Over the last 7 days of driving to Tucson and back with three teenaged girls and a fiancee, through mostly horrible driving weather, with awkward and probably septic living conditions and sickening expenses, with socially-charged visits and a big family reunion with a Mormon wedding in the middle, etc etc etc I have spent considerable time getting my head busted by two equally imponderable things about which at the end of the day neither I nor anyone else has much revealing to say:
1. To live at the very edge of the cash and credit economy, dipping into it when convenient or necessary, but largely isolated from its tidal surges and arbitrariness and impersonal procrustean exigencies, etc. is a very, very hard thing to do. Just thinking about HOW to actually do it is to step right up to the void. Fucking terrifying. I mean, the reason we HAVE this cash and credit economy in the first place is that we crave security so much that we are willing to trade our lives for it. To sidestep security is to step into the void, where any bloody thing can happen and few people can help.
2. The west, the canyons and mountains and deserts and forests, in fresh snow at zero degrees is so beautiful that I can stay in a state of almost continual rapture while rolling through it, even with three whinging kids and lots of popcorn underfoot and tailgaters and ominous state police cars and coal-fired power plants and dams and the Navajo reservation, and the incredibly ticky-tacky shit we people build, which sounds like a litany of disgust, but really I was in a state of almost continual rapture from Salt Lake City to Tucson and back.
So, there you have it: the two Mysteries: human nature and nature nature. Busts my fuckin' head!
XOV.
I meant to also say: we bust our asses all life long for ILLUSORY security. It doesn't matter how big your house, even if it's paid for. You could get run over or cancer or whatever any old day!
ReplyDeleteIdea for a new kind of leisure apparel: "mocdals". A cross between moccasins and sandals that can be easily made by Navajos and sold at McDonald's.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading about Indians again, clearly. (btw, couldn't you just read about happiness and financial independence on the edge of the cash economy, like I do?) Erdrich and Marmon Silko and stuff. And really jonesing to come back West, or even just to visit long enough to get dehydrated and beat to a bloody pulp because of my dirty educated mouth.
Please send sadly matches, ruination kindling and a dry timber of hurt.
Vast panoramas out here totally worth the trip. U can't just read about it cause either: 1. the descriptions will be full of irony, parody, and something approachiong mockery as in DFW's descriptions of Tucson and Phoenix etc or, 2: the descriptions will be soaring and reverent and awe-filled to all feck so's you can't even read them without needing to either 2A: curl up in a soft glade and sob off your agoraphobia or, 2B: start composing Wagnerian/Sousaesque Hymns to the Republic or whatever.
ReplyDeleteLouise erdrich is one of the Pantheon, BTW, FWIW, mobile blogging is where it's AT!
ReplyDeleteMy response to big spaces is usually just to feel really comfortable and small and my blood pressure drops down to normal. Goddamn woodland indians get on my nerves with all their little plans and glottal clickings.
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