it's 1:52 a.m., on 2001-07-03 - fields in the south.
~
I watched something very corny today, but it yanked my chain and pulled me in anyway. It was 'tuesdays with Morrie', an Oprah special movie with Hank Azaria and Jack Lemmon. It was about, a lot of things.
For me, it was about Georgia as opposed to what I'm doing now; about driving vs stagnation. It asked me, what the hell do I want to be *doing* with my life, anyway?
It asked a lot of things of me. But mostly, it asked me what I want to be doing. Whether, am I happier now because of the things I have to do, and the things I want to be, versus the things I am and the things I do.
I think I am. I do what I want to-- I make a conscious decision to do what I want to, when I want to. I am an addict of the internet. Don't let anyone tell you that this little box is not addictive-- but it's a relatively healthy addiction, I believe. I still see people in person. I still know how to appreciate trees. I know how to have sex, though it scares me. I know how to laugh, and sing downtown, and sit on the sidewalk and feel the urban atmosphere through the hot, gummy pavement... cobblestones covered in tar and city grime and *stories*.
I think there is nothing that I love more than words.
I think that I don't enjoy school but for the fun of having something to do and someone to listen to. But that's enough that I intend to stay there until they make me leave, and when they do I'll find a cheaper, more reliable way to transmit my love of words.
I have, I have.
I am a helmsman in the boat of Ra. --I think that's a quote from a poem that I know, and I loved, but can't remember because it was one that I read once and never went back to, because it was one of those moments like water-- you have it once and then it's never quite the same.
I just looked up the poem. it's 'cowboy in the boat of Ra'. I was close.
I want to work on my website, but all of it is on the other computer and dead in the water and, and I'm bitter about it so I haven't started trying to fix it again, which is bad because I can't work on the IBAs until I get it fixed.
I think I want to start writing about, what I know.
~*~
The cement here is very white and very round; fresh out of the mold, it hasn't had time to aquire the sweatstains of honest work, or bubble gum, or graffiti. Growing up different here has the tendency to take on the quality of weeds; you become much stronger than the things trying to pull you out, you grow roots too strong to break, or you wither.
Childhood in a subdivision that is still growing is like a garden full of very young trees. Everything has the smell of fresh paint about it, nothing feels entirely out of the package.
Young trees at heart.
*
I have wanted to write a story about a day that happened once, when I was a child, for a very long time, but I don't know how to do it-- one day, my friend Melissa -- not that her name matters -- and I started talking about the games that we played. Another friend and I had found, sometime soon before this I guess, about kissing. This was a girl; you know how kids play around at having sex and never know how to do it so they just kiss messy and grind?
I guess Laurie and I weren't that messy. Anyway.
I did, whatever. Maybe I was a weird little kid-- all I know is that I liked these little girls.
And I said to melissa, oh, we pretend to make sex videos. And she told me, 'that's really gross', and looked at me *really* funny.
So I laughed, all nervous, and said, 'oh, it was just a joke'.
And, I want to explain that, show that, and what I felt about it, why I still think about it-- because I do. I want to tie it into this suburban feel, plastic and new paint and no substance-- like veneering over a sheer rock face. Putting something shiny over something old. It feels wrong, somehow, and the dirt kinda seeps up through the floorboards. Like, you can pave and pave and pave the world away, but somehow, you can feel that earth inches beneath your feet.
I don't know. I want to start something else that maybe could tie in with 'georgia'. Something of a similar vein. I want to have a publisher, and I'm never going to get it with fanfic, much as I love it.
Lessee. Start with something sad. Build up to something. Start with a, a, traffic jam? No. I need something. Something substantial.
A coming out, maybe.
~*~
Women in the fields, bent over under the weight of picking cotton, scarves tied tightly around thick hair. Bare, calloused feet pounded along, day after day in the same rhythmic picking refrain. Sore shoulders, no stopping, legs aching and rubbery after supporting bundles and bundles and a dead weight torso for hours and hours on end. Butter-like sweat stains, thick lips. Big smiles.
Those scarves, I used to love them. Winding them around my fingers tightly, cutting off circulation and making my fingertips white. 'Someday,' I was told, 'You'll get to wear one too.'
I hated them, too, because they were a symbol for being a woman. They wound around a woman's head and cut off her ability to think-- that's what I saw.
I find her crouching in the tomato patch with a watering can and the baby held firmly to one hip. A chubby, wrinkly baby who's chewing on that scarf wound as tightly around her head as it was around my mother's all those years.
She looks up when I come closer. Her face is covered in pores, and has a smudge of mud on the left cheek. Round cheeks, white teeth, slick forehead from sweat and salt. I can't think of anything but butter, and it makes summer nights hot and slick, too, fingers entwined and letting the oil rub in to our stomachs.
She bites into a tomato, standing up. The juice runs down her chin, sticky, and drips into the dust, seeds sticking to the her dimple. The baby swats at a piece of stray black hair; her hips sway, full, all round and full like her cheeks as she comes towards me.
It's summer-time. I know it.
~*~
I don't know why I'm obsessed with being sweaty and sticky and butter-y right now. --yes I do. It's Al. And it's the whole get-yourself-totally-down-and-dirty thing that's been obsessing me lately.
I'll tell you a secret. I almost *like* being dirty. No, I do. I like being sweaty and hot and sticky and feeling like summer time. I just don't like doing it if anyone who might notice and be very cultured is around. I like doing it at home; I feel akward outside. I want to be comfortable and sticky. I want to have strawberry juice running down my chin.
Lord knows why I'm finding tomatoes sexy right now.
I can see this black woman, but I don't know if I'm at all right; I'm not used to writing about things I don't know, and I surely don't know black women. You don't *get* black women in this city. I've surely not had sex with any. And I don't know real summer time, or the culture of the south. I don't know why I want to write about it so desperately. I don't know why it wants to be in my head.
Someone, lemme know if I'm doing all right? qB said that she showed Ali 'georgia', and that they both really liked it. So I must have done all right with that. I need to know if some liberal minded, mountain-and-coastal-bred, Canadian white girl could ever understand this place. I don't know. I don't know if I can.
I'm trying to capture these things I see in my head, but I'm not sure if they're true. I tried writing about the middle-to-low class suburb I grew up in, and hit a brick wall. I want to be sweaty in a field? I want to be American? I don't know. Maybe it'll sort itself out later.
Going to bed-- I have Latin class to drive to in five hours, and then history this afternoon. yikes. going to rae's house to sleep in between. Going to be, what I want.
~
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