky. I told people that the pull I
felt for my adopted hometown (which
intensified greatly with Obama’s election)
was gone. Then, tonight, our last night here,
I felt the pangs.
I have no choice in the matter. We’ll fly
back tomorrow evening and I’ll go back to my
strange little life, return to my third
incarnation, now playing the part of a
stay-at-home mother with a writing complex.
I’ll spend hours without stepping into
crowds, wander the empty sidewalks of my
moribund neighborhood, thinking back to the
bustling streets of DC, to my quick jogs
across busy intersections with only seconds
to spare before the light change. Once a
month I’ll meet with my writing group and
feel awkward, without context, but still
grateful to be there. And I’ll dig in my
heels, try to grow a life without the context
of work and a love of place.
Will blog for squirrels
Nora,
researching a blog post.
The writing to survive
household is traveling this week and next,
from DC to MD to DE to NJ and back. In the
meantime, Nora, our Russian Squirrel Hound,
will be filling in. Or something like that.
Expect a photo post or two.
P.S. -- People googling my name: You are
freaking me out.
Not that kind of blog
Back when I was into admiring my own legs.
Mirror, Little House, 1986?
I wonder if he (or she:
yeah, right!) was disappointed. From a little
box on Google or AOL or Yahoo, he
typed "she was drunk"
naked legs and somehow ended up at
writing to survive. Yeah, I've written the
sentence she was
drunk here once, in one of
my
short pieces of
fiction.
Check one. Certainly legs come up somewhere
on the blog, perhaps in that same piece, but
for sure in Heartbreaker
with the
line admiring my legs in
the dashboard light. Check two. And you
might notice a link to Robin Easton's
wonderful blog Naked in
Eden along the sidebar. Check
three.
But did this anonymous surfer, this seeker of
information on a drunken woman, perhaps one
with naked legs, leave happy?
I'll never know.
What about the Bertie Wooster fan who typed
in their hero's name but added an interesting
second search term: birching?
I have never written about this practice, a
form of corporal punishment that involves
hitting someone's bare skin (usually the
buttocks) with a birch rod, though I have
mentioned the Neighbornator's
birch tree. Google lumps the blameless tree
together with its not-so-innocent use.
Combine the search engine's folly with
my post on
a crush -- I had a nickname for
him, a code word really, so that I could
write it in my notebooks without fear of
discovery. Bertie Wooster.
-- and
another imprecise conclusion is reached.
There is always an answer, some reason why
writing to survive becomes a search result.
It's no mystery. You can look at the keywords
and the text to figure it out. Still, I have
to wonder why some people decide to click on
a link to this blog when there are better
sources of information out there. For
example, yes,
Happy Easter the hamster
may have been
in the early stages of rigor mortis when we
found his corpse in the basement, but this
doesn't mean that I know anything about the
actual process, what the body goes through
after death. Inevitably the people searching
on how long rigor
mortis gerbil and how long does it
take until rigor mortis disappears
had to move on
to more authoritative sources. And, sad soul
who turned to the internet to find out
whether hamster rat poison
survive,
I think that the two are a fatal combination,
though you have my deepest sympathy. I've
been there.
Google searchers, AllTheWeb seekers,
AltaVista clickers, I'll never know if you
found what you were looking for, if what you
sought was on this blog, because you probably
didn't leave a comment, just came and
skimmed. Most of you left in a hurry, though
a few clicked through a page or two. I'd like
to know, was it satisfying? Did you leave
happy, or did you still feel a yearning for
information you didn't receive?
There are stories behind every search. The
people who usually end up here are often led
by a sense of anxiety, fear, or worry. I'd
like to soothe, to provide reassurance. In
that spirit, I give you the below list,
question and answer, taken from the searches
that led people here.
can my
relationship survive if I am twenty years her
senior?
It
depends.
crush on married woman
I'm a married woman who is
prone to long term crushes
(though I
seem to stay away from married men even in
my fantasy life). I never expect anyone to
have a crush on me. Enjoy the unreality of
it all and don't go any further.
dysfunctional
families at easter dinner
What makes Easter dinner
different from any other dysfunctional family
dinner? It will be predictable, probably
unpleasant. Prepare yourself.
explain hangover
to parents
They've probably
experienced a hangover before and know the
symptoms, but you can always blame it on a
tummy bug. Chances are they will choose to
believe you. How old are you, anyway?
My striptease
saved my marriage
Is this a hope or a statement of fact? I am
doubtful of the ability of striptease to save
anyone's marriage.
Bad stepmother
blogs
Despite my
one post
complaining about her
(which no
longer feels relevant, but served a
purpose at the time), I love my stepmother
and would never claim that she is bad.
Still, I'm sure there are plenty of blogs
out there that discuss "bad" stepmothers.
This isn't one of them.
Just remember: someone knows what you've been
looking for, or at least they know the words
you've chosen in an attempt to find it.
Luckily, though, they don't know your name.
Not yet, anyway.
(For an earlier post on the same topic,
see How did
you get here?)
Procrastination, B-29 bombers and ball turret gunners
Sometimes, though, when ideas are percolating, our minds lead us in strange directions. (And, of course, that's what's going on here, not really procrastination, but preparation. Percolation. All this will all lead to a wondrous stream of language soon enough. Right??)
Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the
B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic
bomb.
I don't want to be
loosey-goosey on the details, because that
would give it away, but I've been thinking a
lot lately about the B-29
bomber, nicknamed the
Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed
the plane in the early 1940s as a
long-range bomber, large enough to reach
the shores of Japan, and it was a
technological wonder. It also was a bit of
a rush job, with early models especially
prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype
burst into flames on a test run when an
engine fire quickly spread to the wing,
destroying it. All ten crew members and
another twenty people in a nearby meat
packing plant were killed. By the end of
the war, engineers had worked out most of
the kinks, though the American public was
most likely clueless about its defects
(for example, this
anti-Japanese government propaganda
film on the bomber is all
blue skies and heavy bombs).
Ball turret.
From B-29s my mind meandered to ball turrets, those little bulbs of steel and plexiglass that popped out of the bellies of B-17s and B-24s, two guns loaded on either side for enemy planes. The gunner would be cramped in the ball turret for hours, trapped, rotating, circling, with a bird's eye view of the destruction below and in the air. There are two excellent oral histories by former ball turret gunners on the web. Earl Mills, who flew in a B-17 and was eventually shot down, tells of his experiences, while author Sabine Ulibarri details a particularly frightening mission in an excerpt from Mayhem Was Our Business. Both men were diagnosed with combat fatigue, better known now as post-traumatic stress disorder.The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell
Stryker bed frame.
Really, though, what led me
to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts
on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the
first six months, he was in a Stryker
hospital bed frame (often used for patients
in traction). From what I can tell, his
mid-60s model was made up of a skinny
mattress supported on either side by two
mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he
would wait for the moment when the bed would
begin to move, to slowly flip his position
from supine to prone. What would it have been
like to be in that bed, sick, practically
skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost
gone, in and out of lucidity as his body
fought off opportunistic infection? It turned
him at least twice a day and he would often
beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep
it from happening, in part because he
associated it with the painful removal of his
burn dressings, with debridement.
A man who avoided going overseas in World War
II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda,
rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized
war stories of precision and heroism with an
undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years
later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear.
Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.
Off to write. Slowly.