It was honestly enjoyable and mostly relaxing. But it was pretty bizarre.

Going through the basic events: I already have recounted most of the important events from hanging with my parents in another earlier post, and have mentioned that either one of Tim's hoodlum friends (or, and I really hope not, but possibly Tim himself) had stolen Amy's laptop computer.

So, after figuring out that fact and reporting it to the police, we headed southwest to the ever-growing burg of Westfield, which is quickly being swallowed by Indianapolis's northern suburbs. We arrived at Westfield on Saturday afternoon, and ate a handsome dinner with Amy's parents and David, Susan and the new Eliza, our first ever niece. After this, I exercised my fabulous and well-earned projectionist skills at the request of Amy's parents to show a pile of old family movies in Super 8. Some of these movies were incredibly surreal, and if I ever digitize them (as is the plan) I intend to use them in some sort of psuedo art project. They're just that crazy, some of them. Some highlights included shots from Sea World, film of Amy's dad riding a horse-chariot thing, film of some crazy uncle getting a rooster all riled up, and others. You have to see to believe. Hopefully, I will make that possible soon...

The next day was Sunday, which meant I was socially forced to attend church with the family, but was rewarded for my troubles with an excellent (vegan!) dinner at Macaroni Grill. Then, it was a lazy Sunday and a Colts game with the family. We hit up Amy's grandma for an unfortunately short visit. I've had a feeling the past few months that her remaining time is getting incredibly short. Nothing today changed that notion, and this time Amy felt it too. I was pretty sure even Grandma thought that the end is coming. It's incredibly sad and haunting. She's a wonderful lady.

After visiting with Grandma for a while and catching lunch today with Amy's parents, it was on the road back to Akron. Of course, it seems easy when I say it like that. We had an odd event around Greenville, Ohio. See, we were travelling west on US-36 toward I-75. When we rolled into an intersection near Greenville when US-36 turned left onto a four-land freeway setup, Amy spotted a little critter just walking in the lanes of the freeway. After she nearly got hit a couple of times (and Amy hiding her eyes), we pulled close enough and I got out and caller her over. I mean, she was just frozen in the middle of a road with a semi bearing down on her. Anyway, this critter was a little jack russell mix (we think) who was starved and pregnant (again, we think), and without a collar. We brought her in the car and decided, because of her apparent pregnancy, that she could not go to the humane society because there was a strong chance that her puppies would be aborted and possibly even she would be euthanized.

So, welcome Maggie to the family, temporarily:

(You can click to see more pictures.)

We're trying, with the help of Kory and Amy, we're trying to get her hooked up with Rose's Rescue for help fostering her and her future puppies. This is third hand, but my Amy said that Amy D. said that the vet bills and things will be taken care of by the rescue if we sign papers and watch the dogs until a home is found. I think. I'm not sure how that works, but I'll keep my ears open.

Right now, Maggie is sleeping in our basement until we get some things figured out. I mean, we found her on the street emaciated and dirty. We don't know if she has the plague or anything else, so we're just trying to be safe. Plus, she's tiny and pregnant, and I don't want our dogs to hurt her. She's very hungry (she's basically skin and bones beyond the bulge that we suspect is offspring), so we're trying to get her eating habits back to normal to stem any possible food aggression.

They (Maggie and her future puppies) are not moving in permanently. I'm putting my foot down, and luckily, Amy agrees that these are not permanent residents. However, this may open us up a little for fostering? We'll see.

Of course, with coming back home, I did the required thinking and sentimentalizing that I always do. Something about going home and something about coming back to our new spatially independent life gets me thinking about that. Of course, seeing the Indiana landscape of flat terrain and decaying agriculture always brings up some romanticized version of my homeland that I tried desperately for the first 23 years of my life to simply escape.

I don't know. Of course I have questions of mortality, with Amy's grandma being in bad shape, my mom finally improving, and my brother possibly heading for a term in prison. Watching those family movies with Amy's family made those questions louder and more prominent, that the end is inevitable and coming faster than any of us could ever anticipate. That young, just-married couple in the film (Amy's parents) knew nothing of the life that awaited them, of the trials, tribulations, and the very very good here and there. They certainly didn't know that their image would be trapped on film to be reviewed some 36 years later.

At the same time, something seemed more genuine about those films and the lifestyles there. It just seems like, since 1980, America has been obsessed with constructing this great, non-existent lifestyle for the purpose of looking good. When I looked at those films, I saw earnesty, the real stuff of life, people being people with less concern to material goods and status symbols than our current culture is faced with.

1980 wasn't that fucking long ago!

Then again, I'm obviously both romanticizing something else that never happened, drowning in sentimentalism for something I never could have experienced, thanks to what Dr. Emmett L. Brown calls the "space-time continuum." But all of this rings truer after the viewing of these films, when to go anywhere from the house of Amy's parents, we are forced to drive through various suburban developments with endless numbers of dead-end streets to discourage people from driving anywhere, and strip commercial developments, each with ample parking to discourage people from walking anywhere.

Everything in a land like Hamilton County (which is a place I could write a fairly disenchanting geographical perspective on and turn into a book, I'm pretty convinced, but I've got other projects to finish first) is based on the exchange of money, and everything on the landscape is done in a way that makes such a constantly flowing exchange seem more reasonable. The real life towns of Carmel, Westfield and Noblesville have been completely surrounded by suburbs, and have been thus transformed. The small downtowns have been changed from agricultural service centers into yuppie service centers, places for realtors, lawyers, accountants, antique stores and art galleries.

It's really a breathtaking experience, in a way. But a suffocating one in another. I do wonder if this obsession for money is robbing us of a life experience that would have been much closer to genuine had it occurred 25 years ago.

But who is to judge genuinity? Maybe this is all a product of the fact that much of our employment in this society revolves around the production of the non-material. Insurance salesmen, bankers and the like used to be the only people who worried about these things. They have been joined by web designers, television producers, information traffickers, call center people, communications companies, cellphone idiocy, and other "high-tech" things. Those jobs in which things are actually created (factories, landscaping, even fast food) are looked down upon and passed on to Mexicans or some other despised group who will work for peanuts.

I wonder in my mind whether this fake-production we engage in now, the production of knowledge and information and other digital things that we can't hold without buying paper and a printer cartridge, contributes to the fake landscape that we surround ourselves with. Maybe the high-tech workplace seems so surreal that we have to live in a quaint made-up town to feel like we're actually living a real life. Maybe we have to have that quaint town to feel a connection with the people we saw in our family movies on Super 8 film.

The quaintness of these suburban towns must be constructed to be desirable for those so critical of fakeness. Without it, people feel useless, and at least with a quaint hometown (however fake) it seems as though the workers are getting something for their so-called fake labors. It's a confusion that I feel at times. Sometimes, I feel like my own job is fake in this way, and it is for this reason that I so desire to (and am so terrified of doing so) putting out publications. Through this, I have a material output which means I added something to the world besides carbon dioxide and sour milk farts (more on that in a second).

And remember this: in no way do I think the labors of web-designers, programmers and the like are anything close to fake. I'm in that class of workers too, remember. It's just the best way I could describe my thoughts.

I am attached to that agricultural landscape in Indiana (the one I was trying to escape) because it feels more real. The people there who work the land come up with a tangible product of their labors. I feel a similar connection to Akron, which historically had a number of factories churning out tires and appliances. This labor was real, with real material product. By living in this place, I don't feel so compartmentalized, which is, I would assume, the goal of the whole suburban wasteland. How sad it would be to die having not lived for anyone but someone else. Suburbs offer this sense of well-being for some, but certainly not for everyone.

I won't pretend my thoughts are complete on this, but hopefully I can work it into an essay for later or something...

My stomach hurts. I wasn't vegan for much of the weekend, and my body has hated me for it. I have had constant stomach aches and have farted sour milk smells after eating cheese. A number of people in my family are certifiably lactose intolerant, and Amy (and Carla did too, I think at one point back in the day) said that abstaining from dairy for a while can push one in that direction. My pseudo-veganism is starting to apparently become a requirement that my body is holding me to. This says nothing for the heaviness I felt after eating that kind of shit for the first time (in large numbers) in most of two months. Ugh. I just want to do nothing but drink juice for the next five days and clean out.

I've certainly never have felt that before.