The Sunchoke

I’ve been in Chattanooga two days now, plus ou moins.  Met up with old friends on Friday and caught an art show in the recently white-washed Main St. “district.”  Then we chilled with the big crowd at the city-sponsored free music-thing before ending up at Alan’s apartment, where I fell almost asleep on the deck until it started to rain. 

I am realizing the extent of my domestication by big-city living, graduate school, and (gasp!) aging.  “Go home, nothing good happens after 12 o’clock!” Kevin and I shout in Somerville coming home on weekend nights.  They can sort of keep a lid on things what with controlling the means of transport and all.  Of course some people must party all night, and there are many cars, but I do not know these people, do not want their means, and in any case, “if God does not exist then everything forbidden.”

 First of all, you can buy beer in convenience stores down here, or rather, since Mass turns out not to be the center of the universe, you can’t buy beer in the convenience stores up there.  I have become a lightweight. Liberal-Puritanism 1, Other Side 0.   Alan and Steve go on a beer run at 11:30, and take a requests, I sort of shrug noncommitally.  “mm, I don’t know I just want like 1 beer.  Can you pick up something unfiltered?” They look at each other.  “Umm, maybe, we’ll see what we can do.” 

Now is this an unreasonable request?  Certainly if it really was 11:30, and probably in any case, when the evening gets down to the fundamentals, as in we’re not talking about something to complement a nice home-cooked meal at a dinner party.  Anyway, what I got (and I so wish I had a picture) was a 40 of Icehouse with “Unfiltered” written in magic marker on it.  So I’m a weird pseudo-yuppie now apparently.  Bad clothes still, but I tuck in my shirt and sometimes shave. 

And then last night, from which the above picture comes, there was the third night of this massive punkfest somewhere out easterly.  This orgiastic crazyness deserves many many entries of its own, not to mention video, but all I have time to offer is: American Cheeseburger is mighty fine.
 

Thursday I’m going back to visit my family, the first time since X-mas. Then I felt like a traveler in-between worlds new to Boston and hating it, separated from Tennessee and growing distant. My semi close friends looked at me like I abandoned them (which is true), my acquaintances were barely aware I had left, my close friends were just that. I waited to get comfort back, walking the streets of my old neigborhood

North Chattanooga, currently under demolition by the same old clique. It never came. Holidays came and went, I came and went and returned, to something.

Since then, i’ve mostly come to realize that comfort is just gone. that comfort really can only exist inside discomfort, sitting on top of the head of the snake.

blah blah blah, filling up the blog, filling up history.