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Meditations On Groton
May. 18th, 2012 07:57 amI’m here. I’m alive.
I just became… for lack of a better word… untethered.
Odd to think that an old beat-up car was my umbilicus to reality, but I suspect it was, I suspect it is. I remember when I bought that car, half on a whim, brand new, maybe two weeks after the model came back on the market, my shiny red Volkswagen Beetle. I remember the ad in the magazine, “Hello-o-o-o, Old Hippie!”
Oh, my. Yes, that ad spoke to me.
It was the fuel pump. Easy fix but I had to save up for it.
In the meantime I took buses. In theory, of course, I’m all in favor of public transportation but the public transportation here is mostly patronized by the lost and the damned on their way to fucking Groton. Guilt by association. While I took public transportation, I became one of them.
Every afternoon before I got on the bus, I would go to the library and take out a book.
Ithaca has a truly amazing public library. I will miss it.
One day it was The Medium Next Door, the true life adventures of a suburban Boston ghost whisperer.
The next it was Erica Jong’s sex anthology, Sugar in My Bowl.
Then it was Growing Up Amish.
Finally it was Ron Chernow’s Washington, A Life.
I am nothing if not eclectic in my reading tastes. And I read fast.
But nothing could really protect me from the unraveling penumbra of those sad lives on the bus. I mean, these people were lost. I may be lost too, but common sense and the small, still voice within both tell me it’s a temporary state for me. It’s kinda like I’m been taking a tour of rural poverty and social isolation, but pretty soon I’m gonna step on that plane and go home.
These people live there.
I don’t even know how to describe what it was like to spy on them covertly over the pages of whatever book I was holding in my lap.
It was this hideous feeling of impermanence. They’re born, they die, they get knocked up at 15 so someone else can be born and die, and for what? They get tattoos, they engage in loud, raucous verbal battles on the bus, they sip Colt 45 covertly out of brown paper bags so the bus driver won’t see them and kick them off. And for what? They have consciousness, I have to assume their consciousness is structured kind of like mine. And for what?
It’s like watching socks in the drier, really. They just go round and round and round.
And watching them, it was sort of as though impermanence had become a physical dimension. Nothing endures, nothing abides. As though I was trapped inside a Schrödingerian paradox. I couldn’t even look at something before it started to transform into something else, and yet the more it transformed into something else, the more it stayed the same.
A very, very, very odd sensation.
I’ve certainly taken public transportation in a lot of places, and I’ve never had that sense before. I remember when I was doing census work in Groton, the strange, unsettling dreams that place gave me. I think there must be something very weird and Stephen King-ish about Groton.
Anyway, I am happy to have my car back.
###
Yesterday I lined up an apartment for the month of June. It’s a beautiful apartment too, like something out of a French movie. If I’d been living in an apartment like that the entire time I was in Ithaca, I’d have been happy here.
And the work I’m doing now – go figure – is remunerative and entertaining, if exhausting. Although I can only write about it in a locked entry. The only real limit to how much I can make is my own endurance. So, again, if that had been around the entire time I was in Ithaca…
Will have to reschedule the oral surgery, which I had to postpone while the car was out of commission. Hopefully, there is still time to do that before I leave.
Must say RTT has been a joy to be around. We’ve been holing up at night and working our way through the early Spike Lee oeuvre. Do the Right Thing is still a great movie. Jungle Fever is almost a great movie. Summer of Sam, which I remember liking very much when it first came out, doesn’t stand up quite as well.
And now I must work…
I just became… for lack of a better word… untethered.
Odd to think that an old beat-up car was my umbilicus to reality, but I suspect it was, I suspect it is. I remember when I bought that car, half on a whim, brand new, maybe two weeks after the model came back on the market, my shiny red Volkswagen Beetle. I remember the ad in the magazine, “Hello-o-o-o, Old Hippie!”
Oh, my. Yes, that ad spoke to me.
It was the fuel pump. Easy fix but I had to save up for it.
In the meantime I took buses. In theory, of course, I’m all in favor of public transportation but the public transportation here is mostly patronized by the lost and the damned on their way to fucking Groton. Guilt by association. While I took public transportation, I became one of them.
Every afternoon before I got on the bus, I would go to the library and take out a book.
Ithaca has a truly amazing public library. I will miss it.
One day it was The Medium Next Door, the true life adventures of a suburban Boston ghost whisperer.
The next it was Erica Jong’s sex anthology, Sugar in My Bowl.
Then it was Growing Up Amish.
Finally it was Ron Chernow’s Washington, A Life.
I am nothing if not eclectic in my reading tastes. And I read fast.
But nothing could really protect me from the unraveling penumbra of those sad lives on the bus. I mean, these people were lost. I may be lost too, but common sense and the small, still voice within both tell me it’s a temporary state for me. It’s kinda like I’m been taking a tour of rural poverty and social isolation, but pretty soon I’m gonna step on that plane and go home.
These people live there.
I don’t even know how to describe what it was like to spy on them covertly over the pages of whatever book I was holding in my lap.
It was this hideous feeling of impermanence. They’re born, they die, they get knocked up at 15 so someone else can be born and die, and for what? They get tattoos, they engage in loud, raucous verbal battles on the bus, they sip Colt 45 covertly out of brown paper bags so the bus driver won’t see them and kick them off. And for what? They have consciousness, I have to assume their consciousness is structured kind of like mine. And for what?
It’s like watching socks in the drier, really. They just go round and round and round.
And watching them, it was sort of as though impermanence had become a physical dimension. Nothing endures, nothing abides. As though I was trapped inside a Schrödingerian paradox. I couldn’t even look at something before it started to transform into something else, and yet the more it transformed into something else, the more it stayed the same.
A very, very, very odd sensation.
I’ve certainly taken public transportation in a lot of places, and I’ve never had that sense before. I remember when I was doing census work in Groton, the strange, unsettling dreams that place gave me. I think there must be something very weird and Stephen King-ish about Groton.
Anyway, I am happy to have my car back.
Yesterday I lined up an apartment for the month of June. It’s a beautiful apartment too, like something out of a French movie. If I’d been living in an apartment like that the entire time I was in Ithaca, I’d have been happy here.
And the work I’m doing now – go figure – is remunerative and entertaining, if exhausting. Although I can only write about it in a locked entry. The only real limit to how much I can make is my own endurance. So, again, if that had been around the entire time I was in Ithaca…
Will have to reschedule the oral surgery, which I had to postpone while the car was out of commission. Hopefully, there is still time to do that before I leave.
Must say RTT has been a joy to be around. We’ve been holing up at night and working our way through the early Spike Lee oeuvre. Do the Right Thing is still a great movie. Jungle Fever is almost a great movie. Summer of Sam, which I remember liking very much when it first came out, doesn’t stand up quite as well.
And now I must work…
