The Gulf
We made it home. We'd had such a wonderful time that we were able to endure the first night without air conditioning. Well, I was. I don't suffer so much from the heat as long as I don't have to do anything strenuous; I mostly just lie around and become stupefied, like a basking reptile. But Chris suffers, and he didn't sleep much that night, and by the next morning I was getting a little cranky myself, especially after the AC guy came back and told us that the repairs will be (A) major and (B) not doable until Tuesday, so I went to Home Depot and bought a swamp cooler. This is a portable AC unit, easier to install than a window unit because it only has a stretchy tube that must be vented through the window. If you care to hear more than this about the technicalities of swamp coolers, I advise you to use Google so I won't have to bore everyone else to tears, but I will say it works a lot better than I expected and we do have one perfectly comfortable room now (the bedroom, natch).
Other than that, I think I have post-Ringo letdown. Or something. Seeing him in concert was overwhelming -- I know I spent much of the show acting like the teenage Beatlemaniacs at the concert in A Hard Day's Night -- and having him point me out as "Big Guy" was just beyond, well, anything ever. I want a very simple star tattoo to commemorate this watershed moment in my life, but I need to cogitate a while about where it should be and how it should look. I kind of like the idea of having it over my heart, because he did one of the kindest things anyone's ever done for me without even knowing the half of it, but I'm still determined to have chest surgery one day and I know that can affect the placement of tattoos. I wouldn't want that surgery, in particular, to ruin a tattoo that was so symbolic of the journey itself.
Also, the Gulf. I'm homesick for it somehow, and guilty that, before this trip, we hadn't been to the Mississippi coast for four years. We used to go a lot. Then, after the storm (I say storm because it was a natural disaster there, and one that received less media attention than it perhaps should have), we made one trip in 2006, and we saw casinos ripped open with their guts hanging out and people living in tents on the slabs of their houses and things on the beach that shouldn't have been there -- not bones, not that we saw, but personal papers, checkbooks, the detritus of people's lives. We waded through the crushed remains of the miniature golf course where we'd spent many hilarious, romantic dates, and salvaged the splintered "Bali Hi" sign from the giant tiki head hole, which now hangs in my garden. Then we went home and I wrote a story, "The Gulf," which appears in the anthology Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, and that was the first thing I ever really wrote about Katrina and, probably not coincidentally, the last piece of fiction on any subject I have completed to date. And I guess something happened, because we didn't go back. The rest of 2006 and 2007 happened, for one thing, and throughout much of that time I could barely get my shit together enough to go to the store, let alone Mississippi. But that was a place we loved, and we abandoned it for four years. Four clean years. We foolishly thought the worst was over. We didn't realize there would come a time when we would feast our eyes on any clean patch of the Gulf and wonder how long it would stay that way. We wasted all that time without even knowing we were wasting it.
Yeah, no point in beating ourselves up over it, I know. But we could have had that time. I guess the feeling is a little like the one you get when a loved one becomes sick, sick with something really bad, and you don't know yet if he's going to live or die, but you sure do think about all the extra time you wish you'd spent with him.
Her, perhaps. Ray Bradbury thinks bodies of water are female, and he may be right.
This is only going to get more rambling and maudlin if I continue, so I'll close. I mostly just wanted to say hi. Hi.
Other than that, I think I have post-Ringo letdown. Or something. Seeing him in concert was overwhelming -- I know I spent much of the show acting like the teenage Beatlemaniacs at the concert in A Hard Day's Night -- and having him point me out as "Big Guy" was just beyond, well, anything ever. I want a very simple star tattoo to commemorate this watershed moment in my life, but I need to cogitate a while about where it should be and how it should look. I kind of like the idea of having it over my heart, because he did one of the kindest things anyone's ever done for me without even knowing the half of it, but I'm still determined to have chest surgery one day and I know that can affect the placement of tattoos. I wouldn't want that surgery, in particular, to ruin a tattoo that was so symbolic of the journey itself.
Also, the Gulf. I'm homesick for it somehow, and guilty that, before this trip, we hadn't been to the Mississippi coast for four years. We used to go a lot. Then, after the storm (I say storm because it was a natural disaster there, and one that received less media attention than it perhaps should have), we made one trip in 2006, and we saw casinos ripped open with their guts hanging out and people living in tents on the slabs of their houses and things on the beach that shouldn't have been there -- not bones, not that we saw, but personal papers, checkbooks, the detritus of people's lives. We waded through the crushed remains of the miniature golf course where we'd spent many hilarious, romantic dates, and salvaged the splintered "Bali Hi" sign from the giant tiki head hole, which now hangs in my garden. Then we went home and I wrote a story, "The Gulf," which appears in the anthology Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, and that was the first thing I ever really wrote about Katrina and, probably not coincidentally, the last piece of fiction on any subject I have completed to date. And I guess something happened, because we didn't go back. The rest of 2006 and 2007 happened, for one thing, and throughout much of that time I could barely get my shit together enough to go to the store, let alone Mississippi. But that was a place we loved, and we abandoned it for four years. Four clean years. We foolishly thought the worst was over. We didn't realize there would come a time when we would feast our eyes on any clean patch of the Gulf and wonder how long it would stay that way. We wasted all that time without even knowing we were wasting it.
Yeah, no point in beating ourselves up over it, I know. But we could have had that time. I guess the feeling is a little like the one you get when a loved one becomes sick, sick with something really bad, and you don't know yet if he's going to live or die, but you sure do think about all the extra time you wish you'd spent with him.
Her, perhaps. Ray Bradbury thinks bodies of water are female, and he may be right.
This is only going to get more rambling and maudlin if I continue, so I'll close. I mostly just wanted to say hi. Hi.