I Love Hippies
Really, is there anything cuter than idealism?
Sunday, January 07, 2007
I've been away
You may have noticed a bit of a shortage of posts here over the last, uh, 6 months.
I've been away.
You see, it all started last spring when, at a time when I was starting to feel a little busier than I liked, I started looking around me and seeing things like this:
(this picture was taken from my front door)
The last post I started to compose before my hiatus was called "Worst things seen recently" and perhaps I'll post it for the sake of history. It was reflective of my state of mind at the time, and I started to feel not so much like writing blog posts.
And then I went away to the Beach Town.
I went away from all of this and off to quaint and beautiful little Beach Town for the whole summer, all full of scientists and lobsters and pretty WASP youths working the tourist trade. I slept in a cabin and walked by the beach to lab each day, drank beer and ate fried seafood at night (and have the gut to show for it), and learned a lot of science and also learned that as long as I am in science, that outsider feeling is not going to go away so I might as well get used to it. There was a memorable trip to Gay Beach Town in which I finally understood what it was that would make gay people want to vacation there, and in which I resolved that someday I'd have to go there without a bunch of straight people in tow. There was weekday swimming in the ocean before dinner, and the attendant conversations with those wet and tired, already walking up from the beach, about how the jellies were that day. And there was stumbling up the street with a crowd of drunks at night, pleasantly astonished to find myself having the kind of loose, bondy experience that I never did in high school (okay, there was the once in New Orleans). There was, for a whole summer, a richness to my outward life that was such a contrast to the hollowness that had become the habit of my inner life. I think that was probably a good thing but also extremely strange, and becomes only stranger as it fades into memory.
That memory has a sort of literary quality, which all this time later is what gives it its strangeness. By literary I mean both that it has a quality other than that of my real life; it's too sweet and sepia-toned to be something I actually experienced. And also I mean that so many of the details seem much more at home in a novel from some past period than from the nearly-contemporary reality. All the wood and sand and sunsets, the towheaded children running after black labs, the salty old-timers squinting at the turning over of another season. The opening of tourist season when people first started arriving in town, airing out their cabins is more like the opening scene in a novel than any other reality I've ever lived.
So life turns out to be not only worth putting up with, but a novel that you can't bring yourself to put down. If reality can be that charmed, then my obligation would seem to be to keep composing the story. Since returning to New York, I have been shaking my head and thinking about how to do that. That's the mistake, of course, thinking about it too much. You don't think about it, you just sit down and start writing. Fix it later if you must, but just get something down.
So: today ends the first week of January. It was nearly 70 degrees and sunny out, and if you can banish worries about rising seas for the time being, well then: how lovely. I ran through the park on my hobbled leg and there were crowds of soccer, softball, and kickball(!) players, dog-walkers and blanket-loungers, and of course plenty of other runners. Everyone taking advantage while they could. Clearly, a perfect day to start this thing back up.
Hey, thanks for listening/skipping to the end. I'll try to keep the long, meditative posts to a minimum and get this thing back to what it was supposed to be.
You may have noticed a bit of a shortage of posts here over the last, uh, 6 months.
I've been away.
You see, it all started last spring when, at a time when I was starting to feel a little busier than I liked, I started looking around me and seeing things like this:
(this picture was taken from my front door)
The last post I started to compose before my hiatus was called "Worst things seen recently" and perhaps I'll post it for the sake of history. It was reflective of my state of mind at the time, and I started to feel not so much like writing blog posts.
And then I went away to the Beach Town.
I went away from all of this and off to quaint and beautiful little Beach Town for the whole summer, all full of scientists and lobsters and pretty WASP youths working the tourist trade. I slept in a cabin and walked by the beach to lab each day, drank beer and ate fried seafood at night (and have the gut to show for it), and learned a lot of science and also learned that as long as I am in science, that outsider feeling is not going to go away so I might as well get used to it. There was a memorable trip to Gay Beach Town in which I finally understood what it was that would make gay people want to vacation there, and in which I resolved that someday I'd have to go there without a bunch of straight people in tow. There was weekday swimming in the ocean before dinner, and the attendant conversations with those wet and tired, already walking up from the beach, about how the jellies were that day. And there was stumbling up the street with a crowd of drunks at night, pleasantly astonished to find myself having the kind of loose, bondy experience that I never did in high school (okay, there was the once in New Orleans). There was, for a whole summer, a richness to my outward life that was such a contrast to the hollowness that had become the habit of my inner life. I think that was probably a good thing but also extremely strange, and becomes only stranger as it fades into memory.
That memory has a sort of literary quality, which all this time later is what gives it its strangeness. By literary I mean both that it has a quality other than that of my real life; it's too sweet and sepia-toned to be something I actually experienced. And also I mean that so many of the details seem much more at home in a novel from some past period than from the nearly-contemporary reality. All the wood and sand and sunsets, the towheaded children running after black labs, the salty old-timers squinting at the turning over of another season. The opening of tourist season when people first started arriving in town, airing out their cabins is more like the opening scene in a novel than any other reality I've ever lived.
So life turns out to be not only worth putting up with, but a novel that you can't bring yourself to put down. If reality can be that charmed, then my obligation would seem to be to keep composing the story. Since returning to New York, I have been shaking my head and thinking about how to do that. That's the mistake, of course, thinking about it too much. You don't think about it, you just sit down and start writing. Fix it later if you must, but just get something down.
So: today ends the first week of January. It was nearly 70 degrees and sunny out, and if you can banish worries about rising seas for the time being, well then: how lovely. I ran through the park on my hobbled leg and there were crowds of soccer, softball, and kickball(!) players, dog-walkers and blanket-loungers, and of course plenty of other runners. Everyone taking advantage while they could. Clearly, a perfect day to start this thing back up.
Hey, thanks for listening/skipping to the end. I'll try to keep the long, meditative posts to a minimum and get this thing back to what it was supposed to be.
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