more than one way
Oct. 4th, 2007 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fflo .mp3 --> "Evacuation Route" - Michelle Shocked
One of the most comforting things I ever experienced---did you experience this thing too?---was to be carried into the house from the back seat of the car, where I'd been sleeping, and up to my bed, directly, so's I wouldn't wake up fully. And I didn't, but I did wake up some. A delicious little bit. Don't know how many times I experienced that thing, but at least once. After dark, at the end of a long drive.
And there hadn't been a hurricane. When weather disaster struck us, we went to the basement, not the car.
Weather disaster, which strikes from outside in, can help out a family whose usual disasters strike the other way 'round.
I have reason to think that my father lied about weather disasters of his childhood. Not to anyone in the family. I had no indication of the stories at all until after he and my mother were both dead. It's a long story, but one I think of now and then. No one to talk to about it, really, who knew him, or us, really, or would care. Really.
Anyway, there's that song, if you want to listen. It has something about parents and children.
Funny how claiming the stories of what sucked in your childhood means you end up thinking less, speaking less, of the parts that didn't. However few and far between, however complicated. Friends and I talk so much of the fucked-up stuff. Me and all these survivors of the awareness of weirdness. We need to. So the other thing, optional, and a little reminiscent of delusion--- we speak of it, y'know, maybe not so much.
Then there's also the way that even the happy stories are sad, or at best bittersweet, when people are dead and gone.
Even as a child I realized that much of the joy of childhood is the absence of the pain of primal loss and the presence of a sort of "okay for now" suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't have put it that way, of course. If I could have put it at all. But I knew something about something I had.
We should tell each other more stories that harken back to innocence.
---
Came by the computer to write about Friday night. It was the first night of my get-away zip east-ish last weekend. I'd driven diagonally down through Ohio, stopping only really once, if you don't count the traffic jam in Columbus--- that (stop) was in Athens, Ohio, where the university is. Odd how Ohio State is the big honkin' hoo-ha school in Ohio, and Ohio U is the remote boonies school. Ain't it?
They have their little Aggieville-type shopping neighborhood by that campus. I went there. It has a flavor of the three-horse college town removed from the rest of the world. There's some bustle, but not a whole lot. I liked it. Great vintage store. Got![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
squirrelykat what she's calling her favorite hat---and that's sayin' somethin'. Plus I knew this place was part of the first away-from-home life of my pending hostess, who went to school there. There's that their-old-haunts without-'em thing again. A thing I like, in my weird way. Tell me your hometown, loved one, and I'm just as likely to get there without you as with. Maybe moreso.
Anyway, I had a few choices later of where to cross the mountains from West Virginia (where I'd picked up the interstate) into Virginia (where I'd be for the night). The interstate route would go miles out of my way and probably be faster, but it'd be relatively boring, no doubt, and I wasn't on a strict schedule. So I went for the winding state road that'd deposit me just about where I would be bedding down. 311. Two lanes.
I like two-lane roads at night with some (but not a lot of) traffic, and that thing you do with your high beams. Have 'em on when no one's out there, and then see the oncoming lights and dim yours at point-in-time x and the other dims them at point z, where z could be before x or x before z, and these dimmings happen at an interval time t, and that's just part of driving around at night, out in the woods somewhere. Very much like the Sho', where I drove first, and first had that freedom. I liked that thing with the high beams then, and I like it now. Human Lisa is communicating with human Whomever in that other car, in a most minimal and technology-relayed short form. It's surreal if you think about it, and you don't even have to think hard.
The better part of your relationship with that person in that other car is just to pass by each other without anyone getting killed.
311 goes through the trees and along and over the mountains and then along and down, after a coupla more passes, with at least one good path crossways 'cross'd a valley. By the time I got to the top of the one hill (wrote down the name but who knows where), at something like 3004 ft above sea level, it was solidly dark, and I could see from inside the car that the stars were very bright.
I pulled off and got out to look at them. It was quiet. They were indeed very bright. There were lots more of them than there usually are. It was still quiet. In the eight or twelve minutes I was there, no cars went by at all.
Back driving, winding this way and that, I could see mostly just trees along the road---lotsa pines. Here and there was a hunk of rock. I could tell I was starting to go downhill. Then I saw a light in the woods to the left. It disappeared and then appeared again on the right. Then later there it was on the left again. After bit I realized it was the moon. Took a while, cuz the moonrise was starting out below me.
I was coming down the side of a mountain, see. So the moon could be below me. "Duh!" and "cool," thought I. Moon got higher. Still would pop up here-and-then-there, the road winding all around.
Stars then moon, company then none, and then down into company again. Popped out at the interstate and cell phone signal hit. Floated through the rest of the night.
And I sort of floated & wafted the rest of the weekend. It was a luxury. Lots felt luxurious, about being gone. Was thoroughly sick of driving on the way back Monday, which happens to me now sometimes, though it pretty much never usedta. Even on a big driveabout.
I don't know how coherent any of that is. I'm not caring. Sorry, dear. Bad steward of your readerly experience just now, what can I say.
I think I might be gonna make up some songs again soon. And they wouldn't be about that thing I was making songs up about for that last while.
This thing could be good.
One of the most comforting things I ever experienced---did you experience this thing too?---was to be carried into the house from the back seat of the car, where I'd been sleeping, and up to my bed, directly, so's I wouldn't wake up fully. And I didn't, but I did wake up some. A delicious little bit. Don't know how many times I experienced that thing, but at least once. After dark, at the end of a long drive.
And there hadn't been a hurricane. When weather disaster struck us, we went to the basement, not the car.
Weather disaster, which strikes from outside in, can help out a family whose usual disasters strike the other way 'round.
I have reason to think that my father lied about weather disasters of his childhood. Not to anyone in the family. I had no indication of the stories at all until after he and my mother were both dead. It's a long story, but one I think of now and then. No one to talk to about it, really, who knew him, or us, really, or would care. Really.
Anyway, there's that song, if you want to listen. It has something about parents and children.
Funny how claiming the stories of what sucked in your childhood means you end up thinking less, speaking less, of the parts that didn't. However few and far between, however complicated. Friends and I talk so much of the fucked-up stuff. Me and all these survivors of the awareness of weirdness. We need to. So the other thing, optional, and a little reminiscent of delusion--- we speak of it, y'know, maybe not so much.
Then there's also the way that even the happy stories are sad, or at best bittersweet, when people are dead and gone.
Even as a child I realized that much of the joy of childhood is the absence of the pain of primal loss and the presence of a sort of "okay for now" suspension of disbelief. I wouldn't have put it that way, of course. If I could have put it at all. But I knew something about something I had.
We should tell each other more stories that harken back to innocence.
---
Came by the computer to write about Friday night. It was the first night of my get-away zip east-ish last weekend. I'd driven diagonally down through Ohio, stopping only really once, if you don't count the traffic jam in Columbus--- that (stop) was in Athens, Ohio, where the university is. Odd how Ohio State is the big honkin' hoo-ha school in Ohio, and Ohio U is the remote boonies school. Ain't it?
They have their little Aggieville-type shopping neighborhood by that campus. I went there. It has a flavor of the three-horse college town removed from the rest of the world. There's some bustle, but not a whole lot. I liked it. Great vintage store. Got
squirrelykat what she's calling her favorite hat---and that's sayin' somethin'. Plus I knew this place was part of the first away-from-home life of my pending hostess, who went to school there. There's that their-old-haunts without-'em thing again. A thing I like, in my weird way. Tell me your hometown, loved one, and I'm just as likely to get there without you as with. Maybe moreso.Anyway, I had a few choices later of where to cross the mountains from West Virginia (where I'd picked up the interstate) into Virginia (where I'd be for the night). The interstate route would go miles out of my way and probably be faster, but it'd be relatively boring, no doubt, and I wasn't on a strict schedule. So I went for the winding state road that'd deposit me just about where I would be bedding down. 311. Two lanes.
I like two-lane roads at night with some (but not a lot of) traffic, and that thing you do with your high beams. Have 'em on when no one's out there, and then see the oncoming lights and dim yours at point-in-time x and the other dims them at point z, where z could be before x or x before z, and these dimmings happen at an interval time t, and that's just part of driving around at night, out in the woods somewhere. Very much like the Sho', where I drove first, and first had that freedom. I liked that thing with the high beams then, and I like it now. Human Lisa is communicating with human Whomever in that other car, in a most minimal and technology-relayed short form. It's surreal if you think about it, and you don't even have to think hard.
The better part of your relationship with that person in that other car is just to pass by each other without anyone getting killed.
311 goes through the trees and along and over the mountains and then along and down, after a coupla more passes, with at least one good path crossways 'cross'd a valley. By the time I got to the top of the one hill (wrote down the name but who knows where), at something like 3004 ft above sea level, it was solidly dark, and I could see from inside the car that the stars were very bright.
I pulled off and got out to look at them. It was quiet. They were indeed very bright. There were lots more of them than there usually are. It was still quiet. In the eight or twelve minutes I was there, no cars went by at all.
Back driving, winding this way and that, I could see mostly just trees along the road---lotsa pines. Here and there was a hunk of rock. I could tell I was starting to go downhill. Then I saw a light in the woods to the left. It disappeared and then appeared again on the right. Then later there it was on the left again. After bit I realized it was the moon. Took a while, cuz the moonrise was starting out below me.
I was coming down the side of a mountain, see. So the moon could be below me. "Duh!" and "cool," thought I. Moon got higher. Still would pop up here-and-then-there, the road winding all around.
Stars then moon, company then none, and then down into company again. Popped out at the interstate and cell phone signal hit. Floated through the rest of the night.
And I sort of floated & wafted the rest of the weekend. It was a luxury. Lots felt luxurious, about being gone. Was thoroughly sick of driving on the way back Monday, which happens to me now sometimes, though it pretty much never usedta. Even on a big driveabout.
I don't know how coherent any of that is. I'm not caring. Sorry, dear. Bad steward of your readerly experience just now, what can I say.
I think I might be gonna make up some songs again soon. And they wouldn't be about that thing I was making songs up about for that last while.
This thing could be good.
