deeplyshallow // crazy seafarers

crazy seafarers

Sunday, before picking up Dennis for our ill-fated Jeep jaunt, I killed a little time by investigating a winding road I’d never noticed before. My dad has always had this habit, and lately I’m seeing it crop up an awful lot for me as well. I am often early for work because I have to set my alarm so stinking early (or I will oversleep), and lately I have been using that extra time to explore.

Sunday was flat-out gorgeous: big blue skies, MIA sun, cool breezes and pleasant temperatures. The road that I followed led into a series of undulating hills, each of them carpeted in bright golden grass that, in some places, is just beginning to turn green. Each bend in the road was shaded by tall, thick oaks, and flanked by small vineyards. The reflective ribbons scattered throughout the grapes glittered; from the corner of my eye each sea of grape vines was filled with insane ship captains sending out incomprehensible signals in morse.

The scattered houses out there were big and shaded, and floated on green islands of well-manicured lawns, ringed with giant trees. Except for the acres of yellow surrounding them, they reminded me of my childhood: tagging along with the grandparents in deep Texas, being taken to the homes of distant relatives I’d never met and who spent their days baking and rocking on porch swings, sipping iced tea and listening to the cicadas. Those were wonderfully lazy days.

I’ve been on the road a lot this weekend, just poking around here and there. I haven’t had much time for road trips, and this weekend certainly doesn’t count, but I miss them. There’s no place I’m happier than on the open road, no deadline in sight, just sailing through mountains and across wide flat plains. (Okay, so maybe Alaska is one place I’d be happier. But that’s just a given.)

Listening to the radio today while driving, and a song by Ryan Adams comes on. I normally skip this song, but today I was in no mood for unnecessary movements, and I let it play. At one point he sang, “I’m all alone now, I can do as I please / I don’t feel much like doing anything,” and I thought, shit, if I’m not careful, that’s exactly what I’m going to end up doing. So I hereby announce a few resolutions that I hope to keep during this open-ended time:

I will read more. I miss inhaling entire books in a single afternoon. For the past two years I have watched Susan do this just the way I used to, and she’s had less time to herself than I have. I’ve let one of my passions slide. So today I bought a stack of books that I’d been curious about, and I’m going to work my way through them at the expense of other activities, because man, Reading Rocks. First up: The Last of the Mohicans, which is painfully awkward to read. But after that, a series of hard science fiction, which I go apeshit for. Reward the effort, man.

I will watch more classic movies — Westerns in particular. I don’t know why Westerns, except that I have been thinking lately about my grandpa. The third anniversary of his death is later this month, a few days after my birthday. He used to force Westerns on Liz and I when we were kids — like this — and these days it doesn’t matter if I ever saw him watch a particular Western or not. I associate them all with him. So today I completed my “man with no name” collection — A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — and added a few more, just for good measure (Lonesome Dove, The Searchers and Heat — c’mon, take away the submachine guns and this movie’s really just a Western in disguise, complete with bank robberies and last stands).

I will write again. I’ve already tried to revisit the novel, but it was an impulse with nothing behind it, and I ended up spending three hours on Saturday just reformatting the manuscript, which is what I do when I can’t actually write a fresh word or two. Writing’s a pain in the ass for me, it really is. Therapeutic or not, it’s just fucking hard. I don’t outline — I hate to — so I’m always blindly clawing my way into a story, and I don’t notice the dead ends until I run into them and break something.

I will drive more. This shouldn’t be so hard now that the Jeep is sitting in the driveway. I mean, come on: the road is the road is the road, no matter what you’re riding it in. But the road is a thousand percent more enjoyable when you’re in something you worked your ass off for. This is my first new vehicle, and I intend to wring every spare drop of exuberance from it. Also the road is something you have to feel to truly enjoy, and believe you me: in that big green beast I was driving, you couldn’t feel shit. Hell, back when I wrecked it, got broadsided at 60mph by a Saturn, it was like a fly bouncing off of a toad. The lady driving that Saturn? She went to the hospital on a board. (It’s okay, she was faking.) Me? I almost spilled my drink.

I will go out with friends, and listen more than I will talk. This could be hard, since I don’t tend to have any friends, but whatever. I’ll borrow some if I have to. Also hard because I lately have noticed a tendency to commandeer conversations for no practical purposes whatsoever. This is not me, and I am not sure what is going on here.

I will continue to buy movies like a junkie, because it makes me happy, and I don’t like to deny myself things that do this. Started today, actually, with twelve new movies for the collection, among them City of God, The Lost Weekend, the Westerns I mentioned before, and a few others. I even got The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I haven’t seen since I was seven or eight.

Resolutions have always been wasted effort for me, but these I think I’ll be able to keep pretty well. Except for the writing thing. It’s been a long time since that came easily. Although I suppose a little hard work never hurt nobody. Except there was that one time when I was fourteen and working that warehouse job and a twenty-foot-tall stack of loaded boxes fell on me. Wait — I was only pretending to work. How could I have forgotten? That’s all I have ever done. Yes, never mind.