Meditations On Groton

[mallorys_camera]

I’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…

Comments

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I have **never** lived anywhere that had "take the bus" as an option. Public transport is scarce on this side of the Mississippi River...

[robby.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering what you're up to.....the new apartment and working car make you middle class again, which could be boring. Even John Waters has taken to hitchhiking around...to give up some control of his life.

http://dcist.com/2012/05/band_who_picked_up_hitchiking_john.php

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

That's what makes me so mad about this current administration's energy policy! Alternative fuel sources are all very fine and good, but nobody has figured out an alternative fuel source for cars -- those electric cars are a joke -- and in the meantime the vast majority of Americans are absolutely dependent on their cars.

Gas prices here seem to be coming down a bit, I guess as the dollar strengthens in comparison to the Euro. Still. Makes me mad that we're sitting on all that oil and we're not drilling it.

[a1icey.livejournal.com]

i think my first car is going to be diesel.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

That's very amusing. Perhaps I should formally invite John Waters to ride the bus halfway to Groton with me. Or maybe -- what the hell -- all the way to Groton.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I can drive myself or walk, but I have certainly never figured out how to walk to the store and carry back a week's worth of groceries for 20 miles!!!

[nodressrehersal.livejournal.com]

Ah, but if you'd had that apartment with this income, maybe you wouldn't be looking forward to the change that you're currently looking so forward to.

Happy to hear that things are currently on the upswing.

[chezsci.livejournal.com]

Started to worry a little...looking anxiously out the back door into the darkness. Calling out occasionally only to be startled by falling branches or squirrels leaping onto the roof. Imagination skittering towards gruesome fantasies fueled by watching too many South Korean vengeance films. And then it turns out to be only a brief hiccup, a detour through the pulped flesh of the American Dream out of which you come staggering up the beach and out of the grip of the Under Toad that lurks beneath the sheen of those quaintly fascinating blue highways and byways tourists like to visit, but would never survive if they'd suddenly got shot down and out into that darkness that presently, seemingly borders ALL of us like an aura of cobwebs and tumbleweeds.

[cwmackowski.livejournal.com]

What did you think of the Chernow book?

Glad you're getting back on track. And how spectacular that you used the word "penumbra"! ;-)

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

carlos castenada's last book written before he died is pretty much like this. sitting in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, watching the wretched wheels go 'round and having that as a thread to the sacred infinite.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Or a hybrid. Hybrids get great gas mileage, between 50 and 60 mpg.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

It's not possible. You're entirely dependent on that car.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

you'd had that apartment with this income

But then I wouldn't need the change.

Any which way you slice it,the past two and a half years have been horrifying. I'm not exactly sure how I survived it.

But hopefully that's coming to an end. Like a glimpse of distant landfall, I can see a middleclass income glittering before me. The view, as yet, is from afar, thanks to debts, no savings and constant crises. But this time next year, hopefully I'll bewalking on solid ground.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Love this.

Why don't you move somewhere close to me so we can do a writing group together?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Chernow book did a pretty solid job of humanizing the icon, I thought. Never really been big on reading about military strategy so I had to force myself to read those parts of the book. Is the American Revolution the first successful example of successful guerilla (i.e. insurgent) warfare on record?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I should hunt that book down.

My friend Susie Bright's dad was actually Carlos Castenada's thesis advisor. Castenada's thesis was the first Don Juan book. Go figure.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

And every place that I have lived, prior to cars, the people depended on a horse and wagon. Not a fancy buggy for show, but a plain wooden box with wheels to transport goods and people. If I did not have a car, I would be trying to change the city laws to permit horses inside city limits!

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

Its called the Active Side of Infinity. I have read all the Don Juan books Castenada wrote... and I have my favorites. This one read like it was easy for him to write, but the narrative and the meaning he was trying to draw from the happenings in the book feel strained. Its not one of his better books but it definitely goes in a direction that resonates with where you seem to be.