Monthly Archives: July 2023

All houses are haunted

essays, ,

Moving is terrible. “It’s traumatic,” more than one friend said. “It’s the second most traumatic thing after a death in the family.” Well, I don’t know about that, but it has been an old-fashioned pain in the ass, a pain not quickly remedied because the infection is the mountain of your own stuff and how to organize it within a new space. There is a brief moment of excitement, trying to figure out where the golden-spined series of Faulkner novels is going to reside, strategizing about the best drawer in the kitchen to house the spatulas, which hid from you for three days after the movers left so that you were left to flip your eggs with your mind, like some yuppie jedi. But this feeling quickly leaves, and what’s left is all your crap and the endless march of assigning it new places within the home. 

All my routines are shot. I’m writing this at 5:42 in the morning on a Tuesday on a desk that needs a shim. I pray the arrhythmic clicking I’m creating with each space bar doesn’t wake the dogs. I haven’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. I don’t know when to shower. I can’t find the kids’ lunchboxes. I need a USB cord. God only knows where that blue umbilicus lies within the boxes still unpacked, and we’re mostly unpacked. But there are always the straggler boxes, the boxes scribbled “whatnots,” the boxes that should just as well be incinerated because if you’ve lived without the USB cord for three weeks, you probably don’t need it and should learn to live without it. Purge your sins. 

Plus, it’s not just my stuff, but my entire family’s, which brings to mind George Carlin’s bit “A Place for my Stuff,” the central conceit of which is that your own belongings are your stuff, while everyone else’s stuff is indeed shit. Which pretty much sums up my entire theology regarding material plenty. I’m sorry I have to briefly pause my avoidance of cursing with this post in order to make my objects/waste point. I am overwhelmed by my stuff. And I’m horrified by everyone else’s shit that they’ve brought into this house. Brought into the old house and now moved across town to the new house. It’s like the beginning of White Noise except it’s all in my house, and I’m tripping over it. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. 

Plus, all houses are haunted. The sounds in a new house are maddening. The air conditioner kicks on in an odd way, with clicking beforehand. And then the air return is like a giant seashell of swooshing up in the ceiling. The washing machine is inexplicably loud. The laundry room is the coldest room in the house for some reason. I have yet to fully determine the hottest room in the house but tradition indicates that it will be the master bathroom. The ceiling light in the kitchen is not centered, thereby destined to inch several members of my family just that closer to madness. The garbage container area sticks and must be yanked with egg-yolk covered hands. There is a bug in the garage that I can’t find, though it flies by my ear in Top Gun-ian fashion. Part of the yard is a swamp. The garage is still half filled with alien crap, there is entirely too much of it, none of it seems relevant or needed, and yet I can’t find whatever it is I have decided I need to find. When I get home from work, goddamnit the dogs have heard me, when I get home from work I feel compelled to re-enter the trench of unpacking, but I seem to be the only one still at war with our household. Everyone else has settled in. I’m in the trench (the attic), being shelled by the enemy (the invisible insect), while I dig further for shelter (organize our Christmas decorations). We moved because we wanted to change and now everything’s different. 

Perhaps this entire project would be easier if I were not so extravagantly uptight. I am like the Liberace of stress. I am like the Pavorotti of coming unglued. I am like that pickle jar your uncle dipped his fingers in over Thanksgiving and then wrenched back so tight that no one has been able to unwrench it since. The briney thoughts are swirling around and off-gassing and creating a further vacuum of anxiety. I can barely enjoy anything for longer than ten seconds without my mind undertowing all that came before. I realize this analogy could be workshopped. My pickle jar is a riptide is what I’m saying. The dogs are whining and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I should just flip on the lights and start the coffee and get on with my day. Chores are at least manifestable, accomplishable. I haven’t finished the novel but by God I have taken out the trash. 

The complete eruption of routine triggers the motion-sensitive driveway light in my mind. My routine, as it was, was not the best, and I need to fashion a new one in this strange environment that I have put myself in. Are you writing? Are you still writing? What are you working on? Please, friendly acquaintance, don’t ask. Please forget I ever wrote. The landfill turnover of my accumulated personal affects reveals just how hopelessly sentimental I am, how hopelessly aspirational I continue to be, even at this late date. Did I really think I was going to read Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination? How vain I still am, hoping someone, anyone will come over one day and admire that small-format Mary Miller short story collection, the one put out by Hobart. Even better, I’ve got her first chapbook, too! Or perhaps someone will appreciate my unblemished run of the first three years of n+1. But no one is coming over, no one cares, and literary theory is an ugly hill. There is not enough space to house every book I have ever read and every book I thought perhaps I might read one day. There are libraries for this, even here in the suburbs, though of course none of them stock the right books. So sayeth the permanent grad student. 

The dogs have a hierarchy of discourse in the mornings. First there is the high pitched whistle, a kind of test whine. I am the only person on the planet who can hear it. It’s like my own version of dog ears. Then the whining gets lower pitched, becomes more vocal, more syllabic. Finally the little one just barks haughtily. A couple of paws stamped in the dark, then quiet. If I sleep too late, he will really get going as if he’s barking at an intruder from his crate. But the only person he’s barking at is me. That’s the only intruder I ever find when I stumble in. I thought I wouldn’t be able to hear them in this new and improved house, but even though I’ve reached middle age, I still won’t learn. 

Thick in Orlando

essays, ,

In Terminal B of the Orlando International Airport, there is an art installation. A cube of glass contains a man, sitting on the ground, resting against his bags. He is the Weary Traveler. He has fuzzy hair, a mustache, a Polo shirt, bad sneakers, love handles. He looks tired. The mannequin is eerily lifelike, so that there is a vibe of “is this man alive and sleeping? Or is this man actually fake?” outside the glass cube. Spectators, all in some stage of arriving or departing, circle warily, take pictures with their phones. It’s an unsettling scene, because the man is so lifelike and also because the level of irony is difficult to detect. Is this a sincere depiction of weary first-world travel, the culturally compelled hauling of children to tourist sights that are brand extensions of intellectual property franchises owned by an international entertainment conglomerate? Or is this installation making fun of everyone for doing the schlep? Are we being represented or implicated? Both? When headlines ask rhetorical questions in the New York Times or the Atlantic — “Will AI change pancakes forever?” — the safe answer is always No. But whenever I think of a binary question and wonder aloud if a particular situation isn’t both , the answer is yes, of course, it’s both. If it can be both, it is both. 

I have traveled to Orlando, Florida, for work and pleasure more than any other American city. There are other cities where the in-laws live that I have traveled to more often, but that’s different. That’s for family reasons. It’s almost a sub home. Truthfully, I mostly come to Orlando for work. I’ve been here maybe fifteen times for two to three-day stretches, and what I remember every time I arrive is how little I remember about Orlando. Nothing in Orlando seems familiar, while still always being familiarly shallow. The sites of Orlando: toll roads, retaining ponds, screened-in swimming pools, flat highway vistas under construction. Palm trees. Malignant levels of sunlight. But there’s no emotional familiarity. The town feels conceptual, abstract, a 3-D printed version of a city. It possesses no nostalgic pull. 

I have a friend who calls some locations “thin places,” and I think he means it in a kind of C.S. Lewisian sense of thinness, that is, a place whose pull on you is so strong that it seems to pull you into another dimension — of memory, of nostalgia, of friendship. This is unscientific, admittedly. And it sounds hokey, but I feel it, too. My prime example would be Oxford, Mississippi, a college town built on a square. It has the right mixture of incremental change and decade-upon-decade of sameness, so that it always feels utterly familiar. Also, it has an uncanny ability to act like a portal that leads to everyone else in Mississippi. I often joke that if you want to find someone in Mississippi, just go to Oxford and hang around for an hour. They will appear. Something will have brought them there. In this way it’s much more a hub of cultural activity than the capital city, Jackson, where I live. Oxford possesses a magnetism, and it’s not because of the football team. 

In Orlando thickness reigns. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of construction in the city. Perhaps I just always go to different places? But that’s not quite right either, because I’ve stayed several times at the same hotel, though I don’t know what it looks like or how to get there. Its geographic relationship to the airport feels arbitrary, ad hoc, improvised each time upon my landing. The very entrances to the hotel property feel re-drawn before my arrival, deliberately unmemorable. I know I am near the “parks,” but I don’t know how near, or which ones. 

At the Brookstone, in Terminal B, they’re selling the new Metallica LP. I read somewhere that Metallica had to purchase their own vinyl pressing facility in order to keep up with consumer demand. Life just keeps getting stranger. The electrical outlets inside the rows of chairs don’t work. Everything here is life As If. It’s not a trip if you don’t take notes.

Perhaps it’s because Orlando is in many obvious ways a deliberately fake city, a city whose primary economic engine is tourism, and not just tourism but a kind of live-action role playing of childhood entertainment, a deliberate fantasy land, a structured nostalgia. (Which I have taken my children to, and yes, they enjoyed the Uncrustables, just like everyone else, so what of it?) 

It’s Vegas for children. (No smoking, no copulation.) It feels temporary. It feels season-less, and yet the buildings are simply this season’s model. It’s not necessarily bad. This is old news. This is meant to be observation not indictment. This is what happens when I show up too early for my flight. It’s a place that makes me want to buy a nine dollar coffee-adjacent beverage that contains a thousand calories. I feel there will be no great stories set on a Monorail. 

Maybe the fact that I have no sticky memories from my trips to the city is just a consequence of middle age. Maybe I’m late to the magic of Orlando, or anywhere. Maybe it’s not the city but the traveler who is too thick to retain detail. Maybe I am the fake man, weary from my adventures through the fake landscape. The prepared environment. Is it any wonder that Terminal B is the only place that feels familiar, that feels somewhat homelike? It’s where I always end up. It does, after all, have a Chik-Fil-A.