Retread — Burroughs Month: Thanksgiving Prayer

“To John Dillinger and hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day. November 28, 1986.”

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches.

For decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind their
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories — all right let’s see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

I do not believe it is as hopeless as all that. This year, I am incredibly thankful to be alive at all, let alone to live where I do with the people I love. I understand Mr. Burroughs’ criticisms, I just think that we must keep caring and trying to win out against the sense of defeat and cynicism, and maybe then the dream can still be saved. I don’t believe people are inherently bad; I believe the opposite, and I won’t get discouraged and filled with bitterness toward all of humanity just because of the publicized exploits and outrages of the bad apples in our barrel. I believe that for each one of the headlines that sends people in to despair over the state of the world, there are a thousand unreported little kindnesses and gestures of love and connection.

And world peace. I know. I get cheesey. I’m just feeling very happy and free and alive.

Almost all photos via Square America.

This post originally appeared on November 26, 2010.

You Can Go Home Again — Girls like a boy who reads

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

St. Augustine

Even though I have long been grudgingly hep to St. Augustine’s game, I still like this quote, but that’s mainly because again, despite my hepness, I still dig him.

You Can Go Home Again — Ms. Parker

via subwayphilosophy right here on the wordpress.

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant — and let the air out of the tires.”

(Dorothy Parker.)

Oh, you. Seriously, though?, I believe she may be right on this one. Certainly my parents lit out of their hometown as fast as they could. I, on the other hand, not only romanticize their hometown but truly believe that I have never been happier anywhere other than the town in which I presently live.

Bridge at Knights’ Ferry, photographed by me. April 2010.

I have found myself returning to this “home” again and again to live as an adult because I feel genuinely that my eyes are offended by sights other than the ones I love so well here (country drives, quiet campgrounds, familiar trees and rocks in the middle of fields off the highway — these are like guideposts for exploration of my own soul) and the companionship of familiar places and faces; what interests me is that friendohs who have lived around here longer than I and never much anywhere else seem to take toward my town the same attitude my parents did to theirs: can’t wait to leave, consider it bougeois, boring, etc.

I don’t know if it is so much a case of familiarity breeding contempt as it is of inconsistency bringing longing for roots.



How sad that got. I’m sorry.

You Can Go Home Again — Every day.

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

(Matsuo Basho.)

I’m not so sure. This seems like one of those things people get on magnets or coffee mugs. I’m not feeling this quote as much as the others I’ve been using, but I wanted something generically twee to accompany the delightful twee picture, whose credit I have lost. Sorry if this quote super-duper speaks to you, but I’m more of a light-my-soul-on-fire kind of a journeyer and I find this a little too sitting indian style suspended above a koi pond for my taste. Some day I will tamp down this ferocity and mature and grow more zen and finally gain the knowledge I claim to want … but apparently not today.

You Can Go Home Again — Tired but true Frost wisdom

via diskursdisko.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

(Robert Frost.)

I hope they do not find it too much a chore with me — I’m bringing biscotti, pignolas, and a little kid half of them have never seen.

ibid.

I am happily and firmly ensconced once more in the land of crick gypsies by now, I reckon. It’s a comfortable place to be. To go from the tony cabins on the lake in to the deep woods and see assorted family is my favorite transition to make. In the case of these photo choices, I need to defend what people from “Down South” (ie: anything below Boise) seem to consider to be the overabundance of prefab and mobile homes in the fam’s neck of the woods. I was born and bred in the briar patch and let me tell you it’s a good thing, not a white trash thing. Here’s what it means to me:

Parker Posey via suicideblonde. Isn’t she lovely?

It means it’s a place where people actually understand that less house and more land is the way it ought to be, and not an endless pursuit of the opposite in the very antonym of the symbiosis which our Earth deserves. It is a move against space-waste and toward conservation of personal resources. I say yay to trailers and have actually said for many years that my ideal house, once my child(ren?) had grown and gone, would be not even a singlewide but a small camper or lite RV on some land by a river.

I know, I know: I will have plenty of time for that when I’m living in a van down by the river. But really.

You Can Go Home Again — No yesterdays on the road

via retrodome on the lj — this wonderful pic is giant, you really must check it out. I’d love to be able to name all the girls.

What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds.

But, when you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you.

No yesterdays on the road.

(William Least Heat Moon)

What a great idea, right?? Super-great quote. Can’t identify most of the ladies in the pic, but if you click to enlarge, I believe the seated short-haired one in the center is lovely and talented Barbara Cameron, Miss November 1955, is it not? That toothy smile seems familiar.

edit: Another i.d. and photo credits via Diamond Minx:
Diamond Minx Says:
July 20, 2010 at 1:04 am

The lady in the fringed skirt with the fur stole on the right is one of the most famous burlesque performers ever – Miss Gypsy Rose Lee. The rest of the girls were part of a touring show she produced.

Here are the photo credits:

Ralph Steiner (1899-1986)
Curves Ahead (Gypsy Rose Lee), 1950/51
Gelatin silver print
7 1/8 x 9 1/8”
97.11.5
Gift of Therese and Murray Weiss

Many thanks — “Sing out, Louise!”

You Can Go Home Again — Daily Batman: Road trip

By wonderful Adam Hughes, of course!

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

John Steinbeck

Worrrrrrd. On that note, my first stop (really days from now but I’m constructing these all well ahead of time) after having spent the first night of old home week (aka You Can Go Home Again) in Eugene and seeing Christer-in-law and her apparently amazing boyfriend the night before will be to drive up the road to my brief hometown Portland and have breakfast at Elmer’s with my husband and his father as though it is a regular happening of a Saturday morning.

Likewise.

My husband I can handle but I’m 100% sure I will cry at the sight of my father-in-law. He lived across the street from us and was a constant, quiet, perfect presence and companion in my life and since the day I left Portland we have not spoken a word to one another. I suspect he will be as fine with the bare fact of this, which is the part others might find odd, as me because of how deeply we both of us repress; neither would have expected to hear from the other when there are such sad thoughts to be thunk and beers to be drunk while watching baseball or sitting in a lawn chair looking over the backyard.

But I am afraid that what will cause a stir between us is that I will cave under the weight of the sadness of not having quietly done all that together all this time rather than separated by these miles and deep emotions, and I will cry and it will make him sadder. I feel that I have already dealt him such a bad turn by springing on him that I had to leave, that to compound my betrayal of our connection and friendship and love by showing him further proof of my weakness and self-indulgence by crying about my sadness instead of squeezing hands and exchanging a meaningful glance and saving the tears for the gas station on the way out of town would really end me. Please send vibes.

Goin’ on a tiger hunt

I guess I should mention in case things go haywire in the next nine or ten days that I won’t be here — haven’t been for almost a day now, actually, I think. It’s all ghost posts for the next week and some odd days.

I’m taking my hips on a gold road trip to the Old Home. It will bring good and bad. I will be stopping at several points along the way there and back for some painful purposes, and at other times for what I hope will be crazy-joyful occasions of reunion.

The only way out is through.

(Geneen Roth.)

This quote puts me in mind of a memory that is tied closely to the trip I am about to make. A long time ago, when I used to live where I am going, my aunt — the one who is a nun, not to be confused with my bereaved aunt who is reading Kubler-Ross and about whom I talk all the time, nor my chic deaf aunt who lives on a cliff — used to sing to me this song called “Goin’ on a tiger hunt,” some variant of which you have doubtless been taught in church youth group or some scout camporee or perhaps by a cartoon. Animaniacs was surprisingly educational at times.

If this picture of a little girl making a wish on her birthday candles some fifty years ago does not make you accuse the room of being dusty you have no soul. I hope every one of her dreams came true and she has lived a long and happy life.

The main thing of the song — which sitting on the steps of my grandparents’ house by the highway singing with my aunt is one of my happiest memories — was this syncopated repetitive chorus whenever the hunter would encounter an obstacle. You would chant back and forth while clapping rhythmically, “Goin’ on a tiger hunt. * But I’m not afraid. * Cause I’ve got a gun. * And bullets at my side. — What’s that up ahead?” and Aunt B would respond, “A tree! / Tall grass! / A fence! / Mud!” Then you must say,

Can’t go over it * (can’t go over it)
Can’t go under it * (can’t go under it)
Can’t go around it * (can’t go around it)
Gotta go through it.

And then you would delight in making squelching noises for mud, slidey hand sounds for grass, creaking like a gate, etc. *

You went with delcious slowness through the first part of the song, forgetting really in the process that your whole job in this call-and-response game of foley artistry is to hunt a tiger and catch him with bullets all while not feeling fear, and then suddenly when you asked “What’s that up ahead,” Aunt B would shout, “THE TIGER!” and your heart would pound and you’d hastily run backward through all of your previous sound effects trying to go as fast as possible while keeping in the proper order and lastly mimic the final sound of the slam of the gate behind you. Then you would say, “But I’m not afraid.”

In Girl Scouts we played it as “Going on a Squeegee Hunt” and we just skipped the guns and bullets part. I’m not sure what a-changing times lead to the substitution of the made-up “squeegee” monster for the visceral image of the tiger — whether it was less scary than the tiger or whether it was less encouraging of poaching a potentially endangered species — but in any case I feel like with the whitewashing the song lost its sizzle.

I am going on a tiger hunt, and I am afraid, and I do not have a gun, nor bullets at my side. But I cannot go over, under, or around what comes next — I will go through what painful obstacle stands in my way because that is simply the only choice I have. Which, as that is the case, it can only be meant to be and I therefore have double reason to persevere.

I must maintain this mindset. Wish me luck.



*For the tree, I believe we said, “Gotta climb it,” the only deviation in the song’s demandingly strict meter — why not just omit the tree in favor of a thing which might be gone through? It is scarcely true that you cannot go around a tree, and climbing it is the same as going over it. Really the only thing in the words of the chorus that you can not do when faced with the tree in this song — besides obviously the impossibility of going through it as is evidenced by the replacement of “go through it” with “climb it” — is tunnel under it, but even that is only for lack of time or machinery. You technically could go under it as well as around and over it. “Through it” is wholly out, and thus it destroys the fundamental message of the repetition of the chorus. A puzzling lyric.

Has anyone ever been taught to chop it down? Get back to me if you have. Now I’m ten kinds of curious.