and what will i do with you? (a little bit of sunlight and a little bit of tender mercy)
I had a wonderful three-day visit ( as chronicled here, sort of) with a blue-eyed Midwestern girl who tastes like sleep and fermentation, occasionally leaks rubber, and just became legally old enough to buy her own vodka in the U.S.A. Since I couldn't practically afford to fly, don't own a car, don't know how to drive a car, and lack the stamina for thousand-mile walks or bike trips, I spent a little over a full day taking various Greyhound buses to get to Minnesota and a little over a full day taking various Greyhound buses to get back. I got overtly/blatantly flirted at twice and asked to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and personal savior once. My ass and legs fell asleep several times. I read the Hunger Games trilogy, Geek Love, and Darkness Visible (given to me by the aforementioned girl) while corn and cliffs and the electric lights of other people's cities rippled past me outside those filthy bus windows. Luckily, I found all of my reading material engaging. Good way to pass the time. I don't think I can say I "liked" Geek Love, exactly; I had some issues with it, but it was absorbing. (And of course, Darkness Visible is too somber to be enjoyable per se, though it is powerful and affecting; the Hunger Games books aren't really all that well-written, etc. But you know what I mean.) My hair got greasy and my makeup ran. The hem of my dress crumpled up. I didn't really sleep on the road (unlike my various circulation-deprived body parts); I ate packages of cheese crackers from vending machines. On the return trip, some leg of travel between Chicago and Pittsburgh, the amazing late-middle-aged Russian driver laid a verbal smackdown on the guy who was keeping other people up by having loud, lengthy cellphone conversations with someone who could equally well have been his girlfriend/wife or his mother. It was one or two in the morning. "HECKSCUSE ME! HYU ARE NAHT DE ANLY PARSON ON DIS BUS!" yelled the driver, waking up the remainder of his passengers. "DIS IS NAHT A TELEPHONE BOOT! HYU SHUT YOUR PHONE OFF, OR I WILL KEECK YOU OFF DIS BUS, CAPICE?!" The cellphone guy behaved for the rest of the trip. People went back to sleep in their hard, smelly seats. I was the only one on the bus between Dubois and State College, so I stretched my legs across the aisle and thought about waking up with a slow heartbeat in my ears and how cold someone's skin is compared to mine. Thought about how much I needed a shit and a shower, too, if I'm honest. Hummed or quietly sang songs from All Hail West Texas and discovered that, yeah, they do tend to start out as one song and end up as another, as though the whole album is one big tangled-up song by itself. (But selling acid was a bad idea, and selling it to a cop was a worse idea, oh, the roots reach down to where the bad people go, and what do I do with you, pink and blue, true gold...)
When I got home, my father made me crispy toast and fried eggs (after a bit of passive-aggressive badgering), my dog was still alive, and I slept dreamless for eleven hours in my own hard bed. There's a ragged-edged hole in my wrist; I've tied a bright blue silk scarf over it, which also works well as a fashion statement. The scarf is the color of an over- chlorinated public swimming pool in high summer. I've been catching up on the internet and wishing Carrie well as she goes off to do brave things. There's this great interview with Miranda July, which I like because it sneaks a true, serious, sad thing in amidst a bunch of whimsical goofiness:
The next prediction isn’t mine. It’s something I read in The Economist (What? You didn’t
think I read that? You don’t know anything about me). I quote from that article: “ . . . In
the long run we’ll all be dead. But how long is the long run? In 2003, Mr. Rees gave it
a 50-50 chance that humans will go extinct in the next 100 years. Mr. Bostrom puts the
odds of that at about 25 percent.” Did you catch that? This scientist and philosopher are
predicting that there’s a 25 to 50 percent chance humans will go extinct in the next 100
years. Doesn’t that mean our grandchildren will be the last humans? I feel like we should
all be behaving very differently if this is true.