An update from the Atlantic coast

I don't know how to write this blog and make it entertaining. I seem to really only be able to pull that off when I'm sad or angry about something, and.... I am far from either of those things. Everything is awesome. I mean, relatively speaking. I still miss my mom and my friends, but there's too much cool shit going on around here for me to dwell on it.

We moved from the shittiest town I've every been stuck in; Anniston, Alabama, to a comparative oasis of awesomeness; Wilmington, North Carolina.

Anniston had only chain restaurants. The same 15 bland and unremarkable choices that you could find in any truck stop on a major highway. It had the same 5 major box stores that sell everything but not at a very high quality. It was saturated with chemicals and full of people who utterly sucked. 

The coolest of them was the bartender we went to hang out with 2 or 3 nights a week, because he was so grateful to have cool people around and didn't skimp on the sauce. He was explaining to me at one point that his family sometimes goes up to the villages in Alaska on missions for the church, and he's gone with them several times. At that point, he raised his eyes skyward, made the sign of the cross over his chest, and said, "Lord forgive me, I know, I do work in a bar." As if... being a bartender was something more worthy of asking forgiveness than the bright red shirt he was wearing with Coca-Cola emblem style white letters reading ENJOY VAGINA! The irony was palpable.

Other than that guy who, confused as he was, was probably the closest thing to a friend I could have made in that town, everyone else regularly did their best to be rude, rip us off, and generally make it clear that we weren't welcome. 

The guys at the tire shop, which was across the street from the very Monsanto plant that had been dumping PCB's into the drinking water supply of Anniston for 40 years, were a prime example of this. I found myself speculating about the possibility that they'd lived in the vicinity of that carcinogenic, brain-melting, chemical pit for a few generations at least. It could have explained a lot. The answer that was given to Josh when he asked how much it would cost us to get our new tires put on our old rims was, "You from Alaska? Y'all can afford it." Asshole. Even after agreeing on 15 bucks a tire, they tried to charge us 120 bucks, counting each tire they'd taken off a rim AND each tire they'd put on as one individual unit. It got uncomfortable real fast after that. And... that was a lot like what we ran into all over town.

It was a sad place. A concrete hole in the ground, with smoggy, hazy, thick air, and no birds singing in the morning, because animals didn't want to live there either. No good food, no good bars, very few cool people, lots of cockroaches and a variety of poisonous bugs, and a perpetual sense of the doldrums lingering over everything.

Imagine my surprise and delight then, in moving to Wilmington, and finding everything we've found here.

We've been out to eat many times already, though we usually try not to do it that often, simply because there is so much good food to be had. Almost none of the restaurants around here are chains Everything we've eaten here has been amazing. 

Rather than being stuck buying everything we need for the house AND all the groceries at either Target or Walmart, as that was almost all Anniston had to offer, there is a full grocery store just down the road from here that almost exclusively sells local produce and meats. 

Rather than dealing with a shitty landlord for a month-to-month lease apartment, we're living in a campground in our bad ass house-on-wheels. We've already learned lots of things about living in a big trailer. Don't leave the cover on the sink if you're not going to be around for a few days, because when you open it, it will smell like musty sponge. Make sure to leave 4 or 5 feet between the trailer and the plug-ins or else the living room slideout doesn't have room to come out and then you have to re-connect the hitch and move the damn thing when you've already put it up on blocks and set the jacks down. Put everything away where it goes as soon as you're done using it or it will turn into a mess FAST. It's a work in progress to organize this monster, but it's also kind of exciting. From here on, our house comes with us wherever we go. No more living out of backpacks. It's wonderful.

We went out on the town Friday night and they had a bunch of police standing by in case of shenanigans. It can be an issue, because Wilmington is very near a Marine base and they like to drive down on the weekends and cause a ruckus. I may not be a huge fan of cops, but I was absolutely delighted when I saw that the cops were not in cars or on bikes, but instead, on horseback. Seeing a horse standing around in the middle of a downtown bar scene just tickled me pink. Even better than that, almost every bar in Wilmington allows dogs. How fucking cool is that?!

The whole experience is also made better by the fact that Josh's brother and his girlfriend are here. That takes a lot of the work out of a new town. We've already gotten to go out to a little island off the coast on Saturday in one of their friends' boat. They tell us which beaches are more lenient with the rules about beer and rowdy behavior. They tell us which restaurants are good. And, just like all of Josh's sisters and family have proven to be before them, they're awesome people.

It's great to have a girl to hang out with when the boys want to talk about guns and tell war stories. Especially one who is like-minded, and is a feisty and hilarious, beautiful little Dominican lady, to boot. I am learning a lot from her and it feels good to make new friends.

Essentially, I have nothing to bitch about and it's so nice.

I dreamt of you the other night...

...that you moved into a house down the street from me. We tried our hardest to ignore each other but it was quite hard because we rode the same bus to work as teachers at the same local high school. It was a high rise building in the middle of the city, whatever city it was. And, upon entering the main lobby doors every morning, we dutifully turned opposite directions and walked, not quickly enough to betray our mutual desire to escape each others company as fast as possible, but not slowly enough to give the impression that either of us would rather linger.

Then one day, a meteor hit. And before we'd even gotten news of what had happened, a wall of dust came rolling toward us, taller than the building we watched from, and behind it, an almost equally tall wall of water. It disintegrated the glass outer walls of the building, and washed through and around the bottom ten floors as if they'd never existed anyway. Suddenly, we were each no longer afforded the luxury of pretending we were strangers. We were running in teams, rappelling down on ropes and cables into the ducts and passageways of the bottom floors (dream logic) to try and access rooms that were insulated from the flood, and to see if we could bring back any of the kids who were still alive down there. We had to communicate, we had to plan, and we had to watch each other's backs. We were shuttling wet, half hypothermic, shocked and terrified teenagers into the warmth and relative safety of the home we'd made near the top of the high rise.

We also went together on a very risky trip across the canal that had formed between us and the nearest building. The flood had somehow bent the steel frame of the building, so that it was tilted at an angle. The balcony which was our destination was half submerged in water, and the half that remained dry had accumulated a few dozen people who had fallen under some kind of despair-induced catatonia. They just stood there, for hours without blinking or moving, staring East as if only able to focus on what little solace it gave that the sun was still rising every morning. As if that wasn't weird enough, they had also turned blue and developed strange patterns on their faces reminiscent of crop circles or the Nazca Lines.

The reason we'd gone to seek this strangely affected crowd, was that one of them was your best friend. He also happened to be Eddie Bravo, which is weird. No idea why that guy would pop up even peripherally in my dreams... but then I have no idea why I was dreaming about blue people or the end of the world or you, either.

So, we wrapped Eddie Bravo up in a blanket, and then again in a tarp, making sure to leave his face exposed for air. Then we laid him down into a kid's plastic toboggan sled, which... of course we had laying around, and we pulled him behind us back across the channel between our buildings and got him to the nurses who somehow made him turn back to a normal color and got him to speak. They said it was some common ailment. Like... the doldrums or something, only in actual physiological form. Normal for people who are in shock from a major trauma. You were so relieved you were almost brought to tears. By that point, we'd gone from avoiding each other to sticking together. And you were you... the way I remember you from back when I first met you;

Handsome, charming, possessed of some bizarre intuition that I was never able to understand, that allowed you to see through me and read my mind, rakish, a little arrogant, a little reckless, street smart, and very wise. Giving off some sort of air or frequency that worked its way, like microscopic barbs, slowly underneath my skin.

Then I woke up. It was Sunday, late morning, and Josh was already awake making breakfast. I laid in bed for a long time, thinking. Analyzing how I felt. Inhaling little sips of love (which smells like bacon, on Sunday mornings, in case anyone was wondering) as it drifted out of the kitchen, and trying to sort out what that dream was doing popping up in my otherwise happy life, right when I didn't need or want it. And I marveled at how drastically things can change.

In little bits and pieces, all your romantic gestures came back to me. All the words that could have been ballad song lyrics composed for me. All the things you ever did that made my heart start to feel like a pulsing aneurysm. And then... all the times I discovered, or realized that each of those things had been only part of the game you were playing. The one in which I was probably the most prominent player other than yourself... but that was definitely not only a two player game. Every little let down, every misleading statement, all the confusing behavior, mixed signals and random absences, every pitfall in the rollercoaster, every lie, every question you managed to strategically sidestep, every other girl I knew in my heart was getting some fraction of the same treatment, though you denied it fervently until I gave up asking.

I know that, at times, what you gave me was the best of yourself. That there were times when what I saw in you was as real as you'd ever shown to anyone. You told me I'd cured you of your old ways. And, here and there I'm sure that was true, though it was always temporary.

I once believed that you knew me, inside and out. That we were supposed to weather the storms together. That we were what fate looked like to other people. Like all the songs that have ever grabbed you by the seat of the soul and yanked hard. Everlong. Wonderwall. La Belle et le Bad Boy. That you truly would "crawl for miles over broken glass" if I needed you. I was so dense.

Because... the reason I know that I can publish this letter on the World Wide Web... is that you'll never read it. Because despite the fact that I would die if I could not write anymore, despite the fact that I regularly dump the contents of my heart and mind onto pages that are easily accessible to you, and that you've always known existed... you never did and never will care, or come looking for them.

I don't know why dreams happen the way they do. Part of me thinks... I should feel guilty, but I don't. My subconscious wrote a hokey movie script. There was a conflict, a climax, and two main characters. I watch a lot of that kind of movie. And my brain must pick you, just like it picks anyone else once in a while, as a character out of my past. Makes sense really... you were, for sure, a character. An actor. Entirely different on stage than in real life. And while you could be wonderful at your best... at your worst, you sucked me into something that was so painful. You were a player, and I was a pawn. I would have handed you my entire life on a silver platter, and you would have stored it like a prize trophy among the closet full of silver platters you have possessed over the years. You spun a whole world together in front of my eyes out of pretty, empty things, that would, so you said, exist for us someday. And thank god, they were never going to. You made so many attempts, insinuations, amends and promises....

And that guy that I adore in actual reality, who makes his love transparent, easy and clear, who is currently singing so badly that it's hilarious, at high volume to drown out the sound of the fan over the oven... The one that changed his plans for me, made room in his life for me... that guy makes me breakfast on Sundays.