Going Home — Far Away Is Here

A week ago, Lee and I were deciding to go ahead with our Spring Break. We'd planned a slow road trip around Virginia and North Carolina, to a number of cities he had yet to see. Although NYU had already announced a temporary closure due to the coronavirus threat, and there was a small outbreak in New Rochelle, we figured we were going south, away from the virus and the panic, and we were picking up my Element in Northern Virginia, so we could always high-tail it home--which we did, on Tuesday, from Richmond, after spending some of our last intimate moments with friends and loved ones for a while. The feeling of dread we were navigating through was just getting too thick, and even though New York is densely populated and had started getting a number of reported cases, it is home.

3 episodes with unsettling masculine energies we came across on our travels and 3 books by/about badass femmes I have been reading...

1) On our only night in Charlottesville, A came up to a table of four of us sitting at a dive bar (The Livery--in an old stable) in Charlottesville. He insisted on buying us a round of drinks and though we looked around the table at each other quizzically, we agreed. A said he was lonely, that he just wanted folks to talk to. He had some very bold tattoos, including "eternity" in cursive script across his neck and DaVinci's Vetruvian Man on his hand. He had just moved to town and worked a lot--as a short-haul truck driver for Walmart. He will be working more now, as he said limits on drivers' shifts had just been lifted b/c of "the virus." He said he had hopes for being a stand-up comedian. We weren't too into his jokes, but we did like his company for the length of that drink.

2) On our first night in Richmond, as we drove home from a big brewery that had been very sparsely full of people getting drunker and drunker, we past what looked like a corpse on the side of a hill and thought better of it, going back to see. I got out of the car and walked up to the man--an older African American fellow--who seriously looked flattened, done but did see him slightly breathing. I wanted to wake him but calling into his ear didn't help, nor did poking him a few times. Two other women stopped and got out of their cars. It was a chilly night, cars kept going past us, fast. We stood there, vacillating between concerned and, when he finally began to let out some loud snores, amused. Still he wouldn't wake and finally my friend S called 911 and the paramedics came. They were gruffer with the man, waking him immediately with their pokes, but also kind, talking to him about where he was going, where he had come from. The women left, we watched for a while, the paramedics thanked us, and then we left...

3) On our second night in Richmond, we decided we needed to get out of the house and so we ordered take-out and on our walk to pick it up saw a group of five young men (white, college-age?, high school?) wearing bandanas and each riding a different form of transport--a hoverboard, a moped, a skateboard, a regular old bike, etc--and hollering as they tore down the street. I know this description might sound silly but it felt markedly ominous. Our friend D said he wanted to mark that moment as the one he'll look back on when he realized the world had truly changed. On our way home from picking up that take-out, S noted a man covered in a sheet and sitting on a stoop talking to himself. None of the rest of us noticed, but we totally believed her and didn't see the need to turn back and check.

1) Mermaid Moon by Susann Cokal. Susann, who was my mentor in grad school, is a ridiculously smart person and a talented and skillful writer with a truly unique voice. I'm so enjoying getting sucked into this world and story she has so beautifully crafted about a mermaid who leaves the sea...Seriously this prose and story is a gift!

2) Adriane Hanson's unpublished manuscript. All I'm going to say is sex, horror, nature, feminine power, death and murder burst forth in this story of a family of three sisters (and one brother) and those connected to them. So amazing to have been following my dear friend's progress on this manuscript over the past year and a half and even better now that I have the complete pdf uploaded on my kindle.

3) End of Days by Sylvia Browne. So I picked this one up last week when I saw a post from a page of it where this celebrity psychic predicts a viral epidemic like this one, as well as it's sudden disappearance. Browne is controversial, an outright criminal and a psychic whose had many study the inaccuracy of her predictions BUT so far the book is all about various world religions and their visions for the end of days and I have to say the cumulation of it all is quite fascinating. Favorite parts so far have been the retellings of indigenous American and Australian myths. From the latter: "The Dreamtime, woven through their lives in the most sacred and mundane ways, is at its core that time of creation when the Aborigines' spirit ancestors moved through bare, unsanctified land and gave it its physical form and its sacred laws. There was the Rainbow Serpent, who slithered across the earth forming rivers and valleys with its massive body. There was Bila, the Su8n Woman, whose fire lit the world. There were Kudna and Muda, two lizardlike creatures who destroyed Bila. They were then so frightened by the darkness they'd created that they began hurling boomerangs into the sky in all directions, trying to bring back the light..."