After years of intermittently smoking weed with horrendously unpleasant results, I had my first positive experience, just a few nights ago.
Friday was an exceptionally beautiful day to travel an hour or so South, to the rural hills in orbit of Jefferson City where my best friend grew up, (as I showed her my equivalent, last week,) and… they’re completely sublime. Perhaps the most beautiful in the entire state - and you know I say that with some authority.
As we do, she drove me in her tiring early-90s Camry around gorgeous gravel roads for hours while gushy dad rock played, taking every route at least once. The green was boundless; the air, stirringly familiar. Residencies were fascinatingly various - several abandoned, 19th-century witch houses overlooked trailer parks and neighboring beige, new money hellcubes.
All the while, she told me stories from childhood - The Full Tour. It’s perhaps the most profound thing you can share with another human being - the images, smells, sensations, and abstractions of one’s past and/or developing mind. When I realized that I was watching the same trees and fescue-wrapped ditches go by from the same perspective she once did, over and over again when her Dad would drive her to school - and that I’d actually allowed her the same, before - I began to feel at home more than I have in years.
This feeling was especially compounded after we met up with her parents and arrived at their railroad town’s community fish fry - another one of those events of which I am deeply familiar, but have been estranged from. A genuine tri-rowed fold-up tables engulfed in elderly relatives and neighbors to meet briefly & politely before slowly hobbling in line, filling your paper plate with very greasy food-type gig. I was once an infamous frequenter of such get-togethers in Emden, Illinois, where my father grew up, and here, too - as the youngest member of the Old Wheels Car Club of Columbia.
Come to think of it, old folks are perhaps the central ingredient. In response to my (relatively modest, out-of-context) outfit, the gentlemen manning the cash register asked if I’d “dressed all fancy, just for [them,]” and I responded (quite wittily, I’d add) with
He was very entertained, which is nice. Despite trying to distance myself and my image from the tropes of my upbringing for a decade, it’s warming to know that I still can’t help but communicate well with working people. Adulthood has proven over and over again that I respect them the most, and that I’d pick over occupants of more ‘sophisticated’ cultures without much hesitation at the end of the day. Perhaps they are the audience I should’ve been seeking out all along.
This lot is a bit different than mine, though. Like Eryn and her parents (though to a much lesser extent,) they seem more intense - a few, almost brooding, and I’d wager it’s all to do with the topographical (and therefore income-related) contrast with my time in the flatlands.
In essence, the high soil nutrient saturation of flat farmland makes for ideal row-crop (traditional) farming of the mainstream crops like corn and soybeans, whereas “farming” on more vertical terrain is a different, generally less lucrative profession, entirely. Astonishingly, there’s still some sort of living made on cattle, swine, hay, and sheep - and that’s about all that’s possible in these rougher regions astride the Big Muddy.
I remember my Missouri neighbors and Illinois relatives as moderate and emotionally distant - almost dreary. When passion was evident, it was most often rudimentarily expressed, and the appearance of levelheadedness was an ultimate ideal. Of course, I was much less emotionally perceptive, but I don’t doubt my observational abilities, really. Any real extremity was borned of
insanity, only - an entirely separate paradigm.
I never arriveδ at the horizon but saw of it
plenty, in passing
In me, the neeδ to work it
to hanδle it
to pull it
to yank it arounδ the yarδ
For myself, the curvature of the horizon was entrapping.
When there’s nothing of any distance away high enough to escape it, one’s world becomes
much smaller. This phenomena is a repeated theme in
Feebles in Night. Perhaps my urge to depict it was a classical one of necessary expression, or maybe it’s just all I had to say.
It first became evident when I’d be traveling and
entirely infatuated with any distance of vision at all. Obviously, it’s still enchanting, and experiencing it in every way for most of an afternoon seemed to somehow add significant context to my internalized meaning of home. Hopefully, it wasn’t just the altitude changes.
On our way home, I decided to
partake, and it was… incredible. The divine alteration of sound consumed all of my attention. After changing into my last pair of tacky jeans from childhood, Eryn just said “…Ricky,” unprompted, which is now my thirteen name and a good reason to never
ever smoke again.
I did feel different afterwards, though. I feel like I’ve gained a huge amount of understanding as to why so many people my age partake in so much of it, so often.
In other news: I am still fucking coughing, and have run through half my adderall way too quickly again.
It’s fine, though because the month’s focus would appear to be our anchor channel and Le Mans (coming up in 10 days!!!) - neither of which require much intellectualism, per se.
Eryn’s mom is definitely
Honk’s biggest remaining fan, which is very sweet. She’s probably the only individual on Earth who’s made it through the entirety of the
Impala episode.
“Like your second wife in a 24-hour gym.”
I’m parked on the street in Cherry Hill at the beginning (of this and a few other episodes,) which is literally a 5 minute walk from my house. Having finally immobilized Nevermore last weekend - the starter stuck and burned itself out - I am now without my own transportation again, likely for a more extended period than those few so far this year. As such, I bought my first carton of Luckies yesterday - an accomplishment I do not take lightly - and have been reduced to one place of business - The Wee Hill’s corner liquor store - to stop by and visit.
If I’d known I could’ve been daydrinking just down the road in 2015, I probably would’ve perished.
Anyway.
If you remember that fucking Bonus Hole thing… The cashier (a very sweet, curious, and wholesome being) taught me how to “play,” and I’ve been enjoying the obscene ludicrousness of it all every time I go. If you’re really curious as to what it actually does, go look it up. It’s not something that can be easily explained without visuals.
I guess this is how I could make my millions… Watching quarters fall (or not fall) into a goddamned hole.
Catch me there,
David
