runaway return

It was hard to wake up this morning, after sleeping in on a lumpy bed, waking up groggy to greet the sunrise behind castle-like clouds looming over the island on the horizon, but rituals of St. Drogo, the familiar routine of coffee and power chords, or in this case blastbeats, watching The Kids file in and out, it's not a bad place to come back to.

Driving through the western half of Ohiostan is its own adventure, and there was something strange in the incongruity from place to place, of the stately palatial homes along the lake, the slightly tackier dwellings of the nouveau riche or those with bad taste, heading further out past crumbling and faded facades in towns built on the steel no longer made here, a post office building housing a "buy gold" enterprise, empty factories like some Springsteen cliche.

The turn onto the island reveals a somewhat-new welcome center and a brand-spanking new Border Patrol station just across the street. The juxtaposing of 'welcome tourists' and the razor wire on the other side is disconcerting to me. As soon as I pull in it starts to rain, but I have a trunk full of books and a few layers so I make myself a cup of tea, begin with the pile and listen to the sound of the waves, talk to the next-door neighbor and heir to this chunk of peninsula who in the name of history lets my grandparents rent this place cheaper than a hood apartment in Clevelandia, as he tells me about retirement, traveling around to see jam bands, and the surveillance drones that fly over the water.

where's the pictures? you might ask. Some of us don't utilize technological devices while driving... most of the time.

This has been the childhood idyll of so long, and the emotional retreat in my adulthood that there's a part of me that has a sense of innocence lost. Crass tourism is one thing, the encroachment is another. I suppose it makes people feel safe but it's just weird to me.  The sky once felt so open that we played under, there are now snakes in the water where we swam, nonpoisonous but still awkward, I read the first volume of the Gormenghast trilogy, chunks of the annotated Hobbit, Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz,travel writing about awesome places that I'll probably never get to see because they've been similarly obliterated by both commercialistic and state shenanigans.

Still, there was beauty to be found, a sense of pristineness, I guess. It rained so much that the green was easy on the eyes and abundant. We drove to a state park known for being a primo birding spot, due to its closeness to the lake and the marshy wetlands full of light pink mallow and lotuses, the tower of the nuke plant notwithstanding.

 As kids we once played on the beach and collected the pale pink shells of freshwater clams, the beach has been left to revert, no sand Zambonis or lifeguards, and underneath the menacing clouds, the tension in the green water, it had an air of wildness that I loved.

 There was a boardwalk through the swampy woods that reminded me of some rainforest with its lushness and only being able to hear the drone of insects, the sound of wind on wet leaves like rain, the solitude.

The rest of the three days was spent reading more, drinking more tea, making fires, gazing up at the stars, having a subsequent dark night of the soul, good conversations with the parents, and waking up the last morning for a sunrise perhaps not quite so epically paintlike but still beautiful.

In all honestly, I like those dark moments before the sun hits best. Sad that one can't see the sliver of crescent moon there.

That gold there is hardly done justice, but it was lovely.

escapes

A much-needed vacation in the works, spinning many plates means that getting out of the slabbe gets tres complicated, provided it doesn't rain, as it did the last two days. I'm a creature of habit, comfortably numb locked into routine, five years running now, which has led to a dogged stability that belies the weird artistic impulses and occasional roiling emotions. Or, as the archival collection on immigrants to Clevelandia described my forbears, having "plodding and persevering determination" as befitting a true Slav. A day or two feels kosher, four days in a row with a fill-in for my show something excessive and I wonder how much I've bought into this system out of habit not addiction, like the caffeine that gets my heart beating every morning enough to function.

But there's something wonderful about the swirling green waters, sitting on the breakwall, not having obligations for a small window of time, of the ritual of watching the sun rise and set and the moon burn red over the islands, of making fires, watching stars, playing guitar and reading reading reading.

I need a cleansing and refreshing, a time to get alone and ponder for more than a few minutes at a time, a time to not have to worry about what to say and how to say, to be a speck in the created order and hopefully see some shooting stars this time around.

neptune's call

Some shows are easy to go to by one's self, and tonight I had a ticket to see The Duke Spirit for the first time since I heard one of their songs on college radio, snagged the CD at the public library and while my initial reaction wasn't one of instant smittenness, Neptune has grown on me, and in the ensuing years has gotten regular rotation on the show and occasional spots on mix CDs due to the hooky tunes with big Sonic Youthy noise, a chug reminiscent of Queens of the Stone Age, and pre-Starship Grace Slick vocalizing.

I got there late and missed the first song but caught most of the good long set, which was mostly the toned-down newest record, the kind that one makes when one is trying to "mature" as an artist but ends up being not as immediate or interesting. Still, the songs sounded great live with extra crunchy guitars, a good sound mix and Leila's charisma and amazing vocals. I would have loved to hear "Dog Roses" or "Send a Little Love Token" but it was good enough that I really can't complain.

I wonder what the crowd would have been like if they were headlining and not opening for a rescheduled Battles, because it didn't seem like the crowd was terribly into it except a couple of adoring fanboys at the front and I ended up moving to the other side of the venue because the guys next to me were talking the whole time and making fun of them. Either I've got horrible taste or maybe the music was too accessible for the crowd. I'm not much for tuneish snobbery at this point.

I only watched about ten minutes of Battles' set because it was late and while the technical prowess is definitely there, my math rock days are kind of behind me at this point and I felt like I was more at an indie dance club party than a rock show, with the screens behind them with the disembodied vocals of Blonde Redhead's Kazu emoting on a video screen above the bouncing and bobbing kids. Interesting but it didn't move me, or I just wasn't in the mood.  I'm also not a big keyboard/perky music person, and I was getting sleepy, so I drove home in order to get a little bit of sleep before another day.

nowhere fast

It feels like May outside, and I drop off my car, noticing that the gas prices keep rising and remembering what life was like before transportation. I got my license late in life, only when I really had to, since the bus line only went so far and my idealistic dreams died in the wake of student loans and other adult-world concerns that didn't preclude me from getting rides from other people with bigger carbon footprints.

I've realized recently that I've forgotten what it's like to be car-less, to set aside a block of time to do things, to slow down one's pace. There's a restless part within my soul that's been there as long as I was old enough to wander, when I'd spend my teens ambling through Parmastan on trips to the library, the goodwill, and the record store, those days and nights when I just had to get out of my dorm room or apartment and go somewhere, seeking small shards of the sublime in the most mundane of surroundings that suddenly became more beautiful or interesting and kept my sanity on the days when I felt like I was cracking up.

When one walks and actually looks, there is way more to see than what's passed at 25 miles an hour. The shadowy desolate figurines in a shop window, the way the light falls across an empty storefront, green-eyed cats staring out the windows of basement apartments, the five-minute dramas of cigarette breaks outside of corner stores. There are others out too, and I find that I avoid eye contact much more than I used to, but my eyes eternally thirsty take in every small detail of these familiar streets on the way to the library or the drugstore as if I'm seeing them for the first time.


Some who lived in supposedly better times would say my generation goes nowhere and does nothing, because we're too busy being on the Internet, and while I think I might be one of the last cohorts of kids who played outside unsupervised for hours on a regular basis, building forts in trees and riding my bike up to the pool in cutoffs and swimsuit without much fear of abduction, I think our lack of movement has something to do with technology but also more to do with the lack of economic power that previous generations took for granted. We have to find our beauty here, in case we never get to see elsewhere.

I get the feeling that if one looked into the past, for everyone who took to the open road and started fresh, there were others who had neither the means nor the lack of ties that make it easy or desirable to do so. The mythos of new beginnings is a microcosm of manifest destiny dressed in the garb of rebellion, of trust fund kids and people with nothing to lose, while others of us cling to our roots and branch out towards the sun when we can.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.