(Phaysis)

Back home from my holiday retreat to Texarkana. Got to see the family. We had a rather non-traditional holiday feast. I grilled fajitas, and it was awesome. Steak and chicken fajitas with the onions and bell peppers, skewered some veggie kabobs with zucchini, tomatoes, and pineapple (yes, I know tomatoes and pineapple are fruits). We also had Spanish rice, refried beans, all the toppings, chips & salsa, and fudge pie for dessert. The house smelled like a Mexican restaurant. So good.

If you’re interested, I can give you the recipe for the marinade I used; you could still taste its citrusy spicy goodness on the meat even after grilling.

Now that I’m back home, it’s time to unwind from the unwinding and spend the last two days of “freedom” before I have to return to work on Monday. Sucks that I have a family holiday in the middle of a week of paid vacation; it’s like three three-day weekends in a row, and each weekend has its own flavor. The first weekend is frustration, the second is exhaustion, and the third hasn’t happened yet.

I took the opportunity Wednesday night to go driving around Texarkana. Instead of driving around to ogle the construction and the new churches that are sprouting up all over the place like pimples, I decided to take my wheels to the far north end of the county to an old haunt of mine.

Oak Ridge Road is a lonely stretch of back road north of Wamba, just off of FM559, where my friends and I in ’96 would hang out with smokes and beers and nothing around us but fields, empty roads, and the stars above. So damned peaceful out there that it’s my place to go for contemplation. It’s a sacred place. And so on occasion I have to go back, to pull the car to the side of the road, get out, gaze at the stars, the moon, the constellations; to feel the cold breeze; to breathe the crystallized air; to be alone with nothing around me but the rolled hay bales standing out in the fields like grazing cattle keeping silent vigil.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a single place here in Austin that I consider sacred. I’m sure there’s somewhere, but nothing comes to mind. I could easily say Epoch, but this place isn’t sacred. It’s just a hangout where, sometimes, someone will hang out with me. Not very sacred. I could say Pease Park since I like walking there, but it’s not really a nightime hangout (well, not for me, anyway). There’s the overlook on Castle Hill, but it’s off limits. The boat ramp on west Lake Austin Blvd is OK, but it’s not quiet, private, or cop-free.

I guess most of my “sacred places” are not really destinations, but journeys, neighborhoods to drive through. All the rich neighborhoods to the west of MoPac, along Exposition. The hills south of the river, along Westlake Drive. West 6th and West Lynn. Those are fun because of the hills and curves, and they afford me the opportunity to turn off and be contemplative, but there’s just nowhere I can sit, watch, observe, turn off and feel. I just don’t feel too welcome anywhere; it’s the problem of urban density, where every property has trespassing rules, where sitting too long is considered loitering. I’m constantly looking over my shoulder for the security guard on his golf cart coming to chase me off. That’s what I hate about this town.

In 2000, just days before I moved away from Texarkana for good, I made it a point to visit my field on Oak Ridge Rd. for one last bit of closure. It was just after sunset, the stars were coming out, and I sat on my trunk while the radio played. As I reflected on my impending life change, the radio belted out the opening strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”, and after all the times I’ve sat through that song waiting on it to be over, it struck a chord with me that night. No matter how my life was about to change, all I had to remember was to stay simple, and I can keep myself sane.

Nine years later, I’m still trying.

I just ordered tickets to Texarkana aboard Amtrak. This is a first for me, the riding Amtrak thing. Leaving Saturday morning at 9:30, arriving at 9pm. Coming back 5:30am a week later on Sunday to arrive home at 7pm. After being a rail afficionado for a lifetime, I finally have the opportunity to ride the rails. I’ve heard it’s classier and more comfortable than Greyhound; I can leave my seat and walk around, and there’s food available onboard. It’s just that in this part of the country, it takes forever to get anywhere.

Amtrak, in Texas, has to share the rails with freight trains, which get priority; Amtrak just leases time and space. So the trips promise to take longer than marked on the schedules. And god help us if there’s a train breakdown somewhere on the tracks, or a train hits a car; that’s at least a 3-hour stop. And nobody can leave the train except at the rail stations. Good thing I don’t smoke anymore.

So I’ll be staying at my cousin’s place, on the couch. Her housemates are night-owls. There’s pets and smoking and alcohol and cold conditions. My mother, who lives in the apartment out back, has promised to let me use her car when necessary; hopefully there won’t be too much inconvenience on either part. This’ll be my first time in Texarkana without the available use of my own car since I moved back from North Carolina in ’98. I’m not used to that level of living, coordinating with others to get around instead of hopping into my car at-will. Get settled in my ways, y’know?

Also, this’ll be the first time I’ve spent a whole week in Texarkana since I moved to Austin. Usually I’m ready to return to the comfort of my own bed after four days, so it’ll be a stretch. I may hate life after the week is over, I may find myself, I may cancel the train reservation and hitchhike back home. I don’t know. Hopefully it’ll go well.

So this is a warning to those of you in Texarkana who are my friends and family (and who still bother to regularly read my mostly-dead journal): I’m coming to Texarkana for the Thanksgiving holiday. Prepare your tables.

(written on Thursday, 11/24/2005 23:58:55. Thanksgiving day.)

So of course the high that I’ve been experiencing the whole week would end like a car crash this morning. I got the sleep I’ve been missing, but due to the cold, the uncomfortable “bed”, and my nieces, nephew, and sister, the sleep I got wasn’t worth much, so I slept for ten, maybe eleven hours. The moment I open my eyes, glance at the blinds, and look up to the ceiling, I started seeing spots. Thanks to a casual glance while waking up, I got a migraine, first thing in my morning. On thanksgiving. So I took some acetaminophen and hoped for the best. The kids were no help, but I hung on long enough to take a shower after they left. By then, the spots were gone and the migraine was a dull throb. Picked up my mother and we headed off to my aunt Janet’s sister’s house for dinner.

Dinner was good, of course. Ate a plateful, had some dessert. Played quiet, didn’t have much to say because the migraine recovery. Some time later we all left, and I dropped my mother off back at her home and I drove on. Went to Liz and Laura’s house, hung out with them for a while. The girls went to deliver a plate to their spry 92-year-old great aunt, so I chatted with Doug, Liz’s husband, for a good hour or so. Longest chat I’ve had with him. Had a good time shooting the shit. The girls came back, Jon woke up from his nap, and we had a few laughs on the back porch. Came back inside, chatted some more, and then the television got turned on and we somehow stopped talking. Funny when that happens.

After some hour or so of my second helping of the “That 70′s Show” marathon today, I decided to head on. Went driving around, decided to plug up my laptop, get some GPS data, do a little bit of wardriving, and now I’m here again, IHOP, tapping away on my laptop again. The cashier/hostess remembered me from last night and recommended the waiter to seat me somewhere near a power outlet, just like I requested last night. Yeah, she remembered. Someone should give her a raise.

The problem I have with my time is knowing how to spend it. When I’m home for long stretches of days, my time is spent sleeping short hours, watching television, doing a whole bunch of nothing, making no plans, seeing the few friends I have, and leaving their houses so late that I really don’t want to drive around to check things out. The problem is filling my time in a memorable, quality fashion. I think, now that the holiday and my day at OBU are out of the way, that I should follow up on some plans I made, y’know, some ideas. I would like to track down my friends Eddie and Michelle. It’s been over 5 years since I last saw them, and I hear they keep asking about me. It will be really good to see them again. Also, if things get too slow, I’ll grab some of my friends and go to an empty parking lot somewhere to do the burning mushrooms floating newspaper thing I saw my Austin friends doing behind Mojo’s some years ago. There’s things to do, y’know? Hell, I could show pictures to my family. I think I’ll do that tomorrow.

Ah, yeah. Texarkana life. Some drunk dude just came up to me, asked me if I was lookin’ at Playboy on this thing. You could smell it on his breath. Heh. And…I just saw some other dude walking around with a UT Longhorns ball camp on. I just can’t escape that, not even for one weekend. And, AND, just to show how connected this town is to the pulse of the fashion nation (MTV), last night I saw some real emo kids, the kind that look EXACTLY LIKE some emo kids I saw back at Spiderhouse. It…was…creepy. Seriously, same look.

Liek omg this is so going in my eljay.

(written on Wednesday, 11/23/2005 10:33:39 PM)

Whirlwind. Past 24 hours. Past week. It’s Thanksgiving holiday, my first trip home since Easter, and I’ve been going and going. Since my convalescence this past weekend, I’ve been running on some kind of edge. I’ve noticed it. Alertness. Awakeness, even in the lack of sleep. It’s all the preparations for the trip. The getting the car ready, the packing, the attention to making things happen. In the course of 2 days I hacked up a script to log what it reads from a borrowed GPS receiver. The logs from my drives are beautiful. Pages of useful data of just me…driving to Texarkana last night and, today, Ouachita.

Yeah, I went. Since I was in the neighborhood, loosely speaking, I took the hour-long trip up to Arkadelphia to see my alma mater. This December will mark my ten years since I was a student there; December 14, 1995 was my last day of enrollment. And though I’ve been back to OBU two or three times since in 1996 and 1999, this time around had an extra impact, a certain amount of poignance. It’s weird. It’s good to see the places I still sometimes happily, sometimes ashamedly, sometimes frightfully dream about and remember. And it’s creepy to see the changes, to see which buildings are torn down, which are brand new, and which are still around in all their mid-90′s glory. I’ve been away from OBU for long enough that the act of looking at the campus inspired few heavy emotional responses, and the memories that arrived on first trigger were cold, matter-of-fact memories; place names, hidden areas, geographic layout, things no longer there. But the fallout, the memories that return to me after I saw those places, those memories are at once both warm like fire and cold like an Arkadelphia winter, and they’ve sparked tonight’s firestorm of emotions.

It’s a mouthful, and I’m still trying to ruminate and digest today’s trip.

I shot around 2 1/2 rolls of film, just buildings, spaces, surroundings. No people. The fact that the campus was quiet, that school was out the day before the holiday (I had thought they’d be open), made things empty and solitary, but after my 4 summers spent on campus, the experience of the silent emptiness there wasn’t so alien to me. I did drive up there hoping to visit with old staff and faculty still there and to do some business with my school records, which didn’t happen, but just the experience of being back was enough to justify everything.

In some sense it was the Ouachita that I remembered, and in another sense it was like I was a floating intruder surveying a foreign place, an interloper in a forbidden zone checking up on its changed, hidden secrets. If there had been students there today, if there had been faculty and staff, it would have felt like being a welcomed stranger, like how I feel when I’m walking around Renfest on a late Sunday afternoon near sunset: everything is quieting down, everyone is folding up, the parking lot is decompressing, and I’m walking around between the booths where my few Rennie friends do their business. Yeah, just like that.

But today everything was just empty. The only human noise was from the construction crews, the few stragglers walking around campus, the campus security truck tooling around, and the ever-present Arkadelphia autumn breeze knocking around the leaves. I took the occasion to walk down the hillside beneath the student center to the Ouachita River, to the river bottoms where I spent so much of my time. They’d done some work there, made a walking trail, built steps and platforms down the hillside, thinned out a lot of the trees to open up the space to the campus uphill. The pavillion is still there, and so is the picnic table where my first girlfriend and I ground into each other in the heat of early summer. The odor, the smell down there on the river bottoms, the damp soil, the volumes of still water, the smell of river rot…that smell became my friend, my elixir, my aphrodisiac. I smell it and I am at peace. And today I took it in by the lungfulls. It’s still in my soul. THAT is the Ouachita that I miss.

The people I knew there were good people; not to gloss over everything with a rose-colored sheen, but they were my friends. They were the fire that kept me warm, the spark that burned new experiences into my memories. They were there with me…ten years ago. Not today. I think that was part of what is so surreal about today’s visit, and so saddening and angering. We’ve moved on, they’ve moved on; there were no familiar faces there today to share in today’s experience. I think that’s the hardest part.

It’s heavy, these floods, these torrents of memories and emotions that’re filling my head right now. Just looking around and seeing everything has brought them forward after so many years of not being triggered. There are the big picture memories that’ve always been there, but today brought back the tiny memories, the things that’ve been taken for granted, the decorations on someone’s house on the edge of campus, the fact that the ground near the theater is covered not with grass but with clover, the angled plaques mounted on a courtyard…those memories have come back.

The side trip to Lake DeGray, where I loved going, didn’t help much with the flooding. Went to the Highway 7 beach because it was the closest of the places I used to haunt, and it had the expected late-November empty beach hauntedness. The breeze was a wind over the lake, chopping up little waves in my direction as I stood on the point looking over the lake at the waning sunset. The parking lot was empty. The water was low. And everything had a heavy, heavy poetic air. This is the sunset. I cannot go back. No more dawns. The music playing on my laptop’s jukebox affirmed it, hammered it home:

“The paths that I once tred
Have all but gone
Only embers now smoulder
Where bridges once burned
I feel alive and yet I fear
What may happen now
I know,
I can’t return
…
Can I start again?
Erase this pain
By casting doubts into the waters
Asking judgment of the sea
Though Fortune may guide the fools
I have no wish to be free
Until I am gone.”

-VNV Nation “Distant (Rubicon II)”

In the past week I’ve been ill, I’ve been hyper, I’ve been clicking through the to-do list, I’ve been awake. I even finally and officially met this girl I’ve been exchanging glances with at Mojo’s for the past 3 months. And I’ve been driving, enjoyably and alertly driving. Sightseeing. And now I’m feeling, feeling things I can’t explain without metaphors; I know the words, but I can’t put them together, can’t craft what is necessary to communicate these things. That is my state. I’m still digesting.

My trip to Texarkana for the holiday was good.

I left a day later than I had wanted; got out of here at 10am wednesday morning and arrived in Texarkana around 4:30pm. Neverminding the smooth traffic flow, the two traffic jams (on a highway, no less), the torrential rain for 30 miles of the trip, the slowdown caused by accident rubberneckers, and the 10 miles stuck behind a 20-wheeled crane moving along at a leisurely 55mph, the drive up there sucked. The drive was around 45 minutes longer than usual. But I got there.

But for the visit, though, I got to see more of my family, buddies, and friends than I usually do on my typical two-day whirlwind weekend. Got the chance to help my sister and her husband with their “new” computer. Oh my god that piece of shit is ancient. After dealing with cleaning the dust out, upgrading the OS from Win95 to Win98, trying to get them online, installing more ram (it originally came with 16 megs of ram), and dealing with a new video card, they finally have a new computer and are now able to go online and check stuff out. So, to them, I say, “Welcome to Phaysis. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

I managed to eat quite well the entire weekend. The dinner was at my sister’s in-laws’ little shindig. Was nice to see them all again. Afterwards, I left to go see my own friends for the first time since getting home. Hung out until the wee hours of the morning, then went home. Friday, same thing — go out, come home late.

I managed to borrow a pc-card modem from a friend of mine, and was able to get online on friday nite. That was cool, kinda. Dialup sucks. (I’m so glad to be back home on my cable modem.)

Thursday night, though, I was so bored that I decided to indulge in my new hobby: wardriving. I was under the mistaken impression that Texarkana residents are still in the internet stone ages, unlike Austin, which have businesses that advertise free wireless access as a major selling point. So, on my drive, I found a ton of wireless hotspots in this one corner of town, and surprisingly enough, 95% of them were encrypted and secured. I did find three spots, though, that were wide open. That wasn’t so surprising.

I drove by this one hotspot and whipped into the parking lot to examine my readings. Found out it was open, and the major street that I was on was deader than a doornail, so I zeroed-in on the access point, picked up my laptop, and proceeded to associate with the node and I browsed for a good five minutes, tittering like a little schoolgirl. All the while, though, I had my eyes flashing between rear-view mirrors on the lookout for cops, guards, feds, whoever. A couple of times I had to do “turnarounds” in parking lots when the security guards in their nice trucks started coming my way, but not with this hotspot. I did my (mostly-legal) business and cruised on through the neighborhood and out of sight.

My little experience there gave me a few important survival tips, which I’m still compiling. But I had fun.

Ah, :sighs: work today, coupled with the long weekend and the tough driving, has left me tired and in need of some sort of energy or something. I want to write a journal entry detailing what all happened this weekend, but you’ll have to excuse me today. My writing sucks. Ah well.

Anyway, I got to have lunch with my mother sunday, and I hung out with her for the rest of the day until I had to leave for home. I left Texarkana around 8pm and got here at 2am. Total time for drive home: 6 hours and 57 seconds. I loaded my stuff into my apartment, unpacked, and got ready for bed. Let me tell you, sprawling out on my own big bed, with soft sheets, after that long drive, is a helluva lot better than trying to catch catnaps on my mom’s couch. Damn straight.

Ok, time to go kill some food. I’m starved.