8 posts tagged “local”

My cup mouldeth over outside Cup A Joe's on Hillsborough St, and I'm reading theology blogs and watching traffic drag past from a little stone table on the sidewalk. It's dusky, and as the light and heat fade, I'm chewing the ice from my iced mocha, and ponder the phrase "balls deep in culture." Surely, if such a feat could be, this scene, right here, right now, has nothing remarkably in common with what it signifies. How many remarkable little conversations are going on just inside that window pane? How much goes unsaid? There's nobody to ask out here, and nobody who'd know.

I'm soon to go play some video games or something. After I finish this beverage, $3.16 worth of an excuse to sit out here, I'm off to waste an evening on wine and Halo 3. In truth of course, I'd like to come back here; or follow these people, or find them again - people like the hot (as in 'sweaty') girl and her boyfriend who just ran past me, indefatigably intent on another quarter mile, or the little mutt Ziggy and his black-socked-and-sneakered, middle-aged rock-and-roll-guy owner - and accompany them to wherever and whatever misadventure is sure to befall them after they take a shower (and yeah, they all need a shower).

That whatever they're up to is as pedestrian as... well, as pedestrian as they are, is no injunction. It's kind of the ideal. The paraphilia of it: the lust to know what's going on in the lives of people who just happen to be around. It's filthy gratification: sipping coffee, watching them, and guessing.

What could be a better hobby?

As the ambiance cools here before closing time, and I prepare to leave here, I accept, for the moment, that I am to the people here at the cafe what they all are to me: somebody walking by, of middling interest and plausible intrigue. I'm aware of a deep abrogation what structure comprises us, a chiasmus of sorts, an antinomy:

When you're alone, everybody's with everybody else, but to everybody else who's alone, you're with everybody else.

Throw in the word 'God', and it's theological.

The French Kicks were beautiful.

I got to tell one of them about what their songs meant to me. I wasn't trying to be nice, I just meant it. I got to say thanks.

Tonight was really nice.

There were so many beautiful girls, and a guy my age, perched in a back corner of the bar in this red checked shirt looking for all the world like a leopard, listening and watching, his back curved with impossible relaxation, and yet such intensity in the eyes of a seemingly effortless person. I wished anybody else had seen him; I looked at him and saw a man I understand somehow. An instantly lovable, estimable, dangerous species. The world belongs to such people. It's no imagination - you can find the wilderness looking back at you in any crowd, if you look hard enough. Nobody else seemed to see him. We animals are really all the same, but people forget. Here was an artist's image of an artist, a maverick scent, an obvious cleverness, lapsing at ease. The sexy girls in the make-up and the beautiful dresses, dancing up front and getting less attention than they'd thought they were - they didn't seem to understand, somehow.

The music was wonderful. So much happened. They seemed sweet. I sang along. The band played nicely. It was fun.

Okay, giving back up books and reading stuff again.

I think I can do it this time.

Hey!!! A family of deer!

They just passed through our yard, single file. They weren't so small - long flicking tails, some size to them. We have a pile of dead branches and sawed trunks that they like to come behind. There may be flowers there that they eat, that I've not seen.

Hm.

There they are.

I'm watching a little one wander through our yard, one ginger step at a time, nose to the ground, puling at stems. His big brown brother isn't too far behind - ears perked up, he's watching the woods. They're running! Tails up, hopping gait turns into a sprint, like furry traincars picking up speed and heading away in unison. How silent they are though!

Guess something in a neighbor's yard startled them. They probably won't be back to our woods for the rest of the day. We'll see them again though.

The easiest way to find them in the morning is to watch for the shine of the sunlight on the leaves out there. Wherever there's a brown shadow, it's either a tree or a deer. Don't focus too hard, and if the shadow moves, you've found a deer.

I will miss the woods when I'm gone.

Today I'm going to take some pictures of the old house that burned down about 12 days ago.

There was a fire awhile back, and a small abandoned home on Carpenter's Pond Road just down the way burned to the ground. All thats left are a few brick columns, and a few happenstance boards propped up against them. Everything else is char. Dad thinks somebody must have broke into the house to spend the night, and their candle burnt the place. Or, it could have been arson: the house, we think, was owned by the people who live in the house about 25 yards east - itself something of a shack - and they could have burned it to save the money it would cost to bulldoze it. As it is, they'll still need a bulldozer, so maybe not. It was a pretty old building to look at: a house that'd rejoined the woods around it, in a way. It was covered in dirt, and the paint was almost scraped off by all our weather. I didn't see the fire myself.

A few weeks ago I saw a different fire, though. Another guy not too far from here had a barn full of machine tools, a pretty nice shop, evidently. It burnt. He had built a lighthouse in his front yard years ago, which is still there.

It's supposed to be warm today. I'll go for a run. Not too late, though: it'll be getting cool this evening.

I'll be sad to see these days pass. They aren't easy or 'fun', but it's important to be here. I don't want to end them.

Dad's in bed again. Mom's at work. I'm useless. As usual, it seems.

Last night, I helped my dad set up his old Marantz stereo amplifier (analog!), with some speakers, and a tape deck. I used to have this old setup in my room before I left for college - then, I had two other speakers. Sounds good. The volume and balance pots on the amp are messed up though. There are two more speakers we could hook up, but I'm pretty sure they're humidity-damaged by now, and as I recall, the bass response on them was already shaky. Oh well.

We listened to tapes of great piano players, and my dad made himself a big Jack and 7. Every once in awhile, he'd go off to play something on the piano himself, inspired by something he'd heard. I didn't really miss my guitar.

I found a bunch of old punk tapes, too.

My dad's always had better taste in music than me. I think I've always known this, even as I made him buy me rock albums, excitedly stole Kelly's cds, copped records, downloaded indie rock for mixtape-stuffing. I've heard some good stuff on my own, made a good run of hearing as much of "right now" as possible. But I can't compete. This is it, I'm tipping my King; his ancient cassettes are easily and simply better than anything I've heard this year, maybe last year too. Losing this one is as inevitable as growing up.

This was a lot of fun, though.

Last night it wasn't windy, and only a little cold. Standing out by the door, watching cabs pass. Say hello, take $10, step aside, admit one. I'm both bookends for the evening - say goodnight, step aside for 82 people to leave.

Some friend of apparently everybody's died yesterday. He committed suicide, as far as I've heard. In the center of our long hallway, I saw a huge, stocky man holding his girlfriend, sobbing. I watched, and watched the girls at the other end of the hall watch, watched them sober up, listening to the wordless grief, anger, and confusion, coming back out of themselves. Something about the sound of that brought out interesting reactions in people. I watched some turn with anger, contempt, at the sound, eyes widening to a lame resentment of this abrupt display of humanity. One of the bartenders spent 25 minutes on the phone with someone outside. I'm used to seeing him differently, stoic and gamefaced; irony, hesitation, frailty, ambivalence crack through. He smiled helplessly at me.

At the end of the night, a drunk girl waiting for a cab slurred a question at that group as they left, and I asked if she knew them. She growled, "I know lots of people around here. I'm waiting for my cab," and turned her shoulder to me. She, at least, stayed intact.

These days I float, listening to old music, little errands. Found my first summer song, I think. It's early yet, but we'll see.

The rain that came early this morning brought a decrease in temperature. We lost 20 degrees just after dawn. The little leaves on the berry bush out the window have pursed and stiffened. Rainwater has a way of making trees look especially nude: here, a pine has black mold bruises on her bark, and a few feet away, her sister is thinner and veiled from 10 feet up to her crown in green lichen. Branches bare, a tree without her greens, without her summer vines, upholds only claws to the sky. Trees asking, and the rain coming down is a response and from the sky, grey as a newspaper, that is no answer. None of us are sure whether it's really, really okay to bloom yet. The layered golds and browns on the forest floor, like shredded sheaves of papyrus, are the unreadable history of nature, among living ruins: between the trees, bare columns themselves, lay past years of drafts of Declarations of Independence, scraps of the terms of life's uneasy Pax with her host, elegies in leaves telling of the end of every spring / summer Golden Age.

When a column falls now, in March, at this time of the season, it lies in state.

When a column falls now, of all times, it falls because it had been sick for so long. It couldn't hold out any longer. You know the trees who are unlikely to return to life - the ground around the trunk records in a halo of bark what must be life's fundamental iniquity: survival means the end of life. What survives is us, the arcane and holy interpretation of this elegy that is our human story, and more importantly, our priesthood: we owe each other the falling water and protection from the rain. After the Fall, good God gave man his habit.

As the temperature drops, we are lucky for the sacraments we have. In unlearned ages, men would read leaves, living and dead, to speak of the future of one another. We open our palms to the sky, too. As the weather warms uncertainly here, we must be grateful for the Sacraments we have - in the future, they are our past and present, and our humiliation - out of them comes such a strange promise...

Life cycles: but we have each other, blessed memories, and this one tender piety, as we, dying in life, lose bits and pieces of ourselves and others see our halos and stay perfectly silent for us.. Some season, we'll fall. It's our shared grace. It's the terms of the peace, the gilt and the saffron and the cashmere, and when it's all spilled and split and gone cold, it's our own scraps of gold on the ground.

Loving nature, I'm inclined to believe, is part the sanctification of a man, given our condition...

Outside Weaver Street Market, leaning against a patio table in the open air, I am peeling the plastic off of a Clif bar. This bar will soon be delicious. There is a sneaking breeze taking my collar up around my neck, where it will remain for the next few hours. My patent leather messenger bag is soldered to my hip: eventually, it, with friction, will smear a thick black band of warmed leather polyp onto my left jean pocket, which I will later mark with passing amusement, unaware that leather could rub off. I will bite into this bar, and eventually, because of it, an unremarkable short-term future will unravel itself, involving a bike shop, a book of Jewish kitsch recipes,  lots of walking, and a cheap au lait (iced). This will satisfy my need for a comfortable ritual near the climax of this sojourn. I will, ambivalently anyway, feel that I've earned it.

Carrboro is a bucolic, mostly-granola little village just beyond the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There are lots of trees, a few bike shops, little cafes. A ski-town, with no mountains, no snow. Every time I come out here, I feel like I'm on vacation from something. I feel like I should be taking pictures.

In front of the market, the constant foot traffic seems well-adjusted to the hidden joys of walking places, biking places, riding scooters. College boys have their jeans rolled up, and coast down the sidewalk inattentively with a few pedal-pushes, spokes clicking. It's hard to say how someone can look like an intellectual just by riding a bicycle, but, each alone with himself, wool beanie or headbanded or head bare, as they pass I glimpse managed effort or thought on his face. I note this for it's thorough familiarity, and the strangeness of it, the spectacle of beards on serious white faces, disheveled and tired and pushing past a food co-op on their way to God-knows-where in different directions, mirthless post-children probably thinking about books and girlfriends, or sealed off completely between their earbuds and their indie rock.

Down the street, black faces in a different, more honestly disheveled uniform of dirty work clothes or the telling drab layers of those who don't work, whose skin looks stained and whose eyes look heavy, leaded down by something altogether more, also and other than biology, hangovers or Lit Crit - big, intimidating men and battered-looking old men are always waiting by the bus stop that the rest of us will walk and pedal past.

It's a weird spectacle, knowing the same people see each other all the time. I am a guest here. Carrboro is not a big place.

I am, to catch us up, really, really close to biting into the Clif bar. It's headed towards my face. I can almost guess from the smell what it's going to taste like. I get the feeling that this is going to be good for me, and that, if I relax into the promise of wholesomeness that the people at Clif and and the Weaver Street Market and Carrboro in general and all the liberal sunshine that this fine day have made to me, I will find myself to be quite pleased. I resist the urge.

I watch a guy out in the shade take his laptop and leave a girl's table, and join another woman's, and I watch a little boy come up to him and tell him that he likes his coat. It is a remarkably strange coat. Two nonconformists, fitting right in.

Beside me, two old guys are talking in Spanish, watching people too. One is teasing the other about not having any money to lend, styrofoam cup with a straw bent in his hand.

Mmmh, okay. The bar tastes really good. Better than it smells. It only cost about $1.79.

I look out, all the white, shiny, opaque and busy faces, intent on each other, private thoughts, food, laptop screens. They are all puzzled and purposeful. I wonder what I'm missing, chewing my chocolate-nougat ticket to be here. I know, when I've eaten the last of it, I'll drop the wrapper into the trash and start walking automatically towards whatever I'll make my next diversion, nothing in hand, nothing much in mind yet. I don't know what I will find, but I'm a little sad, seeing all this and that, and knowing that whatever I find won't be what they all seem to already have. This bar really does tastes too nice to eat slowly. This is some kind of double-chocolate, maybe.

That, then, there, with some walking, became this, now, here.

What should I have done?

Found out Harold died yesterday. My dad and I stood out in the cool in front of his old house, in front of his widow, speechless and empty-handed. My arms crossed themselves in front of my chest involuntarily when the wind whipped a little, and stayed that way. She didn't make anything of the tears running down her face, and as she told us about his heart-attack, her voice didn't rise and fall with emotion. She said it matter-of-fact, just as certain and as unadorned a fact as 'Harold's not here'.

"I supposed y'all'd have heard. Everybody else around here knew, and I just assumed somebody'd told you about it", she offered. They hadn't. He didn't know, and I, walking up a moment too late, didn't know she'd just told us. He turned to me, labored, shock etched in his red face.

 "Pat, did you hear that?"

"No, what?"

 "Harold had a heart attack. He died after Christmas." 

"Is that right?" And from then on I just stood there.

My dad, in his way, responded as best you could, with one of his little soapbox eulogies that are so characteristic of him to offer, so annoying sometimes, and yet so clearly built on moments like this. "Harold had a lot of good in him. Some bad, too, no doubt about it." "Yes he did," she replied quickly, with a brass in her voice that seemed to say everything about her life with Harold that didn't seem worth saying out loud anymore. Things you could only guess at, but were always plain as day.

Earlier today, my dad told me, "Harold's a cheat, but he's a good mechanic." Harold was a meth addict, and for the years that we knew him, barely got by, renting or sub-letting old houses, putting his old tires and chop-shop roadsters out front of a succession of different muddy lots and gravel driveways all over and around Highway 98. 10 hour days at Morgan's, doing jobs on the side for folks like my dad, occasionally parenting. Was he 40 years old? Was he 50?

His wife, though, I won't soon forget. The comically poor country woman, a stereotype everywhere but in her own presence, standing out in the cooling evening with us, in a faded, sagging grey t-shirt with her sagging body and thickly pendulous breasts, long and thick brown hair senselessly pulled from her face, her matter-of-fact eyes askance. I realize for the fourth or fifth time consecutively that I'm looking at a kind of noblewoman. My dad told her if she ever needed anything, to get a hold of us, and she told us she had our number, with a certainty in her voice that seemed to want to assure us we wouldn't hear from her. In the background, a TV flicked colors all over the kitchen and the walls silently reflected them. We knew she had a daughter. From the porch, her living room looked clean. I wondered if her life was worse, better, or 'just different'. She never seemed to look up to tell me. I didn't feel quite present enough to ask without pretense. My dad, an undisputed master of this kind of awkwardness, was silent, and so was I.

We'd come to get a tire replaced for us. She said goodnight to us, I walked back to the Tercel, and my dad to the Frontier, in silence except for the soft crush of our shoes against the drive.