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We're back "home."
In Akron.
In Akron.
This weekend was pretty surreal in quite a few ways. For one, it was short enough that my brain is going insane being back here already. No, I like being at my home a great deal. My brain is currently trying to figure out whether I had ever really left and whether the weekend was a figment of my imagination.
If it was a figment of my imagination, I deserve two more days of weekend again.
We went to Indiana Friday afternoon and hung out with my parents on Saturday and part of Sunday. With everything going on with Tim's wreck, my mom's cancer and with the old house still not sold, they're broke, so activities were pretty limited. We ended up taking them out to dinner (for Tim's and Mom's birthdays which are next week) on Saturday night, which they greatly appreciated.
Tim is doing pretty well. He has a giant robot-looking cast on his leg for his broken foot, has a sling for his collarbone, has some stitches and staples (which are quite freaky to see) in various places, a swollen nose and cheeks, remnants of black eyes, and some loose teeth. He's supposed to fully recover physically.
He's going to have some legal and financial problems from this whole ordeal, as expected. He was arrested Thursday and charged with Criminal Recklessness, a D felony, and some other citations. He got citations for OWI with 0.15 BAC, crossing the center line and driving without insurance. He also got a couple of citations that won't stick, such as driving with a suspended license (which is false) and standard OWI (double jeopardy conflict with the other OWI charge). My parents, poor enough as it was, posted bond and got him out. His attorney thinks that with the right strategy, he can work the charges into a sentence of court-ordered rehab. That won't do anything for the pending civil suits, but first matters first. The kid obviously has problems, but prison doesn't help problems.
We saw pictures of his truck. He should be dead, simply put. It looks like someone tested a nuke in the engine. Tim's been stone sober and smokefree (both varieties) since the wreck. His attitude seems to have changed dramatically. And it's about fucking time.
Mom is also doing okay. Her last round of chemotherapy was today, and the plan is that she'll be having a mastectomy around a month from now, probably over Thanksgiving so that she can recover during the week off.
Sunday found us skipping the church of Andy's parents and eating (apparently on a tab) at Uncle Monte's (which has NOTHING even close to vegan and most of the vegetable sides contain massive amounts of meat!). At Monte's, as I reminisced about the superb flavor of the chicken there, Mom tried to convince me to eat chicken by reminding me that the chicken was already dead. Not wanting to press the issue by explaining why this didn't work, I politely declined.
I'm now a month of a vegetarian, though the certainly unvegan nature of the soul food weighed heavily on my stomach in ways that I'm unsure any food has. Was eating this kind of food always this heavy? If so, I'm finally seeing what eating is really supposed to be like. I do want to exercise more in the coming weeks to speed up my metabolism, but I think the diet change is an excellent start.
After dinner (and a number of attempts by Mom to keep us longer and longer) we went down to Westfield and hit up Amy's parents. I got schnookered into church (boo!) but got to see my niece Eliza for the first time. She is very small and baby-like. I won't call her cute because I have a strong belief that no baby is cute, not even a relative. All babies are bald, chubby in the wrong ways, whiny, smelly and generally gross depositories of various fluids that are constantly ejected. They are worthless little blobs that also seem to be such a nuisance that the cute factor, if there was one, would last approximately 4.3 seconds. That being said, it was nice to meet Eliza because certainly she will grow out of babyhood as they all do and eventually assume some form of cuteness that I can harp upon in future posts. It will also be nice to parent vicariously through David and Susan, since we see every part of parenthood at this point as a deterrent, and their experiences will probably magnify this fact.
After church was vegetarian lasagna with Amy's parents (who are surprisingly more understanding about our vegetarianism) and TV late into the evening. Amy watched several episodes of "The Dog Whisperer," which is a strange take on dog behavior on a channel we don't get.
Today, Monday, was a hodgepodge. We spent the morning with Amy's mom while she played hooky from work. We all ate lunch together and then took an old guitar from their attic, got it restrung and delivered it to my mom, who happened to be getting chemotherapy over on 96th Street in Indianapolis, about 15 minutes away. See, an old guitar that I had sold Tim about four years ago and which was his favorite accoustic, was in the truck with him when he wrecked. Like the truck, it was totalled. However, coincidence of all coincidences, Amy remember I had pointed out some time ago that one of her brother's old guitars in the upstairs of her parents' house was the same model as Tim's. Since David hadn't touched it in years, we acquired it easily, got it strung and delivered it to my mom for Tim.
The catch: it's still ours until he's sober for a year. And Amy's dad, who Tim knows has a gun, will be arriving to repossess it should he revert to his old behaviors.
After taking the guitar to Mom, we went and visited Amy's grandma, who's almost 93 and isn't looking great these days. She's still sharp as a tack and she always enjoys our visits. From what we hear, she talks about us for days after we visit. Maybe it's because we visit her to talk specifically to her and listen to her and not to keep up appearances? I hope she feels better, but I do know that she is getting very old. I hope that before she leaves I can get my mom to talk to her and learn more of the family history. She's better at that stuff than I am, though I'm sure I'll have to be the one passing the legacy to Tim's kids. After that short visit to Grandma's went back to Amy's parents' house, packed up and headed east. And now, we're back home. Our home.
Driving around Hamilton County, Indy's northern suburban blob, is always an interesting experience. Such a drive was made necessary by the need to deliver Tim's sobriety guitar. Everything changes so quickly in these burbs that in each visit, the landscape is completely different. And of course, it made me think.
See, on Saturday night after everyone went to bed, Amy and I watched American Beauty on TV. For a while, it was in the top five of my all-time favorite movies. It's still (at least) in the top 20, but it aged in a strange way since its release.
I guess part of the problem with watching American Beauty now is the social context in which I first experienced the film. It was put out in 1999, and I believe I saw it for the first time in February of 2000 at the second-run mall theater with Carla. That was so long ago, in autobiographical context. At that point, I was incredibly optimistic about a number of things, like art, culture, politics, the world condition, religion, etc. The first time I watched the film, I interpreted it as a very optimistic piece, which remains with me to this day.
Having been plenty brainwashed by the media and whatnot, I was a strong believer that the turning of the western calendar to the new millenium (even though I knew it wasn't yet the real millenium which happened in 2001) would be enough of a milepost to pass that society, as a whole, would look around and say, "okay, this is what we need to work on." I strongly believed that many of the problems of the past century, such -isms as consumerism, militarism, new urbanism, fascism, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc, etc, etc, would all be duly rectified.
And then, during this time when I was so optimistic, came this film American Beauty which seemed to be trumpeting this very thing. We watched as Lester Bernham struggled with these very problems as an individual and how he ultimately fell victim to his environment. It was optimistic even when Lester nearly slept with his daughter's friend but decided against it in a powerful scene fueled by Annie Lennox's "Don't Let It Bring You Down." But the message was empowering and uplifting: no, consumerism and suburbanism aren't the only answers. Yes, there is another world out there. And yes, we're all fucked up, but we can get through it... and there's no reason not to try!
And when I watch the movie six-and-a-half years later, it seems like a failed prophet. It's even more of a disappointment than when you look at the old Popular Mechanic magazines from the 1950s that promised flying cars and shit by 1999. It was almost as sickening as the PETA videos that Amy shows me everytime she catches me writing romantic poetry for meat.
Here was this movie, this popular and Oscar-awarded movie that talked about these deep issues that I cared about. This was the chance to bring these things to the forefront of people's minds, to help them question the fakeness of their lived. Here was a message that questioned people's priorities, and poked them in ways that were just a little uncomfortable and a little too close to home.
I walked out of that theater way-back-when thinking that I had seen the beginning of a revolution, and I was thrilled. Six years, two sham presidential elections and one sham midterm, two ridiculous wars (and one or more on the way), dozens of weeks of three dollar gasoline, hundreds of new megachurches, thousands of new suburban developments, and millions of new SUVs later, I realize how false the prophecy was.
How many people are still duped into thinking a giant house (with a tiny lot), a handful of big cars, 1.8 kids, 0.75 dogs and 0.49 cats are all that's important? How many unfit parents force themselves into parenthood seeking societal approval? How many drone on in cubicles just to realize this pre-programmed dream? Driving around the constantly developing Indy suburbs of Carmel, Westfield and Fishers today made this all the more obvious. These people could have never seen this movie and understood it, right? I can't imagine calling a place like this, a lifestyle so fake as this, my home. Maybe that's what my infatuation with Akron, a hellhole to many, is rooted in, seeking some sort of earnesty that just doesn't exist in a place like Carmel.
It's still a beautiful movie, but it's one that will never be contextually relevant again. It will be forever filed into my material collection as an autobiographical relic, much like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles music tape, a "VOTE ANDY!" flyer, a certain plastic viking cap or a charbroiled wedding photo as a signifier of a distant memory of something that wasn't meant to be.
Sometimes it's sweet, and sometimes it's bitter, and sometimes, like American Beauty, it takes a wide shift from one to the other with time.
If it was a figment of my imagination, I deserve two more days of weekend again.
We went to Indiana Friday afternoon and hung out with my parents on Saturday and part of Sunday. With everything going on with Tim's wreck, my mom's cancer and with the old house still not sold, they're broke, so activities were pretty limited. We ended up taking them out to dinner (for Tim's and Mom's birthdays which are next week) on Saturday night, which they greatly appreciated.
Tim is doing pretty well. He has a giant robot-looking cast on his leg for his broken foot, has a sling for his collarbone, has some stitches and staples (which are quite freaky to see) in various places, a swollen nose and cheeks, remnants of black eyes, and some loose teeth. He's supposed to fully recover physically.
He's going to have some legal and financial problems from this whole ordeal, as expected. He was arrested Thursday and charged with Criminal Recklessness, a D felony, and some other citations. He got citations for OWI with 0.15 BAC, crossing the center line and driving without insurance. He also got a couple of citations that won't stick, such as driving with a suspended license (which is false) and standard OWI (double jeopardy conflict with the other OWI charge). My parents, poor enough as it was, posted bond and got him out. His attorney thinks that with the right strategy, he can work the charges into a sentence of court-ordered rehab. That won't do anything for the pending civil suits, but first matters first. The kid obviously has problems, but prison doesn't help problems.
We saw pictures of his truck. He should be dead, simply put. It looks like someone tested a nuke in the engine. Tim's been stone sober and smokefree (both varieties) since the wreck. His attitude seems to have changed dramatically. And it's about fucking time.
Mom is also doing okay. Her last round of chemotherapy was today, and the plan is that she'll be having a mastectomy around a month from now, probably over Thanksgiving so that she can recover during the week off.
Sunday found us skipping the church of Andy's parents and eating (apparently on a tab) at Uncle Monte's (which has NOTHING even close to vegan and most of the vegetable sides contain massive amounts of meat!). At Monte's, as I reminisced about the superb flavor of the chicken there, Mom tried to convince me to eat chicken by reminding me that the chicken was already dead. Not wanting to press the issue by explaining why this didn't work, I politely declined.
I'm now a month of a vegetarian, though the certainly unvegan nature of the soul food weighed heavily on my stomach in ways that I'm unsure any food has. Was eating this kind of food always this heavy? If so, I'm finally seeing what eating is really supposed to be like. I do want to exercise more in the coming weeks to speed up my metabolism, but I think the diet change is an excellent start.
After dinner (and a number of attempts by Mom to keep us longer and longer) we went down to Westfield and hit up Amy's parents. I got schnookered into church (boo!) but got to see my niece Eliza for the first time. She is very small and baby-like. I won't call her cute because I have a strong belief that no baby is cute, not even a relative. All babies are bald, chubby in the wrong ways, whiny, smelly and generally gross depositories of various fluids that are constantly ejected. They are worthless little blobs that also seem to be such a nuisance that the cute factor, if there was one, would last approximately 4.3 seconds. That being said, it was nice to meet Eliza because certainly she will grow out of babyhood as they all do and eventually assume some form of cuteness that I can harp upon in future posts. It will also be nice to parent vicariously through David and Susan, since we see every part of parenthood at this point as a deterrent, and their experiences will probably magnify this fact.
After church was vegetarian lasagna with Amy's parents (who are surprisingly more understanding about our vegetarianism) and TV late into the evening. Amy watched several episodes of "The Dog Whisperer," which is a strange take on dog behavior on a channel we don't get.
Today, Monday, was a hodgepodge. We spent the morning with Amy's mom while she played hooky from work. We all ate lunch together and then took an old guitar from their attic, got it restrung and delivered it to my mom, who happened to be getting chemotherapy over on 96th Street in Indianapolis, about 15 minutes away. See, an old guitar that I had sold Tim about four years ago and which was his favorite accoustic, was in the truck with him when he wrecked. Like the truck, it was totalled. However, coincidence of all coincidences, Amy remember I had pointed out some time ago that one of her brother's old guitars in the upstairs of her parents' house was the same model as Tim's. Since David hadn't touched it in years, we acquired it easily, got it strung and delivered it to my mom for Tim.
The catch: it's still ours until he's sober for a year. And Amy's dad, who Tim knows has a gun, will be arriving to repossess it should he revert to his old behaviors.
After taking the guitar to Mom, we went and visited Amy's grandma, who's almost 93 and isn't looking great these days. She's still sharp as a tack and she always enjoys our visits. From what we hear, she talks about us for days after we visit. Maybe it's because we visit her to talk specifically to her and listen to her and not to keep up appearances? I hope she feels better, but I do know that she is getting very old. I hope that before she leaves I can get my mom to talk to her and learn more of the family history. She's better at that stuff than I am, though I'm sure I'll have to be the one passing the legacy to Tim's kids. After that short visit to Grandma's went back to Amy's parents' house, packed up and headed east. And now, we're back home. Our home.
Driving around Hamilton County, Indy's northern suburban blob, is always an interesting experience. Such a drive was made necessary by the need to deliver Tim's sobriety guitar. Everything changes so quickly in these burbs that in each visit, the landscape is completely different. And of course, it made me think.
See, on Saturday night after everyone went to bed, Amy and I watched American Beauty on TV. For a while, it was in the top five of my all-time favorite movies. It's still (at least) in the top 20, but it aged in a strange way since its release.
I guess part of the problem with watching American Beauty now is the social context in which I first experienced the film. It was put out in 1999, and I believe I saw it for the first time in February of 2000 at the second-run mall theater with Carla. That was so long ago, in autobiographical context. At that point, I was incredibly optimistic about a number of things, like art, culture, politics, the world condition, religion, etc. The first time I watched the film, I interpreted it as a very optimistic piece, which remains with me to this day.
Having been plenty brainwashed by the media and whatnot, I was a strong believer that the turning of the western calendar to the new millenium (even though I knew it wasn't yet the real millenium which happened in 2001) would be enough of a milepost to pass that society, as a whole, would look around and say, "okay, this is what we need to work on." I strongly believed that many of the problems of the past century, such -isms as consumerism, militarism, new urbanism, fascism, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc, etc, etc, would all be duly rectified.
And then, during this time when I was so optimistic, came this film American Beauty which seemed to be trumpeting this very thing. We watched as Lester Bernham struggled with these very problems as an individual and how he ultimately fell victim to his environment. It was optimistic even when Lester nearly slept with his daughter's friend but decided against it in a powerful scene fueled by Annie Lennox's "Don't Let It Bring You Down." But the message was empowering and uplifting: no, consumerism and suburbanism aren't the only answers. Yes, there is another world out there. And yes, we're all fucked up, but we can get through it... and there's no reason not to try!
And when I watch the movie six-and-a-half years later, it seems like a failed prophet. It's even more of a disappointment than when you look at the old Popular Mechanic magazines from the 1950s that promised flying cars and shit by 1999. It was almost as sickening as the PETA videos that Amy shows me everytime she catches me writing romantic poetry for meat.
Here was this movie, this popular and Oscar-awarded movie that talked about these deep issues that I cared about. This was the chance to bring these things to the forefront of people's minds, to help them question the fakeness of their lived. Here was a message that questioned people's priorities, and poked them in ways that were just a little uncomfortable and a little too close to home.
I walked out of that theater way-back-when thinking that I had seen the beginning of a revolution, and I was thrilled. Six years, two sham presidential elections and one sham midterm, two ridiculous wars (and one or more on the way), dozens of weeks of three dollar gasoline, hundreds of new megachurches, thousands of new suburban developments, and millions of new SUVs later, I realize how false the prophecy was.
How many people are still duped into thinking a giant house (with a tiny lot), a handful of big cars, 1.8 kids, 0.75 dogs and 0.49 cats are all that's important? How many unfit parents force themselves into parenthood seeking societal approval? How many drone on in cubicles just to realize this pre-programmed dream? Driving around the constantly developing Indy suburbs of Carmel, Westfield and Fishers today made this all the more obvious. These people could have never seen this movie and understood it, right? I can't imagine calling a place like this, a lifestyle so fake as this, my home. Maybe that's what my infatuation with Akron, a hellhole to many, is rooted in, seeking some sort of earnesty that just doesn't exist in a place like Carmel.
It's still a beautiful movie, but it's one that will never be contextually relevant again. It will be forever filed into my material collection as an autobiographical relic, much like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles music tape, a "VOTE ANDY!" flyer, a certain plastic viking cap or a charbroiled wedding photo as a signifier of a distant memory of something that wasn't meant to be.
Sometimes it's sweet, and sometimes it's bitter, and sometimes, like American Beauty, it takes a wide shift from one to the other with time.
Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ on October 24, 2006 01:05 AM | Permalink
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