Keep Austin something

I used to hate this drive a whole lot, Dallas<->Austin. I made a point of never figuring out whether Waco was closer to Dallas or Austin because then I could say to myself "I think it's actually a little more than halfway" whichever way I was going. Later on I would do Chicago<->Lexington and learn what a boring drive actually looks like. 

Of course these days I like it better also because it's a bigger deal to be between those two cities. 

There were things I liked to see along the way, anyway. The big truck billboard at Carl's Corner. Signs for West and Waxahachie which had associations with the past, albeit superficial ones. 

It's a good drive for my particular brand of escape fantasies--the ones that really rescue me in certain moods are the ones about moving to a terrible little town where I don't know anyone but where you can maybe buy a house for $40k and not do much of anything ever again. 

Pardon the gap in blogging, if you're reading. I got to Austin, had a few too many with one old crowd, and then D was down here for two days and it was a mad, gay whirl and all that. Maybe I'll write about that tonight. I'm suddenly halfway through my trip, and suddenly only halfway through my trip, and a little anxious now. 

Lunch is a lot of things. Lunch is complicated.

I'm hoping everyone along the way lets me sleep on couches. Sleeping on a couch is somehow so much nicer than sleeping in someone else's bed. I finally slept in today, til 9. 

Then of course I went to another Half Price Books just to get out of the house. My uncle was home maybe doing work and I always have the feeling he doesn't know what the hell to say to me. Like he actually seems somewhat bewildered by me. 

My aunt on the other hand I never talk to when I'm not here and then I get here and remember I really like her. 

So back to the Home for Aged Hebrews for lunch and then I watched TMC for a bit with my grandmother, some comic short that I actually found rather funny about this couple that kept trying to win on quiz shows. Now of course I can't figure out what it was. I'm using search strings like "comic short couple radio Errol Flynn sneeze" and it's not working. It reminded me of Robert Benchley in comic sensibility. 

My grandmother went to the dentist and came back and we went through another box of photos and as god or someone is my witness, I will not, this vacation, look at another photo of a person who was relatively happy and now is dead or someone now very old looking like all the 1970s in one fashion choice or a lovely house torn down to make way for some faux Tuscan monstrosity.

She would pick up a picture of my mother and aunt thirty years ago and say "you know these people" and pick up another of the same and say "you don't know these people" until I wasn't sure quite what joke she was making and whether this was enjoyable for her or a little bit of agony. I kept commenting on the places in the background and the time periods and she didn't have much to say about it. 

It all made me terribly sad and fortunately I find the dull expanses of north Dallas and Plano soothing. Sad isn't really the word at all, though. Something more anguished and full of doubt. I kept wondering if it was about actual misgivings about my life choices, which is what it felt like. 

My grandmother last night asked me about what things I'd like when she died. With someone who is 92 it isn't convincing to say "don't be ridiculous" though I did lead off with "ask me again in ten years" and she said "I won't be here in ten years." Five years ago it was possible to believe she might, as her health was remarkably good and her mother lived to 99 or 100. (Birth certificate in the old country, you know.)

Then her son died after a long, awful illness and now she seems very old. 

I said I wanted the giant Buddha head if nobody else did. There are also these insane mid-century lamps but I didn't want to sound like I was shopping. Jesus. 

The thing about my family in Dallas is they are family in some sense I never aspired to. They all lived along Hillcrest Blvd the last fifty years. My aunt's kids went to school close to home and the two boys have lived there again since college though the older one just bought a place (shockingly, off Preston! Which is to say, a mile west.)

Partly this is generational but actually they both make a decent living and Dallas is cheap and I could never fucking figure out how they could stand to still live there. 

So then in a certain state of emotional agitation I think what if the whole problem is that I can't figure out how they could stand to have spent so much of their lives so close to home. What if that would have been better, and I would have been nicer, and have some core to my life. It continues overheatedly down that line. 

I had dinner with my other cousin who I was close with when we were kids but haven't kept actively in touch with for years and years. We went for exactly the kind of Tex Mex that doesn't exist in the northeast. That did me some good. And we talked about the Cousins of my Existential Doubt and he and his wife also find it nuts, and that was probably good for my sanity. 

He did though ask me in a discussion of The Big Question of Where Next whether I would consider Dallas and it was like having a somewhat ego-dystonic kink discovered, because of course I've daydreamed about it but I don't know that I've ever admitted that to anyone (oh, hi!) for a number of reasons. 

I like it here. The air smells right to me. Maybe if I lived here I'd hate it. It's not a real possibility. 

There is always a Cadillac at Royal Lane

Arrived in Dallas an hour or so late and took DART up to practically Plano where my aunt and uncle live. DART is great. Dallas is too sprawling for it to do what public transit does in northeastern cities but for what it is, it seems well put together.

Got up and went to Half Price Books, which is in the building that used to house the department store my family started and ran for thirty years or so, where my mother was a switchboard operator when she was a teenager, paging people or whatevs.  

Honestly I didn't need books but I needed something to do with my day and also HPB is near a Taco Cabana and TC is my getting to Texas ritual. Of course I bought some books to lug around for two weeks because I'm a moron. But I mean what if I were on the train across west Texas and really wanted to read that biography of Daryl Zanuck?

Odd driving again. The fine motions of the left foot on the clutch particularly getting from zeroth into first gear are still there, but less automated. 

It was a gross morning and I forgot how walking-oriented Dallas isn't and ended up trudging on a sort of a abandoned looking street to get my black bean taco. 

Funny to drive past the gold-windowed office buildings off Northwest Highway that are so bland but so iconic of Dallas for me. 

Then up to the Home for Aged Hebrews (phrase from Angels in America I think, can never resist it) to see my grandmother. We had lunch at Dicky's, a mediocre barbecue chain the whole family loves, and as it was Tuesday it was two sandwiches for one, and I ever so gallantly picked up the check, which with my fried okra and Dr. pepper came to $9.35. My grandmother kept staring at the receipt and saying "is that right? It seems like a lot" and now you begin to understand about me and money. 

We sat around some and I had a panicky feeling about what to say to a 92-year-old person I have known all my life who has treated me with extraordinary kindness and generosity but who will not, oh will not ever really understand my life and vice versa probably. 

She asks after my boyfriend by name which is really very sweet. 

Had to return to my aunt's house to get a jacket for the special Mardi Gras themed dinner, so I grabbed a strand of purple and a strand of gold beads for her, and then everyone turned out to be wearing Mardi Gras beads and I felt rather gallant!

Then we went to her apartment and looked at old photos of people most of whom are dead (most of whom I didn't know well, one or two of whom I am very sad about, plus vicarious sadness for my 92-year-old grandmother who has lost almost all of her friends and contemporaries.)

This and some other things like her asking what I would like when she dies* just drove me over the edge and I had to leave. I don't know whether I'm emotionally frozen in NY or psychotic in Texas but I've wept three times in two days. 

It's about thoughts of mortality of course but also about the partial way your family must know you (my grandmother has no idea, I guess, that sometimes I am an asshole!) and all that other stuff. 

So yes. Travel is fraught, for me!

Came home. Watched SOTU with aunt and uncle and cousin and neurotic dog. I like these people. I'm going to bed. 

*there are several things because they remind me of her house where my childhood most resembled what other people who liked childhood more seem to remember. But it's quite a conversation to have. 

And I won't drive a truck anymore

Ugh, where was I?

There was a lot of drinking. What I can't understand about Mardi Gras is why, having had only a glimpse of it of course, it doesn't annoy me. The air of revelry doesn't seem forced or ugly, as it sometimes does. As far as I can tell, it is all honest, organic decadence. 

We went to Endymion, which is huge and the floats are insane. You start to get very excited about catching these silly plastic beads (though actually the one part of the whole thing that gives me pause is all the waste. Someone must manufacture millions of chains of beads and half of them end up crunched up on the street because nobody picks them up if they touch the rather disreputable looking pavement.)

It's good. Strangers talk to each other, though some of that is just the south. 

We didn't go to Galatoire's because it was fucking closed. I wasn't too devastated as we went to Brennan's and it was a large, rich, overwhelming brunch. We could hardly talk on the walk home. Turtle soup with sherry, eggs Sardou, and bananas Foster which was invented there and which my mom has made since I was a kid and I can now report it is exactly the same on the mother ship. 

I did the other things I had meant to do, though. I walked down to the stairs down to the Mississippi very early Saturday and watched big ships navigate the curve. I got my muffuletta, which I just ate on the bus, which was perfection. 

I drank several hurricanes walking around on the street, and the moment you do this is the moment it's impossible to imagine why it's prohibited everywhere else. 

The weather held out all weekend. 

So I guess those are the highlights. Also as I was walking back to H's somewhat late, there were people on a stoop with instruments, and I don't think they all knew each other, but they started playing bluegrass and were actually very good, so I sat there for a little while. 

Last night around midnight I had a bout of anxiety about the fact that, having had what feels like a complete vacation, I am not heading home but heading on. These are probably going to happen along the way. Anxiety is my old pal and I can generally manage it. 

The bus this morning left at 7:45. I fell asleep for a couple of hours which is great except that I missed the Atchafalaya swamp which I remember as interesting-looking. That part of east Texas after you cross the state line isn't. (Crossing the state line comes with a big emotional rush if you have a long-standing complicated relationship with Texas and the suspicion you'll never live there again.)

Killing time in downtown Houston at the Lone Star Saloon having a Shiner Bock. It's the only thing anyone drank in college and I still like it. They don't have a distributor in New York so you can't get it. 

Made some agonizing small talk with bar regulars. Caught the bus, which (to the shock of no sentient being) took an extra hour to get out of Houston at rush hour. Now seated beside some kid with a different sense of personal space than my own, ready to be in Dallas but not even in Corsicana.  

Not every town has streets named for muses

Indeed I did not get to H's until 8 something. There were almost no cabs and a long line, and an enterprising cab driver packed three parties in at $7 a head. I was brusque with the guy in a way I didn't have in me before living in NYC and always hope will melt away when I'm elsewhere. 

H had beignets on the table for my arrival!

New Orleans reminds me of Philadelphia but this can't be right. I think it has to do with having spent a number of happy New Yearses in Philadelphia and watched the Mummers parade the next day, the same kind of shaggy, shabby eccentricity as Mardi Gras from my glimpses so far. Philadelphia probably lacks the ongoing sense of decadence, right? All other obvious regional differences notwithstanding. Um, it's a stupid comparison. 

The architecture is wonderful in a way a person who spends no time at all thinking about architecture (hi!) can appreciate. 

It's near 70 degrees and some knot of rage is getting unworked. 

My goal for tonight is to consume alcohol while walking down the street. It's just so stupid that you can't do this anywhere. 

Went to lunch in the garden district with H's interesting friend and walked back here to the edge of the Quarter. I think tonight H is indulging my irrational need to eat at Galatoire's, after we take in a bit of Endymion's parade right around the corner. Their Grand Marshal is Kelly Clarkson, who I somewhat secretly like. 

H is asleep and I'm going for a walk. 

I sleep good and I miss a lot of trains

Unbelievably, sitting on the shore of Lake Ponchatrain an hour now. I can actually see the city. We're waiting for freight traffic which is what always happens on Amtrak--the freight companies own the tracks so you're entirely at their mercy. It is tough to believe we could not have slipped through in the last hour but it's an unquestionable authority at two removes, which is to say our conductor might actually know right now that the answer is that we will next move in seven more hours, but has no incentive to tell us that. 

I missed Laurel which is fine. I fell asleep listening to Explosions in the Sky, a Texas band a friend mentioned on fb. They did the theme for Friday Night Lights. I loaded up a bunch of new music for my various rides and, hooray, it's all good so far. 

We sat somewhere in Mississippi for a while refueling. I think we're 11 hours late now. They are currently offering people 50 cents worth of coffee for free to make up for it. Luckily for me I don't really drink coffee so I don't have to trade in/relinquish my pique. 

Last night I sat for an hour or two in the cafe car with the other weary travelers. It's rare you meet anyone much on your wavelength on these things, or it is for me. I did once meet a lovely fellow, a folk-singer from California, who is currently cat- and house-sitting for me for this three week lunacy. 

H, with whom I am staying, is already awake. He has given instruction on how to pronounce Chartres and Rampart so as not to be taken for a rube by taxi drivers. 

Oh hey now there's a truck stuck on the track or something and they're waiting for it to be towed. I am maybe going back to sleep for a few. I'll be surprised if I'm at H's by sun-up. 

How not to start a trip

Right now I'm sitting on a train outside of Meridian, Mississippi at around 12:30 am listening to lute music, so all is more or less as it should be. I could stand to get some sleep, but 1) I can't find my sleep mask which would help and 2) I maybe half seriously want to be up to have a moment of silent tribute in Laurel, Mississippi when we stop there. Birthplace of Leontyne Price and all.

I would put the beginning of the trip as the moment I lay down on my couch to sleep the night before departing and realized I had pinkeye. A trip to the mirror confirmed it. I thought: this will not do. I had it a year or so ago and it's uncomfortable and you really would not want to spend a day on a train with it. 

There were some vigamox eye drops left in the medicine cabinet, doubtless expired I thought, but what was I going to do? I had to get some sleep and there was no way to go to the doctor the next day, so I dosed myself and went to bed. 

They seem to have worked actually but the trip so far has been the kind of thing that might be presaged by a sudden case of pinkeye. 

Basically we ran over someone. Just outside of DC. There was too much of a remove between the passengers and the situation to get very traumatized about it but it instantly turned into a 7-hour delay. 

I found this out by texting with a friend who googled it up.  Amtrak Staff didn't make the smallest effort to give us any idea what was going on. Sitting on a train where nobody is saying why you're sitting still is like being held hostage by bumbling incompetents. 

Finally we lurched south and I took a benzo (having polished off the tiny airport bottles of rum I smuggled on hours before) and put on my sleep mask and useless neck pillow thingy and got some relatively comfortable sleep. I think I had gritted my teeth into a powder. 

Sometimes you make up time. We lost another three hours somewhere. 

My seatmate is a nice enough guy, fairly uninteresting to me as I imagine I am to him. (A while after I dropped into the conversation that I'm "indoorsy" he asked if I had done much backpacking and I refrained from expressing surprise a the verbal form of that common object.)