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We sat on the train in the station for quite some time past our scheduled departure (maybe 20 minutes or so), but I had sequins to sew on a sweater for my Halloween costume, and excerpts from past interviews with Maurice Sendak from Fresh Air to listen to. I was wholly absorbed in the sewing & the listening & wished I had an excuse to stay on the train even longer.
Or, more specifically, Weschler’s recollection of the morning after the start of Operation Desert Storm, when his colleague did a search in the LexisNexis database for an article (about a couple buried alive in an earthquake in San Francisco & the outcome of rescue efforts on their behalf). Weschler connects the database, the practice of searching, the CNN coverage of the war on the TV in the office, the fatalities that occur during accidental strikes on civilian targets. I fully believe in thinking critically about our interactions with database & other information retrieval tools, but forget that it’s possible to write so incisively & with such elegance about what’s happening in those moments. Weschler reminded me:
But strangely, the image that haunts me, and the one I just can’t shake, is that of my colleague in the eerie glow of his Nexus console, calmly punching that set of keys, activating the machine — the machine silently humming away, surveying the veritable continents of information before it, instantaneously targeting its quarry, yanking it out of the endless field and delivering it up to us whole. The surgical precision of the whole process. For a moment that morning, my colleague seemed to me like one of those amazing young officers strapped to their battle stations aboard the AWACs control planes circling high above Saudi Arabia — coolly surveying his console, punching in the coordinates, splaying out the information, directing the entire battle.
CNN, Nexus, AWACs — they’re all of a piece. And the carnage on the ground is something entirely else, almost infinitely removed. (Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, p. 139)
Snow flurries + Akron/Family (don’t be afraid, it’s only love/don’t be afraid, you’re already dead) + the 6:59 a.m. train from South Station.
I know The Pernice Brothers‘ repertoire better than I know The Smiths’, but I’m fond of both, so the combination — an excerpt from Joe Pernice’s 33 1/3 book on “Meat is Murder” — was the main factor in my decision to spend $5 at the used book store last week. Well worth it! Pernice writes about what it was like to be a teenage straight guy for whom the album was a life-soundtrack, wholly a part of the experience of being completely infatuated with a girl & her smoking habit, surviving a classmate’s suicide, and living in Dorchester, MA in 1985. This morning, my reading pace/excerpt length/train speed were perfectly-aligned, and so the trip was all-reading with nothing left over for the ride home (except, I guess, for the rest of the collection).
P.S. Joe Pernice wrote a song about my town, Somerville, that makes me proud to live there (and was an element in my effort to feel more optimistic than afraid when I was making my move from the midwest). Hearing him sing “I’m gonna take a lover. Gonna take her back to Somerville. Show her around the neighborhood, re-case the place and settle down” how could I not look forward to living there?
And, while we’re down here, ignoring the topical boundaries around this blog, those that would suggest it’s about commuting, not living in Columbus, Ohio, I’ll note that one of my favorite memories of living in that city is biking home with T. on a warm late-spring or early-summer night, after the Pernice Brothers show at Little Brothers (RIP). The streets of our neighborhood were empty, we could swerve and loop around on our cruisers, enjoying the flatness of the land & the road, and we saw an animated, illuminated deer (yard ornament) perched in a tree, something we’d never noticed during the day, which made our little part of the city feel even more magical, capable of such secrets.
Reading Ariel Schrag’s Awkward and Definition, remembering my high school experience of not having any dates, then falling into dumb relationships with boys who weren’t anywhere as smart as me, staying in those situations too long, not believing I could do better (not realizing that being alone could be a form of doing better), being intensely in love with my best friends. I’m wowed by the way the comics represent adolescent (girl) fandom, in terms of really specific practices, like making shrines to your Object of Desire, trying to find & wear items of clothing you’ve seen on your Object (in pictures in magazines you’ve collected & put on your wall), quoting the Object (or the character(s) s/he plays) in letters to friends & in conversation, watching movies/listening to songs over & over, trying to physically transform yourself into some version of the Object (with makeup, attire, hairstyle), dreaming about (or, if you’re Schrag and living in a place where you have access) going to shows, book- or record-signings to see/meet the Object.
Schrag’s comics made me remember buying rose-patterned fabric to tack over my windows because Robert Smith was wearing a shirt with a rose pattern in one of my Cure posters; wanting to look like the woman on Jane’s Addiction’s “Classic Girl” single (and wanting to live inside the Ritual de lo Habitual cover art), practicing drawing & painting like Lynda Barry, looking for glasses like John Lennon’s or Keith Haring’s.
On the walk from train to work, I had a moment where I was hit with one of the waves of loss I’m having these days. They’re not big, don’t persist; the last one happened when I was leaving the PJ Harvey/John Parish show & saw the smartly-dressed man-woman couple walking ahead of me & thought I’m no longer part of that, part of a good-looking couple going out to a show, part of a hip straight duo in their 30s, married. But then (the then of this morning, not the then of Saturday night when I was going solo) I remembered how T. had called last night to tell me about the bizarro dream he’d just had & the thought of the dream made me smile, and that was enough.
Dear Canada Tourism Commission,
You know me too well! When I walk by the signs all over South Station advertising your national splendor, I become more & more convinced that I should go polar bear spotting in Manitoba or camp out under the Northern Lights. This morning, I was enthralled enough that I spent my time on the commuter rail daydreaming about taking the train to Montréal (home to Julie Doucet, Drawn & Quarterly, lesbian haircuts + bike repair, and Gallimard). Upon my arrival at work (hello, internet access!) I discovered there is no direct train from Boston to Montréal, but Obama wants one, and now I do, too.
Salut!
Alana
It’s not a good idea to close/”rest” my eyes while riding the early train, without coffee. I barely avoided a missed-stop-disaster this morning, waking up just in time to figure out that we were pulling into my stop, not away from it.
That New Yorker article about burmese pythons & other “exotic pets” let loose in the wilds of Florida? It stayed with me. Even though many hours had passed since I read it on the train on my way home last night, I found myself thinking about it some more: re-viewing Charles Burns’ alluring/horrifying illustration, contemplating the Homocene age, snakes crossing state lines, and the porousness of certain borders (in this case, between swamps and suburbs).
I didn’t consider my decision to listen to the music of two badass ladies — Patti & Neko — as an act of preventive-self-care, but now, at the end of an exhausting work day, counting the minutes until I can go from town to train to city to house, I’m glad that’s how I started out.
(from 4/17 – written but not posted because my work day was too hectic)
Last night I went to see Adventureland, and while I was prepared for the romantic-comedy part, I wasn’t ready for the soundtrack, which included songs I hadn’t listened to in about 10 years, ones that had completely fallen off my radar. Hearing them again, I could only surmise that their connection to a specific relationship that ended badly was the reason, because how else could I justify not listening to Unsatisfied and Sattelite of Love for so long?
A space heater fell on my left foot last night, and so today I’m complying with the rest-ice-elevate routine suggested by the physician at the walk-in clinic. On our way to the hospital (with me in the passenger seat, helping T. navigate the new-to-us route), I was most worried about my commute, about how would I get to work if I couldn’t walk any of the three or four miles I walk in a day’s trip. I love my job & I love walking, so take those away, and my days seem much less awesome.
After the first round of my worrying-out-loud, T. reminded me about crutches, noted that I could totally adapt, and I admired & appreciated his optimistic resistance to my anxiety about what might be true.
