Man, I wish there had been food for you. Leaving for a trip is always stressful, as much as I don't believe in that word, and I didn't do anything about leaving food.
I'm back at this desk looking at that ugly tree blocking out much of the world up against that house that blocks out much of the rest of it from here, and I realize how much of my mind is controlled by that tree. Some sort of scraggly cypress that doesn't belong here and has a vine climbing up it and strangling it. Impossible to ignore. Clear incitement to leave this desk and mobilize.
I had a dream this morning in which I met Patti Smith and she seemed to recognize me and gave me a big hug. We walked around a sort of industrial building by a rural highway, talking comfortably and in detail about things I don't recall. It seemed very normal but I was also intensely grateful for the warmth and the recognition. I told her how I saw her once in City Lights Books in San Francisco and how I was embarrassed to bother her, and about how I just smiled and bowed and turned away. She didn't remember of course but said that oh I should have come over and spoken.
America is very much on my mind, my need to regard America not as a finished thing but as scattered parts of a Make Your Own America kit that I'm working on. The girls and I stopped for ice cream in Lewisburg, PA this afternoon as we made our way back down to Baltimore from Rochester. It was a muggy Sunday afternoon and the place was swamped with post-church Americans and non-post-church Americans, so that nearly everybody was wearing either an unbuttoned dress shirt or a t-shirt with an image of the American flag on it. One said, "Tattered Glory, 2008." Not sure what that meant. Another said, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." That I get, although I wondered if the shirt's owner and I could have a real conversation about what it meant without both of us getting all embarrassed and reactive and tongue-tied and dumb. We all stood there sweating sea water and amniotic fluid, thinking about our horse in the race, waiting for our ice cream, rehearsing our orders. The ice cream was really good.
The mountainous parts of PA and NY are gorgeous, and this morning as we drove down a mist lay in the low areas which always makes the hollows look deeper, the peaks look more distant, higher. Beautiful and deep, so much beyond what you can see.
Stopping in these places reminds me so much of the earthiness and suspicion of the people I grew up with, and of how I love them and hate them. Of course there is no them, exactly, but there sort of is when they're in groups.
I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy a t-shirt with an American flag. Serious. And maybe I'll write "The Old, Weird America" across it. That phrase, half from Kenneth Rexroth and half from Griel Marcus, has been so much on my mind.
I think of Bob Dylan saying that he was born a looong way from home and he's been trying to get back ever since. Exactly right. So it's good to drive, even to the wrong place, good to see things, even if you hate some of them, good to be challenged with the raw fact of what exists, maybe especially t-shirts with American flags. American Fags: feels like that's the team I got drafted by long ago and I'm gradually coming to see the backwards logic of it. A fag and a Jew, I am, in the long, woman-hungry body of an American Southerner from California.
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